Discuss: The bigger picture (3.5 and beyond)
What are some bigger ticket items that we’d like to see happen in core? What really needs to be made better/easier/prettier but takes some effort to achieve?
Again, one item per comment, and then discuss each (or add your +1) in replies to that comment. Talk about what you think effort might be, how it might be broken out into subtasks, and whether it’s something you see as a feature/enhancement for 3.5 or a longer-term project for another future release.
Kevin Miller 10:43 pm on July 3, 2012 Permalink
Round out the UI for Custom Post Types. Specifically add support for them to show up in the list page and in the Publish Submit Box. This is probably further our than 3.5 but it would be nice if the admin showed off these things.
Erlend 11:59 am on July 4, 2012 Permalink
I’ve been hoping to see Alex King’s “Post Format UI” incorporated into WP Core since I first laid eyes on it:
http://alexking.org/blog/2011/10/25/wordpress-post-formats-admin-ui
helenyhou 12:59 pm on July 4, 2012 Permalink
Can you post this as its own comment and not a reply? Post formats are not the same as custom post types.
helenyhou 12:58 pm on July 4, 2012 Permalink
Not sure I understand what you mean by showing up in the list page and publish submit box. Got an example?
helenyhou 11:04 pm on July 3, 2012 Permalink
The welcome panel feels like a tacked-on addition to the dashboard to try to address how not helpful it is for somebody trying to get things done. I would like to see the Dashboard become a hub of doing, not consuming. Things like “edit your home page” for a site with a static front page, or “customize your tagline” for one that still has the default, etc. This would, of course, be easily extensible. I’d love to see big targets and vector iconography so we can be mobile/touch/HiDPI friendly right off the bat. We should also keep metrics (like “Right Now”) on the screen and make them more useful and beautiful.
The idea of tabs for various areas of doing was also floated, perhaps like can be found on the WordPress.com homepage when you’re logged in: https://irclogs.wordpress.org/chanlog.php?channel=wordpress-ui&day=2012-07-03&sort=asc#m46174
I see this as a possible feature (sort of enhancement?) for 3.5.
Kailey Lampert (trepmal) 11:07 pm on July 3, 2012 Permalink
“I would like to see the Dashboard become a hub of doing, not consuming.” +1
JarretC 11:10 pm on July 3, 2012 Permalink
I would have to agree with this as I think many others will as well. One problem I see is those that use WP as a blog and those that use it as a CMS. How exactly do we determine which sections are appropriate for both or do we have an option somewhere that somebody can set to determine how that particular install is being utilized.
tddewey 11:56 pm on July 3, 2012 Permalink
I really like the idea of actually using the dashboard for something
I think if done right, the same tasks that allow new users to discover what they can do with their site are the actions that pro bloggers use daily. Make quick posting a highlight, big touch-centric buttons for common actions, only display statistics and information as it becomes available and relevant.
Ipstenu (Mika Epstein) 1:36 pm on July 4, 2012 Permalink
The welcome panel is more like an information panel.
If the welcome panel looked like the WordPress.com home page, I know my Dad would ‘see’ how it works. He accused it of being ‘too busy’ (which is why I still update his site). I go in every day, and click away.
Jane’s right that the Tabs need work, though. What we have on the sidebar are ‘Right Now’ and ‘Sites’ (if Multisite). Moving those to tabs:
Write | Right Now | Sites
would be a start. Then all the plugins that hook into Right Now won’t suddenly blow up.
helenyhou 3:37 pm on July 5, 2012 Permalink
Let’s absolutely keep multisite and administrative tasks in mind as we continue the thought process.
karmatosed 2:12 pm on July 4, 2012 Permalink
I would love it to become a hub – that to me just makes sense. Perhaps even have 2 ‘flavours’ blogger / cms / even an admin one – or at least some way you can easily turn on / add features.
lessbloat 12:45 pm on July 5, 2012 Permalink
+1
I’m noticing a pattern in watching users where they’ll repeatedly come back to the area where they first found success in accomplishing a task. The welcome screen feels like a perfect fit for this. I’d love to find a way to make this the default spot they can come back to when they are trying to figure out how to do something (vs. hunting and pecking through menu options). It would be great to figure out a clear way to help both blog and CMS users get started, and provide quick links to on-going tasks.
lessbloat 12:47 pm on July 5, 2012 Permalink
So, I’m going to add a bunch of stuff here. Sorry for exploding the comments…
First up, media upload. This needs some major love. This is going to be a huge project, so I propose that we start the UX, UI research in 3.5, and plan to tackle the implementation in 3.6.
helenyhou 3:40 pm on July 5, 2012 Permalink
+1. But, let’s not ignore potential iterative improvements in favor of a future total overhaul.
Example: making the featured image selection process easier is an iterative improvement, and actually might be low-hanging fruit.
lessbloat 12:49 pm on July 5, 2012 Permalink
Settings overhaul. Settings need some love as well. They are cluttered, and could use some CSS under the hood (vs. the current table based layout).
helenyhou 1:09 pm on July 5, 2012 Permalink
Tables on settings pages: #16413
helenyhou 1:19 pm on July 5, 2012 Permalink
More detail: In IRC we discussed how we sort things between appearance, (theme) options, and settings. The current differentiation between theme options and settings is one that’s pretty much just from the development side and doesn’t necessarily come across well to users – what’s kept when you change themes and what’s not. The Appearance menu has both types of items in addition to changing your theme, which seems to be very confusing.
We should probably do some sort of sorting activity (or set of sorting activities), putting each setting/option/action on a card and having users place each into one of a set of categories. It would probably make sense to do this multiple times, maybe with each user, each time with a different set of classifications.
Aaron Jorbin 3:50 pm on July 5, 2012 Permalink
+1. I think laying out all of the options individually, we’ll start to see some taxonomies that make a lot of sense.
lessbloat 12:53 pm on July 5, 2012 Permalink
The comments section hasn’t been worked on in some time. How can we improve this page? It’s pretty cluttered at the moment, is there anything we can do to simplify things? As Jane mentioned to me, we should also look to incorporate the fact that comments are threaded. Currently all comments get presented in the same linear progression, whether they were in reply to another comment or not.
helenyhou 3:28 pm on July 5, 2012 Permalink
I had a thought about making the row actions (Approve/Delete/Spam/etc.) into more colorful buttons, because right now the Comments admin screen is pretty much just a giant wall of text. Some of the actions may not really be appropriate as buttons, but some kind of visibility there may help.
Alternately, we could add a table cell containing just the actions and put them in a vertical list instead, which would give some breathing room. Breaks with the list table row action convention a bit though (the actions you get when hovering over a post title in the all posts table, for instance).
lessbloat 12:54 pm on July 5, 2012 Permalink
Adding and editing widgets isn’t all that intuitive for first-time users. Is there anything we can do on this screen to make things easier for users?
Ipstenu (Mika Epstein) 1:25 pm on July 5, 2012 Permalink
I banged on this over Thanksgiving:
http://halfelf.org/2011/wordpress-sidebars-as-menus-part-1/
http://halfelf.org/2011/wordpress-sidebars-as-menus-part-2/
Terry Sutton 1:03 pm on July 6, 2012 Permalink
Love this. Having Widgets function more like Menus would make both much easier to use. I generally see people having much less trouble with Menus—just select what you want and drag them into the right order.
helenyhou 3:09 pm on July 5, 2012 Permalink
I just had a thought: what if dragging was only within a given sidebar, and themes were encouraged to lay the sidebars out like they might be visually? Then to add a widget, you click a link that’s in the content part of the widget (+ Add a widget), don’t ever disappear the description of the widget area, and go from there, either with a modal that steps you through or something else. The modal could even give the user a semi-preview of what that widget will look like on the front end. Food for thought.
Assigning widget areas like we do with menus might also be something to do, but I think that what I outlined above would be more immediately doable. Maybe.
helenyhou 5:15 pm on July 8, 2012 Permalink
Looking around brought me to Blogger, which has a workflow a little bit like what I’m thinking as far as the clicking to add a new one (gadget in their case) and getting a popup list to choose from, since the number of gadgets is high, much like the number of widgets can be high. I don’t like that it’s an actual new window, and I think we can do better for setting up the widget, a base preview, and editing its settings again in the future.
Ipstenu (Mika Epstein) 6:31 pm on July 8, 2012 Permalink
You mean lightbox the new widget form? Pick the widget, configure it, click ‘save’ and then it inserts into the sidebar list?
helenyhou 6:33 pm on July 8, 2012 Permalink
Yeah, pretty much. I need to sketch my mental idea of the lightbox layout, but thinking list of widgets on the left side, clicking on one expands to show settings. Right side has an essentially unstyled preview + Cancel and Add buttons.
Ipstenu (Mika Epstein) 7:59 pm on July 8, 2012 Permalink
I can see that.
Apparently I have a blogger blog (o.O) and went over to see how it worked. they pop in a new window, which meh. Do not like.
The layout though like this: http://cl.ly/200S0d201N0P1J2E281Y
That’s maybe something that could be leveraged? I don’t know how we’d do it with themes, though, seeing how we offer a lot more flexibility than they do. It’s almost like we’d have to offer it for theme devs to use if they wanted.
lessbloat 12:57 pm on July 5, 2012 Permalink
I’d love to take a look at the main navigation to see if it can be improved at all. Specifically the left navigation, and the toolbar. It’s been my experience that new users spend a lot of time hunting for whatever it is that they are looking for, and more often than not have a hard time finding what they are looking for. Granted, there are a LOT of options to choose from, but is there any way we could streamline these options?
lessbloat 1:04 pm on July 5, 2012 Permalink
I’d like to see us take another look at the help tab. How can we get the right answers to people quicker? There is a lot of text in the current iteration, most of it only applicable to the current page, which doesn’t help the user when they can’t find what it is that they are looking for, and they have no idea what page to go to in the first place.
Chances are only a small percentage of users would use a search function to find what it is that they were looking for (perhaps 10-20% vs. those that prefer to hunt and peck). But, what if we were able to figure out an “Apple Spotlight” like search field for intermediate and advanced users that allowed them to quickly hop to whatever area they wanted to by typing a few letters (vs. jumping through the navigation for everything).
It’s just a thought.
helenyhou 1:15 pm on July 5, 2012 Permalink
I like quick keyboard access to everything, and I wonder if it’d also be an accessibility win. +1 to quick-search-and-jump.
Mel Choyce 3:16 pm on July 5, 2012 Permalink
Love the spotlight search idea, +1
Luke 3:52 pm on July 13, 2012 Permalink
+1 from me!
lessbloat 1:10 pm on July 5, 2012 Permalink
The WordPress Philosophy states:
Decisions not Options
Clean, Lean, and Mean
With that in mind, I’d like to see some of core hit with a “simple stick”. I’d call this endeavor a 20% cull. What functionality in the admin is used by <20% of users that could 1) be eliminated, or 2) be removed and added to a plugin?
I'm likely kicking the hornets nest with this one, but one feature that comes to mind is the blue admin skin. IMO, this should be moved to a plugin.
/me ducks and hides from incoming projectiles.
helenyhou 1:14 pm on July 5, 2012 Permalink
You’re not kicking a hornet’s nest. It’s come up a bunch of times
Trac: #18380
More discussion a couple months ago: https://irclogs.wordpress.org/chanlog.php?channel=wordpress-ui&day=2012-05-01&sort=asc#m40948
lessbloat 1:17 pm on July 5, 2012 Permalink
Ah.. Good.
/me comes back out of my hiding spot.
lessbloat 1:12 pm on July 5, 2012 Permalink
Mobile responsiveness. Would love to see us get 480px and 320px coverage.
lessbloat 3:05 pm on July 5, 2012 Permalink
In it’s current form, selecting a post format when adding a new post seems pretty dang confusing. You select one, and nothing happens. If I select the “image” format, it would be amazing if the admin UI changed to just show an image upload form (a la http://wordpress.com/#!/post/). This would also allow us to deep link from the dashboard, or the main navigation directly to “Add a new image”, or add quote, add video, add link, or whatever other formats we wanted to support.
helenyhou 7:21 pm on July 5, 2012 Permalink
Another comment above linked to this, which seems pretty popular: http://alexking.org/blog/2011/10/25/wordpress-post-formats-admin-ui
Trac ticket: #19570
I’m thinking it would be great on the Dashboard, at the very least. Much more functional than Quick Press.