[wp-testers] The Big Design Debate

[Dirk Hohndel]

Ok,

let's take a deep breath. Me first.

Ah.

That felt good.

Now, I'll try to summarize the issue as I see it.

The WP core developers have taken a massive effort after 2.3 to  
redesign the look and feel of the admin side of WP.
Many of the things that were done were really good and useful - I'd  
say the majority of them. In order to get to where we are in RC2 today  
they did research with mock-ups, asked users, and in general tried to  
take into account a lot of feedback (I think Matt mentioned more than  
50k downloads of development versions - and lots of feedback from  
users in various forums).

On the other hand there are a few somewhat vocal people here on this  
list (including myself) who have over the last two or three months  
tried to repeatedly point out some of the (what we think) major flaws  
of the new design. We are not questioning the work that went into  
this. We are not questioning the good intentions. But we believe that  
some very fundamental (and well established) rules of good user  
interface design are being violated. On some of our concerns we have  
heard answers (that some of us may or may not find sufficient), on  
others we have felt ignored.

There will never be a design that everyone likes. And the more you  
make the design configurable, the more you risk to clutter things,  
make them hard for the beginner and risk introducing subtle bugs. I  
think we can all agree on this.

But some of these things are very basic and in my not really all that  
humble opinion /really/bad/ to get wrong.

Let me try to structure them somewhat concisely and suggest ideas to  
fix them:

a) your screen format is different from my screen format

WP admin should be reasonably usable on rather small and a really big  
screen. I blog both from my EeePC (800x480) and my MacPro (1920x1200)  
- and I'm sure I'm not alone in that.
Having fluid width makes it hard to get a consistent design; there's  
nothing wrong with the fixed width - but please do not have parts of  
the design exempt from that.
I believe it would be a very trivial fix to change the CSS so that the  
two sections that float to the right on large displays remain close to  
the rest of the max-width layout (if you don't have a large screen to  
try this - I am talking about the "Howdy, <user> | Log Out | Help |  
Forums" line and the "Settings Plugins Users" line).

b) your workflow is different from my workflow

We'll never get the order of options and controls right for everyone.  
Some people use widgets all the time, others don't use them at all.  
Some people only set category and tags and none of the other options  
and want to be able to do this without scrolling, others have  
different preferences. There is no "right" answer here.

For 2.6 maybe we can make this easily configurable (drag and drop or  
something - same for the "Right Now buttons" on the Dashboard.
For 2.5 I think we need to let this one go.

c) your expectations are different from my expectations

Let's call this "unintuitive links". There were a number of changes  
that remove "Edit" links and instead made other part of the  
information that is displayed function as such (i.e., clicking on the  
name of the author of a comment in order to edit that comment). There  
is enough research out there that shows that this is a bad idea that I  
still am willing to argue that this was wrong, but I think the  
arguments made by the team (and the addition of tool-tips) makes this  
less catastrophic than it felt to me at first.
Similarly, the distribution of what I would consider top level menu  
items to three different places; it's optically and logically pleasing  
to some, but it's inconsistent (which is the largest blunder in UI  
design - this is the one thing Apple consistently gets right). Once a)  
above is fixed I think this one people might get used to. Or maybe  
not. We'll see.

For 2.6 let's take a hard look at the expectations of a novice and  
expert user and see if we can make this better
For 2.5 I think we need to let this one go.

d) your love for change is different from my love for change

A lot of this discussion reverted to discussions about the value of  
change. It has been proven over and over again that people hate  
change. And at the same time that change is necessary to make things  
better. I think overall things are a lot better than they were in 2.3.  
But I think that some of the changes are steps in the wrong direction  
and will hurt user acceptance, both newbies and veterans. It seems  
that the Write page is getting the brunt of the complaints from the  
veterans on this list. And I think that's for good reason - I've tried  
it in a variety of screen formats and must say that in each and every  
one of them I like the old layout better (and I have written about 35  
posts in the new format across all my blogs, so trust me, I've tried  
to get used to it). And I will also agree that the old layout wasn't  
actually all that great... I've complained about it especially on  
small screens.

Nothing we can change for 2.5 here. But for 2.6, please let's have a  
broader initiative to get requirements and design ideas in.

Again, we won't get everyone happy. But I am convinced that we can  
make it much better than it is and than it was. And no, Matt, I am not  
suggesting "design by committee" and "options for everything". I am  
really talking about the rather big and blatant issues. Let's make  
sure the rest can be addressed by plugins (but I think that's true for  
many of the issues already).

Ok, long email. Maybe it helps to get us out of the current discussion  
cycle. If not - you know where the 'delete' key (or menu item, or  
button) on your mail program is...

/D