Post Formats UI Update, 1/21

Still looking for wireframes/storyboards for possible UI ideas for each post format. To put it succinctly, we are looking to address discoverability, value, and usability, approximately in that order. We will at some point need to talk about how users get there in the first place, but again, for now let’s focus on the add/edit post screen. We briefly touched on what would happen to the UI if the theme doesn’t support the post format – there seems to be early consensus that the UI itself stay altered (e.g. if there were a separate input for a link URL) but there would be a warning of some sort about the lack of theme support.

A large portion of our office hour today was spent discussing a script for user testing that we can use throughout this process to help us evaluate the changes proposed. We need to use a theme that includes all ten formats, doesn’t do anything to the admin UI, and preferably does something to the front end display for each. One that I know of is San Kloud, although it has some deprecated function usage (hey @kovshenin – want to fix that? :) ); other suggestions welcome.

Since the first part of the issue here is discoverability, the script needs to not hand-hold the format selection or entry process. Here’s a rough outline of what it might look like – discuss any changes in the comments, and @lessbloat will help us get testing. Some of these are particularly difficult to describe in a non-leading manner. Through each of these, it would be good to have the user narrate what they want or expect will happen for each of these formats. A little fuzzy since we’re not going to point them at the format picker and a given tester may not be used to blogging, but the more narration of thinking/expectations, the better.

  • Standard/text: Add a blog post entitled X, with the following text. Publish and view the post.
  • Aside: Add a brief blog post without a title, or what might be referred to as an “aside”. Publish and view.
  • Status: Add a blog post that represents your current status as (provide text), the way you might on a site like Facebook or Twitter. Publish and view.
  • Chat: Add a chat blog post where the content is a chat transcript (provide something to copy-paste). Publish and view.
  • Quote: Add a quote blog post with X quote attributed to Y. Publish and view.
  • Link: Add a link blog post with X text linking to [URL]. Publish and view.
  • Image: Add an image blog post and insert X image into the content editor. Publish and view.
  • Gallery: Add an image gallery blog post with X images (this probably needs step-by-step instructions for creating a gallery). Publish and view.
  • Video: Add a video blog post with [something from YouTube]. Paste the URL on its own line without linking it. Publish and view.
  • Audio: Add an audio blog post with [something from SoundCloud]. Paste the URL on its own line without linking it. Publish and view.
  • View your site. (If they chose formats, it should show the differences pretty clearly in a post archive view, hence the importance of choosing an appropriate theme.)

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