We need your help deciding what to do with the welcome screen.

Our most recent iteration was to bring in some icons (to hopefully add a bit of polish to the interface). I began implementing the icons that @empireoflight created, and wanted to give ya’ll a preview:

For contrast, here’s what the welcome screen looks like without any icons:

The question is this, should we:

A) Stick with the icons @empireoflight designed?
B) Try some flat icons similar to what @saltcod mocked up?
C) Try to find a way to polish the welcome screen without icons? Suggestions welcome…
D) Leave it (similar to the second screenshot above) shooting for a clean/minimal looking design?

This morning I tested the Color picker in betaBeta A pre-release of software that is given out to a large group of users to trial under real conditions. Beta versions have gone through alpha testing in-house and are generally fairly close in look, feel and function to the final product; however, design changes often occur as part of the process. 1 against iris-picker-13.diff.

First user

Here’s the video.

Notes

• In her very first use of the color picker, she thought she had changed the color to light blue, but she had only changed the hue. She had to go back after playing with the other color picker and fix it.
• Once she got the hang of it, she found both color pickers fairly easy to use.
• Overall she prefers the color picker on the left (the one currently in beta 1).

Second user

Here’s the video.

Notes

• In her very first use of the color picker, she had some difficulty discovering the need to click both the left box and the right hue slider.
• The lack of handle on the left side hue slider seemed to pose a bit of difficulty for this user, whereas, she moved the right side (HSV) hue slider with ease.
• After figuring out how to use the color pickers, she didn’t have much trouble.
• Had a bit more trouble selecting “White” on the HSV color picker
• Overall she prefers the color picker on the right (the HSV one).

Third user

Here’s the video.

Notes

• In her very first use of the color picker, she used the right one first (HSV), and seemed to like it more than the one on the left (the one currently in beta 1)
• Mentions the one on the right is similar to one she’s used before (in windows)
• 6:20 – “Why is this whole thing black?” she says looking at the right HUE slider bar.
• Overall she seemed to like the right color picker better, except for the last task which was hard for her to select since the orange range of colors is small (squished between red and yellow), with not much room for selection.

Try them out with your friends/family

I’d love to get more insight into which color picker works best. If you’ve got a spare couple of minutes, please feel free to try these out on friends, family members, or co-workers, and post your observations in the comments (specifically which color picker worked best for them, and any thoughts on tasks where they got stuck):

http://wpusertesting.com/iris-a/ (light gray to light blue)
http://wpusertesting.com/iris-b/ (green to black)
http://wpusertesting.com/iris-c/ (blue to white)
http://wpusertesting.com/iris-d/ (black to dark orange)

Here’s a list of todo’s that came out of yesterdays UI chat.

• #20492 – Let’s make submit_button() (with no arguments) be “Save Changes” and have it default to the larger size. If you pass any arguments at all, we default to the shorter button.
• #19956 – Need to figure out best way to turn upload image link into a button.
• #16416 – Re-do wp-signup with the new (single checkbox with the “ask not”) language, possibly on install.php too.
• #21340 – Need to go through all the admin and make sure the main action button/link is first in the source.
• #21310 – Accessibility skip links need some design love (i.e. http://cl.ly/image/2a1e3v371U3X).
• #21019 – Bubbles done as CSSCSS CSS is an acronym for cascading style sheets. This is what controls the design or look and feel of a site.. 2x version of the media button and the blue version of the menu icons.
• #21890 – Need to figure out a good way to deal with the customizerCustomizer Tool built into WordPress core that hooks into most modern themes. You can use it to preview and modify many of your site’s appearance settings. save spinner when the save button is extra wide.
• #21368 – Add has_action() checking. Additional design love? Use new button styles for big blue button.
• #21598 – :focus styles still needs some love.
• #18141 – Remove light border around select boxes. Remove drop down arrow from paragraph select box and tighten it up. Try showing other drop down arrows at all times
• #21456 – Try 32px vs. 64px icon.
• #20855 – Needs patch with disabled option
• #18306 – Add bold to slug.