Admin Help Meeting recap

Thanks to @dllh, @ubernaut, & @trishasalas who showed up today and contributed to the ongoing conversation. Don’t stress it if you meant to make it and forgot, I’m happy to use the P2P2 P2 or O2 is the term people use to refer to the Make WordPress blog. It can be found at https://make.wordpress.org/. as a way to hash out these discussions, too, but do let me/us know if another time would work better if you *are* intending on making it.

Here’s what we talked about:

The user testing videos weren’t very helpful

This isn’t because there was anything wrong with them, per se, but rather because of the platform we are using and how their recorder works. We wouldn’t have known this without going through it as a user, either, so this is really sort of just growing pains. I encourage ppl to take a look at the user testing videos for what they are worth, but there really isn’t a whole lot that’s applicable to what we are doing because, as you’ll notice straight off and as I commented earlier, the recorder hides the help tab anyway. So we aren’t testing whether people discover the help tab naturally because the recorder makes discovering the help tab naturally impossible.

Back to the drawing board then…

So we need to do another round of testing to figure out if we’ve got our assumptions right before we can really move forward. /sigh

  • @trishasalas and @jazzs3quence (mostly @trishasalas 🙂 )will look at the user testing platform to see if we can add more tasks. If so, we’re going to make the first task be “move the recorder to the bottom right” or something to that effect and try to make it as innocuous as possible. If we can’t, we’ll need to try another tack, probably making the first task combine a bunch of smaller tasks (which also wouldn’t be a *huge* issue, but I think ppl probably respond better to smaller, more specific tasks).
  • @trishasalas is also going to look at other potential user testing platforms we could use instead.

Features as Plugins

  • @jazzs3quence took Trac #21583 and turned it into a pluginPlugin A plugin is a piece of software containing a group of functions that can be added to a WordPress website. They can extend functionality or add new features to your WordPress websites. WordPress plugins are written in the PHP programming language and integrate seamlessly with WordPress. These can be free in the WordPress.org Plugin Directory https://wordpress.org/plugins/ or can be cost-based plugin from a third-party. It’s not much, certainly not a final solution, but it can be something we use to test location of the help.
  • @ubernaut wrote a plugin that changes the color/style of the current help tab and will work with @jazzs3quence on getting it up in the .org repo as well.

Data

  • @dllh sent over some raw data (along with some notes) about the help tab usage from WP.com. It isn’t pretty and you can’t really draw a lot of solid conclusion from it, but I have it and would be happy to share or post it to google docs or something if anyone wants to take a look.

And a final reminder that the next Admin Help meeting will be on Monday 16:30 UTC in #wordpress-sfd. And if the turnout is low, I’ll just spam your inboxes. You have been warned. 🙂

#3-8, #admin-help, #dashboard-help