Team THX38 had its first formal meeting last…

Team THX38 had its first formal meeting yesterday. See logs.

We talked about the things we see as more problematic, and spent some time discussing Filters/Search, as we identified that as an area with huge room for improvement. If you have read Dave’s post on design processes, this in area where we would benefit from exploring a bunch of quick directions that we can later test, so feel free to submit ideas.

Shaun also shared the usertest video he ran. Some interesting points from the video:

  • It was pretty clear that discovering new themes was not easy at all. The amount of time between arriving at themes.php and actually seeing new theme screenshots was huge. (The direction of the initial concepts I posted before address this issue by putting a new empty theme-blockBlock Block is the abstract term used to describe units of markup that, composed together, form the content or layout of a webpage using the WordPress editor. The idea combines concepts of what in the past may have achieved with shortcodes, custom HTML, and embed discovery into a single consistent API and user experience. at the end of the grid of currently installed themes that says “Add new theme”, and gets rid of the tabbed interface. That would be something to test.)
  • “I was thinking I would have a screen with a bunch of themes to look at”. This is a nice way to put it. 🙂 She says this when clicking on “install themes” and seeing the entire screen covered with checkboxes. It seems we have this backwards with “search” being the first tab selected, you should be able to get into screenshot-browsing right away and maybe refine with searches and filters along the way. (Another thing we discussed were “categories” like photography, food, etc.)
  • Filters names don’t mean much visually — or rather, they mean different things to different people — so it’s a rough place to start with. The user later mentions she just wants to browse through images and see what jumps at her.
  • While browsing, it would be a nice experience if installing a theme was not disruptive — you click install and maybe see a progress bar on top of the screenshot, but you can still keep browsing and installing other themes.
  • Once you installed a theme, the message and screen you are sent to is a bit underwhelming.

Comparisons to existing theme/template showcases were brought up: WP.com themes, Squarespace, Tumblr, Weebly, to name a few. The plan is to report back the findings at next meeting, so those interested, please, grab one and research what you like and don’t like (with images!) for the discussion. Put your name in the comments so we know we have things covered.

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

I set up an initial plugin for the project that you can grab at https://wordpress.org/plugins/thx38/. Note: it currently makes themes.php unusable, it’s only meant for us to play with as we go. It setups your theme collection in Backbone.

Change of meeting time

We are switching the day of our chats to Tuesdays. So next gathering will be on August 27th at 18:00utc.

#core-plugins, #thx38