- posted on
- March 31, 2008
- by Liz Danzico
The WordPress on the Street
A quick Monday note to mention a recent project I’m quite excited about. WordPress fans may already know that the redesign of the administration panel has been talked about for some time. Well, this weekend saw the release of WordPress 2.5, which included improvements far and wide, including the redesign of the admin.
I’m honored to have been a small part of its redesign. WordPress approached Happy Cog to streamline WordPress’ information architecture and design. We worked with the valliant Matt Mullenweg, who in turn gathered feedback from the team at Auttomatic, while we developed a new structural and design system.
And our redesign was just the beginning. Once the design was complete, the developer community stepped in to continue. The release of 2.5 was truly an open project in that there were nearly 100 people involved. According to Matt in his announcement post, “… in our core code, not plugins, there were at least 90 individual folks that contributed something high-quality enough that it made the cut to be part of the download you guys get today.”
You can see download WordPress 2.5 yourself or watch a preview of 2.5 in action. While the changes from the last release are quite extensive, they’re just the beginning of a long iterative process. So if you have ideas or feedback on how it can improve, WordPress is always interested in hearing them.
I’ve been so impressed with every aspect of working with Auttomatic and the rest of the developer community. Mike Adams, Ryan Boren, Andy Skelton, Matt Thomas, and many, many more made this a truly enjoyable process. I hope you enjoy using it!
Nice work! Been using 2.5 for a couple of days now and the new admin UI feels like a vast improvement.
Congratulations and good work! I can’t wait to get my hands in it and play around! Very excited to use this on my next project.
It was a pleasure.
Well done guys, Liz specifically in this instance, you have turned WordPress around to have a more professional look, feel and flow. Thanks for your contribution to the open source community.
this is awesome! keep up the great work guys!
I think the back-end looks very good. But it has gotten a lot of mixed reviews. Partially because it is such a drastic change from the original WordPress architecture. So the vast majority of users had to almost start over and re-learn how to execute tasks and projects. The back-end has to grow on you, it isn’t something everyone likes. Kind of like a mac! :)
I’m one of the people who has disliked the new Write screen and have been discussing it on various blogs over the last few weeks. Indeed, I posted some questions on Zeldman’s blog but didn’t receive any responses.
It’s been really frustrating because nobody seems to have a good answer as to why a previously smooth workflow has been subverted by the new layout of the Write screen and some of the strange decisions on moving things out of the sidebar.
I’d love to understand the rationale behind these decisions. Do you think you’ll make a post soon on sharing the reasoning and also comment on the negative feedback many people have had about it?
Matthew: Matt Mullenweg’s posted some of the rationale behind many of the decisions. While the IA that Happy Cog did was important, it was only one piece of the process of a large team working on the improvements. Because it’s an iterative process, ideas that started in the IA phase had changed, and many times been improved, as they reached the 2.5 release. I can say that the team continues to work on improvements to the Write screen—2.5 is only the beginning. Posting rationale with the releases is a good idea that I’ll pass on to Matt and the Automattic team.
Hi Liz, thank you for your response.
I did read the original sneak peek and checked out the RC myself which sounded good. However, after upgrading it became clear that the rationale seems to apply to new or under-confident users of WP, rather than long term users who have become very familiar with the original Write screen.
Two points stand out for me:
1) “The new Write screen anticipates the natural flow of the way you write”.
It used to. It doesn’t any more because it’s now forced me into a new way of writing. That’s not anticipation, it’s subversion.
It was previously much easier to write in the panel on the left and simply move to the sidebar to set categories, etc. Now I’m forced to scroll up and down. It’s slower.
2) “The new write screen only displays the information that you’ll use most often”
This is rather subjective isn’t it? How do you know I’ll be using categories less often than custom fields, or tags, or any of the other features? I use custom fields and categories more than tags or time stamp or page slug.
I looked at your Usability Analysis slideshow of Wordpress from last year. It’s very cool and exactly what I’d expect from a thought leader on IA. But some of it seemed to be ignored in the WP update:
“People don’t like surprises”.
Why did you surprise us by changing the Write screen from one that worked perfectly well before?
“People don’t notice good design… and will do stuff when design fails”
Several hacks now exist for getting 2.5 back to working like 2.3. Does this mean the design failed? For me, yes. I didn’t notice any issues with the previous design of Write because it worked.
I understand that part of the problem is my familiarity with the software has been changed and I need to relearn. But why are you forcing me to relearn something that didn’t need relearning?
I can kind of see why the changes were made in principle, but the practical result seems far away from what was claimed in the sneek-peak.
It suggests to me that you weren’t working with a completely representative user set for your analysis: highly confident, speedy WP users seem to have been largely ignored with this update. Is that a fair observation?
Indeed, when I asked Matt Mullenweg about reverting the Write screen, he said: “We will be trying a few different approaches to things like categories that people seem to be having the most trouble with”.
I’m sorry to sound negative about this, I really don’t want to! I’m a web designer with a good grounding in IA: I’m confused about the changes to Write and am really trying to understand the thought process behind them.
Matthew: All good questions that I’ll attempt to answer below. Important to remember: I am just one person on a very large project. So while I feel pretty well-informed about the larger team’s perspective, I could never speak for them. These are simply my perspectives:
“… the rationale seems to apply to new or under-confident users of WP, rather than long term users who have become very familiar with the original Write screen.”
It’s true that one goal was to make WordPress more accessible to a larger audience, including more novice users. Thus, the change to some of the more specialized language (e.g., Post Slug) and unlabeled form fields.
“It was previously much easier to write in the panel on the left and simply move to the sidebar to set categories, etc. Now I’m forced to scroll up and down. It’s slower.”
Our intention (Happy Cog and Automattic’s) was to draw attention to the new tags area and categories. The original intent was to make them more visible, rather than less, by grouping them with the Write Screen. In previous versions, users may have written a post and published without seeing categories (or other choices in the sidebar). The intention was to group these activities. Our hope is that in future releases of WP, users can have the drag-and-drop modules back as well. It wasn’t the intention to remove those: the team just had to prioritize for the 2.5 release. That said, the way some of the fields are now positioned (forcing users to scroll) may not be optimal either, and we are actively doing something about continuing to improve the interface today.
“…. How do you know I’ll be using categories less often than custom fields, or tags, or any of the other features?”
We based the field order on perceived frequency of use. That doesn’t mean that the order matches everyone’s workflow — it never can. Drag-and-drop modules can certainly help users gain control over this order. But for now, the fields represent the order that best matched the perceived workflow of the largest number of people.
“…. Why did you surprise us by changing the Write screen from one that worked perfectly well before?”
In part, this direction came from a larger team. Automattic quite often bases their work on the direct requests and needs of the larger community.
“It suggests to me that you weren’t working with a completely representative user set for your analysis: highly confident, speedy WP users seem to have been largely ignored with this update. Is that a fair observation?”
We did talk to people at all levels. Highly confident, speedy users were certainly included, as were WP developers, and of course, novices. And the release went out in alpha as well in order to gather even more feedback. But even with a representative set of users, working with static designs and in artificial environments may not reveal all the issues. The interaction with the interface, its responsiveness, and how it matches users’ workflow are what we’re looking at now.
“I’m sorry to sound negative about this, I really don’t want to!”
Not at all. All feedback is good feedback, especially when it’s critical and constructive (although I wouldn’t turn down positive feedback either). So we definitely welcome feedback of all kinds.
Hi Liz,
sorry I missed seeing you at IA Summit, I was looking forward to finding out more about the design process for WP2.5.
If I read you correctly, you are saying that you recommended that Categories be placed down the browse order because have research to suggest that the average WordPress user would use tags more often than they would tags or a link to managing comments.
I would really like to see this research, as it flies in the face of the way that I use WordPress, and the way that most people I know use WordPress. But I am happy to find out for sure - I’ve created a poll for the 501 members of the Aussie Bloggers Forum (a lot of whom are WP users).
There are other parts of the 2.5 layout that don’t make sense, but this is an easy one to start with.
Best regards, Andrew
Andrew: Thanks for the feedback. Just to clarify: I was just one person in a larger team making decisions, so I didn’t recommend tags be placed before categories; it was a joint decision between Automattic and Happy Cog.
While we were working on the project, tags weren’t available yet as a feature, so there wasn’t data to review yet. Because tags were new, the team wanted to see them get more visibility on the Write screen.
Looking forward to the results of your poll.
Hi Liz, thank you so much for your responses. I’m very impressed with your open attitude and responsiveness so thank you for taking the time to answer my questions.
Our hope is that in future releases of WP, users can have the drag-and-drop modules back as well.
Yes, I think the community would like them back too. :-)
It wasn’t the intention to remove those: the team just had to prioritize for the 2.5 release.
I’m beginning to understand that a lot of the changes that made it in to 2.5 may have seemed to end users like recent additions, yet have been thought about for nearly a year. Is that right?
we are actively doing something about continuing to improve the interface today.
This is great news — do you know if improvements will make it into 2.6 and when that might be?
Automattic quite often bases their work on the direct requests and needs of the larger community.
That’s great and what I really love about WP — it’s clear a lot of user input was listened to and there are some cool new features in 2.5. It’s a shame that my positivity about other aspects of WP has been drowned out by my negative reaction to the Write screen changes; The Write screen is core to a good experience with WP. If it doesn’t work, no amount of bells and whistles will make up for it.
@Andrew: Interesting poll there! I know there’s not a huge response yet, but the early response in favour of categories doesn’t surprise me.
Personally, I can’t understand this obsession with tags. Offices have filing systems for a good reason; they work and won’t disappear anytime soon. Categories are the same as filing cabinets. Tags are useful for a more organic way of relating information, but they aren’t a clear organisational tool by any means. It’s why after trying delicious and magnolia, I quickly went back to my folder based bookmarks. :-)
“… do you know if improvements will make it into 2.6 and when that might be?”
The WordPress development blog would be a much better place to watch out for announcements about what’s coming in 2.6 and forward. The team is pretty explicit when they can be about what kind of changes come in each release, so you’ll be able to watch all the action there!