Category Archives: Summary

Tracy Levesque 9:39 pm on March 17, 2015
Tags: ,   

4.2 Nux Group Recap, March 17, 2015

Slack log (Requires Slack login to view. Set one up if you don’t have a Slack account)

Last week, and the week before, we sought volunteers to examine each of the flows out of the Welcome Panel. This week we went over the reports that came in about the various flows.

Settings

“Set your timezone and date format” – @courtneyengle

Issues

  • Users don’t do this at the start. They don’t discover that they need to change things until they actively post something and noticed date/time aren’t how they expect them to appear. They don’t know where to change that.
  • There is a hazard with the proximity of these settings to other settings that could have potentially hazardous consequences, i.e. users also changing site/home URL?

Suggestions

  • Change the corresponding date/time settings when you manually change the language – have WordPress suggest it, but not do it automatically.
  • Group in the week-starts-on value with that automagicallness might be helpful as well.
  • Add warning text about changing your site/home URLs

“Change URL structure” – @bethsoderberg

Issues

  • Confusion of what the “custom structure” could mean and lack of explanation of the parameters accepted by it.
  • The header “optional” isn’t really descriptive for the category/tag base settings section
  • The page “number of tags are available” links to is pretty complicated https://codex.wordpress.org/Using_Permalinks
  • New users rarely know what “permalink” means.

Suggestions

  • Educating users on Permalinks: we all loved the help tab description – “A permalink is the web address used to link to your content. The URL to each post should be permanent, and never change — hence the name permalink.” That should be reused elsewhere.
  • Group Permalinks settings with change site/home URLs settings.
  • This may be less of an issue once 4.2 ships and “Day and name” is the new default.

Appearance

“View your site” – @liljimmi

Issues

  • The icon isn’t enough of an indicator that the Site name link links to the Dashboard.
  • The problem is that users don’t typically realize that’s a link back to the Dashboard.

Suggestions

  • Make the link “Dashboard” when viewing the front end and “Visit Site” when in the admin (keep the icons as is).
  • Absence of the site name will be an issue on Multisite. A suggestion to address this is to add the site name to the right end of the sitebar next to “Howdy, Display Name {gravatar}” This would be the same for single/Multisite.
  • If the Sitename is added to the right end of the sidebar should it link to anything? Some say it should link to the front page and others think it does not need to link to anything. Either way, long site names should be truncated.

#4-2, #nux

Tracy Levesque 5:22 pm on March 8, 2015
Tags: ,   

4.2 Nux Group Recap / Call to Action, March 3, 2015

Slack log (Requires Slack login to view. Set one up if you don’t have a Slack account)

This week’s chat was dedicated to looking at the proposed new Welcome Screen, assigning folks to “own” one of the links, identify several things and report back next week:

  1. The importance of highlighting that flow for new users in the Welcome Panel
  2. Once you’ve clicked through to it, what is currently good or bad, or could be improved
  3. Bonus: Whether this is a “Day 1″ link and if so, what should replace it?

Attendance at last week’s chat was sparser than usual, so we didn’t find volunteers to cover all of the Welcome Panel action links. If you’d like to volunteer to examine one of remaining the flows below, let us know in the comments.

The following people volunteered:

Settings

  • “Set your site front page” – @juliekuehl
  • “Turn comments on or off” – @suzettefranck
  • “Set your timezone and date format” – @courtneyengle
  • “Change URL structure” – @bethsoderberg

Appearance

  • “View your site” – @liljimmi @drewapicture
  • “Change or customize your theme” – @liljimmi
  • “Find new themes” – You? Looking for a volunteer
  • “Manage your site widgets” – @ipstenu

Content

  • “Write your first post” – @DrewAPicture
  • “Add a new page” – @abuango
  • “Edit your site title and tagline” – @jenniferbourn

Reporting Back

When reporting back with your findings, it would be helpful to document the current “workflow” for whichever action link you’re examining. Identify the pain points, possibly suggest alternatives, and provide vizrecs (visual records, i.e. screenshots) of your main points.

Things to keep in mind when writing your report.

  • Is this a must-have for the Welcome Panel?
  • Describe the flow from the point of clicking the link to following through the process
  • What is good or bad with the way it currently works?
  • Bonus: Suggestions for improvement

Reports can be shared in the comments and/or presented at next week’s NUX meeting.

#4-2, #nux

Ipstenu (Mika Epstein) 5:23 pm on February 19, 2015
Tags: discussion, pain   

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 page) 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