I thought I’d run one more user through testing our current concept of having both a “manage” screen and a “add/edit” screen for menus.
For this test I added a quick little JS hack to visually highlight the “Menus in your theme” meta box when a user clicks there from the “add/edit” screen success message. You’ll see in the video that my implementation is ugly as sin. 
I just wanted to test the concept with the knowledge that if it worked, we could always improve the design.
I also pulled the last step, which asked users to add a custom menu widget. While adding a custom menu widget is somewhat related, we likely won’t be addressing anything in widgets for this release.
Here’s the video for user 9 (in our series of menus user tests).
User #9
Step 1: Log in
No issues.
Step 2: Go to menus
No issues.
Step 3: Add a menu
No issues.
Step 4: Add pages to menu
No issues.
Step 5: Add home to menu
No issues.
Step 6: Reorganize pages
No issues.
Step 7: Set as primary menu
3:47 – She still had to look/click around. After she correctly saved the “Main menu” as the “Primary Menu” she said, “I hope I did that right”.
Step 8: Add another menu
No issues.
Step 9: Add links
No issues.
Observations/Thoughts
- Overall, no big issues.
- Setting a “Menu within your theme” is still confusing. I don’t think highlighting and sliding it down after clicking the link really helped. How can we improve this?
- The visual click in this video was being recorded in the wrong spot (see the video). This must have happened in the post recording processing/encoding, as the user appears to actually be clicking in the right spots (it’s just confusing to watch).
Jerry Bates (JerrySarcastic) 8:54 pm on January 21, 2013 Permalink
Great test, even if the cursor was a bit funky! I thought the feedback over audio was pretty informative as well.
Having not seen all the videos in this series, how common is feedback like “I have no idea what I’m doing here, just following instructions” amongst subjects? This seems like a fundamental stumbling block that prevents users from getting to the right part of the dashboard in the first place.
adamsilverstein 10:26 pm on January 21, 2013 Permalink
how about in the new menu and edit menu screens, we offer them the ability to assign the menu as the primary (or other menu), instead of adding an extra step. near the save button, “assign this menu to: [none, primary, footer, etc.]” that way you get to pick the spot the menu is going right from the beginning (or choose not too if using in a non standard location)
Diane Kinney 2:42 pm on February 3, 2013 Permalink
I’m not sure where the right spot is to offer up this thought – but my single biggest frustration with menus is that they are not integrated with pages. Most of the sites we build are not blogs, but sites with lots of pages structured into different menus. It would save a lot of effort if I could tick off add this page to Menu A or Menu B right from the page editing screen.