Pain Points from Make/Support

The Support (Forums, IRC, etc) team had their weekly meeting and we dragooned it into NUX for half an hour.

Our major painpoints we see:

  • @wpyogi and @ipstenu:Things are explained in the codex (which means they’re non-intuitive)
  • @tnash: Posts are a confusing term. What’s a post and a page and how are they different?
  • @macmanx: The Dashboard Screen itself just doesn’t seem to know why it exists, except to have plugins drop disparately designed widgets upon it.
  • @ipstenu: The dashboard is slow (also the Network Dashboard is useless but that’s not ‘new’ user land)
  • @andrea_r and @wpyogi: so many menu items. no way to disable ones I rarely use
  • @andrea_r: have literally answered two internal tickets today from people wondering how to port their current content to a new theme in WP
  • @wpyogi: custom pages (static front pageStatic Front Page A WordPress website can have a dynamic blog-like front page, or a “static front page” which is used to show customized content. Typically this is the first page you see when you visit a site url, like wordpress.org for example.) is confusing
  • @justingreerbbi: page/template hierarchy always comes up. I second people thinking they need to create pages for archives
  • @macmanx: People think that ‘archived’ pages means ‘gone’
  • everyone: People don’t know what WordPress IS!

One idea that popped was a new user walk through.

If the only post is Hello World, then show a big fat “Hi! You’ve installed WordPress! This is a fantasmic tool for managing your website’s content! Let’s help you get started.”

Obviously it would need a dismiss option, but since a great many new users come from their hosts installing WordPress for them via a script, it would help them to understand what world they’re in. Right now users are dumped into the dashboard which has a nice welcome box, but doesn’t explain things in depth. The default content should be instructional.

#discussion, #pain