WordPress task identification

As @trishasalas mentioned, we want to identify what areas of WordPress people struggle with, and we’d like to do some user tests on this (both for new users, as well as seasoned veterans, we all have things that bug us at some point or another), and then focus on how we can improve these and help get more people to adopt it and use it on a regular basis.

Our previous user tests have some value to them still, but as mentioned some areas of them have changed quite a bit, and we are also skipping a major part of the getting started experience; the setup, and all the pitfalls it may include.

It was also discussed to make the user tests intentionally “vague” (although this hasn’t been fully decided yet), to avoid being too leading as we want to see how users interact, not how they follow commands.

To this end, we’d like input from various sources on what tasks you perform in WordPress when getting started to help us shape tests to get a broader view of it all.

Some examples to get the ball rolling;

• Upload and configure WordPress
• Remove the default post and comment
• Drop by the theme editor and find the right theme
• Writing my first post

From the list above many people will probably butt heads at the configuration because the wp root directory isn’t writable and they can’t get wp-config automatically configured, they couldn’t find the remove option for the default post, the theme they liked didn’t work well with their WP version (or they couldn’t install it because of permissions again?), and so forth.

We’d then take that list, and break it down into a “vague” list (if that’s the approach we go with) of something like this;

• Here’s some FTPFTP FTP is an acronym for File Transfer Protocol which is a way of moving computer files from one computer to another via the Internet. You can use software, known as a FTP client, to upload files to a server for a WordPress website. https://codex.wordpress.org/FTP_Clients. details, go add WordPress
• Make the site “yours”
• Create some content

The first task might be the most stressful I suspect, but it’s also an extremely important aspect of WordPress, it’s the initial step you take after all (we are also aware that many hosts have single click setups, but that’s a custom setup by the provider, and not part of coreCore Core is the set of software required to run WordPress. The Core Development Team builds WordPress.).

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