Dashboard help plugins

These are 6 admin help plugins that were discussed here to possibly look at to get ideas of what other ppl are doing that we may want to scrounge from. What follows is my fairly quick, first-pass reactions/notes.

SH Contextual Help – threw lots of errors, using old, deprecated functions and bad roles and permissions stuff. It’s meant to add to the existing help tabs, so nothing for us here, really.

Custom Dashboard Help WidgetWidget A WordPress Widget is a small block that performs a specific function. You can add these widgets in sidebars also known as widget-ready areas on your web page. WordPress widgets were originally created to provide a simple and easy-to-use way of giving design and structure control of the WordPress theme to the user. – adds a widget to the dashboard as you’d expect. Not sure this is the ultimate solution.

Screen Options and Help Show Customize – what @hanni said: “not a help 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 per se, allows customisation of help tab display.” AFAICT, this is mostly just for disabling the help tabs and/or show options so, kind of the opposite of what we’re doing. 🙂

WP Help – as mentioned by @sleary pretty much the best part of this is the location because it’s not the tab at the top and it’s right in the annoying top of the left sidebarSidebar A sidebar in WordPress is referred to a widget-ready area used by WordPress themes to display information that is not a part of the main content. It is not always a vertical column on the side. It can be a horizontal rectangle below or above the content area, footer, header, or any where in the theme. space that Jetpack usually occupies.

Help Menu – also throws tons of errors because the code is bad, and also occupies the top of the left sidebar so it’s really freaking obvious. This adds 4 new links, one of which is a bunch of screencasts on different things including several from WordPress.tv and one that’s a bunch of screenshots with confusing annotations and no descriptions that seem like they do more harm than good. As with WP Help, the best thing this has going for it is location.

Help for WP – again occupies the top of the left sidebar. Seems to do links to video tutorials? There weren’t very many available. Again, positioning is the best thing this has going for it.

As you can probably tell, I wasn’t overly impressed by any of these. If we scrap the content, which would be completely different anyway, none of them are doing a whole lot that’s new or interesting other than moving the help to the top of the sidebar so it’s more visible. And even that is somewhat dubious and may or may not be that much better of a solution. HOWEVER, it does make me wonder about putting a help link in the Dashboard menu (e.g. under Updates).

#3-8, #admin-help

WordPress Admin Help

Here’s a draft of the proposed project scope:

As part of the move towards developing features in plugins, we’re looking at making improvements to the WordPress admin help. On Monday at 3:30 UTC we discussed the issue in #wordpress-dev

The Problem: The current Admin Help is hard to find unless you know it’s there. The content lacks any focus; it’s simply a description of what’s on a particular screen and doesn’t add any particular value. It’s possible that we’re failing WordPress users by a) not providing useful help in the Admin, and b) not providing adequate basic resources in the Codex.

Work was carried out by @chexee in ticket 21583 on making Help and Screen options more discoverable.

In the State of the WordState of the Word This is the annual report given by Matt Mullenweg, founder of WordPress at WordCamp US. It looks at what we’ve done, what we’re doing, and the future of WordPress. https://wordpress.tv/tag/state-of-the-word/., Matt talked about the 96% attrition rate on wp.com, and how it was probably higher on WordPress due to the extra steps. If users are getting frustrated and walking away from WP, how can we prevent that frustration?

Goal: to alleviate frustration in people who find the admin too difficult to use.

(Note: changing the Admin is outside of the scope of this project. We are creating help for the admin as it is. However, testing and research will inevitably show up issues which we should record and make available for others to work on should they wish to).

Some questions to keep in mind:

  • how can we best provide admin help to users?
  • what help do users need?
  • how can we ensure that help is unobtrusive for people who don’t need it?
  • what tools are available to us?
  • should we de-couple screen options and help?
  • how can we ensure that the help is accessible to all WordPress users?

The process:

1. Research & Identifying the Problem
Before fixing the problem, we need to discover what problem users are facing. @trishasalas has started writing some questions for user testing so we can identify at what stage the pain points are appearing. For example, are they baffled when they first log in to WordPress, or are they having problems when they are in the middle of work?

@jazz3quence has started researching how other platforms are implementing admin help, and the tools available. Once we have identified the problem we can match a tool to it.

We should also draw up a list of WordPress plugins that are providing admin help (WP-Help, for example).

2. Mockups
Mockups and sketches will be created for the following:

  • the user interface
  • the user’s journey and interaction with the functionality

3. Design & Development
A UIUI UI is an acronym for User Interface - the layout of the page the user interacts with. Think ‘how are they doing that’ and less about what they are doing. designer will put together the interface (to match MP6) and developers will be needed to create the 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. After the first version we go on to the next phase.

4. Test and iterate
Testing and iterating for fun and profit.

5. Finish!
Time for tea, beer, or scotch.

Who’s needed:

It would be desirable to get the following skills involved:

  • developers
  • UI designers
  • technical writers
  • WordPress users (for testing)
  • people who run WordPress training (to provide feedback)

#3-8, #admin-help

User Testing for WordPress 3.8 Admin Help

Following up on the chat from Monday at 15:30 UTC about inline help or now more appropriately called Admin Help (see irc logs) . I’ve started some very rough outlines for user testing scripts. I’ve gotten 2 scenarios with slight variations in each. They are just outlines at this point and need to be fleshed out a bit, you can view them here -> https://docs.google.com/document/d/14UPN3u32QqOt0b9l0XLe9MbDKyhRdYJcLegOBIV8DCs/edit?usp=sharing

Feel free to comment, add, subtract, etc…this is the first formal user testing I have done so I’m learning as I go here 🙂 Kinda fun and very eye-opening.

#3-8, #admin-help, #inline-help

WordPress 3.8 Dashboard Help

We had a chat in #wordpress-dev this morning (afternoon for some folks) about WordPress dashboard help (i.e. the component currently known as the help tab). Hopefully @siobhan will post back here with some notes because I’m not good with notes 😉 but I’m gathering some screenshots of help systems as I meander through my day here: https://drive.google.com/folderview?id=0B3-2b7pMjiwXeEhpbzBNelFlUGc&usp=sharing

Feel free to share any you find and I’ll add them to that Google Drive folder. My only real criteria is “what happens when I click help here” and then take a screenshot of whatever comes up.

#3-8, #admin-help