[wp-testers] The Big Design Debate

[Chris]

What I don't understand is why are we "dumbing down" (as it's been
said) the write page, yet we are making it harder to understand how to
edit posts and comments by removing the "edit" link and making "dumb"
users click the title of the post or the commenter's name. Which is
also confusing our power users. Something isn't mixing there. Was the
edit link taking up too much space in your fixed width design?

And I have been more than annoyed with the lack of fluid design. Fixed
width is so 2004.

On Fri, Mar 28, 2008 at 7:55 AM, Dirk Hohndel <dirk at hohndel.org> wrote:
>
>  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
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