Giving feedback

Giving design feedback is an excellent way to start getting involved in contributing to WordPress. There are a few places you can give feedback:

Please keep in mind the following guidelines when giving feedback:

  • Empathize. Remember that behind every design is a person. If you wouldn’t give this feedback to someone’s face, don’t say it on the internet.
  • Consider starting with “I think…” and finish with “because…”.
  • Comment on particular elements that don’t work in the design, like the typography, colors, hierarchy, and composition. Try to be as specific as possible. If you’re unable to articulate what feels wrong, we can help guide your feedback — just be patient with our follow-up questions.
  • One of the best things to do when giving feedback is to try to separate the problem from how we would like it to be solved.
  • Try to stick to goal-oriented feedback, rather than criticism. Tell us the outcome your feedback is trying to achieve.
  • Provide context for your feedback. Why do you think this design wouldn’t work for your use case? Talk about how you use WordPress, and how this update or feature would affect your ability to write or manage your site.
  • Frame feedback as suggestions, not mandates. “What if you…” and “How about if you tried…” are great ways to present alternate ideas to a designer.

Here are some examples of giving good and bad feedback:

❌ BAD

This new default theme is totally useless. I need a business theme, not another blog theme.

✅ GOOD

I think that WordPress has been making a lot of blog themes in the past couple years. It would be great for this next theme to include some more business-oriented features, because that’s the majority of sites I’m making for my clients and I’d love to use this theme as a base. What if you added a business-oriented template for the homepage? For example, it could include… (etc.)

❌ BAD

I just need a button that opens the customization tool directly.

✅ GOOD

On this page, I have no idea where to go anymore to customize the site, so I’m a bit lost. I think a button at the top would help because then it will be more obvious where I need to click.

BAD

I hate this change. Adding images is terrible. Every time, I have to go through all these steps from the post, to the gallery, to the caption, and back. Can’t we just have a nice interface to manage all the images at once?

✅ GOOD

I write a travel blog and each post represent a specific day or trip I do. Each post has a nice gallery attached to it, where I curate the sequence of the photos and add a caption for each one of them. Order and description are very important, that’s why I need something that allows me to manage all these photos together.

Thanks for getting involved with WordPress. We hope to receive your feedback soon!

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