2.7 User Interface UGGH!

@honewatson: You’re making a lot of assumptions. We did, in fact, conduct usability testing on 2.7, so the changes from Crazyhorse were not untested as you state. I just didn’t publish another report on it because it wasn’t a priority, given the huge amount of work we had to do to get 2.7 out the door. You assertions about what is intuitive for the majority of users seems to be based on your own opinion rather than objective testing, and doesn’t match up with what we found in testing. Good luck with your Admin UI project; plugins that make you happier with the Admin UI are always a good thing. However, we did have good reasons for the choices we made given the wide variety of user types within the WordPress community. I’m going to try and write up a document about the design process for 2.7 to serve as a companion to the Crazyhorse test report I published earlier, so I won’t go into individual things like particular button locations and such here. Before you accuse moderators like Otto of “baiting” users in this forum, though, I’d suggest you consider the tone of your own posts here… making such strong assertions about what works and doesn’t work for our users (as opposed to assertions about what works and doesn’t work for you and users you are in contact with, a much smaller sample) seems likes it’s baiting the development team and all the people who contributed to designing/building 2.7.

@janeforshort

Thank you for your work on WordPress and your efforts to improve the experience for everybody.

My aim was to offer feedback and criticism which is the name of the forum. I offered alternative view points regarding specific aspects of the UI throughout both my responses and gave specific reasons why.

I reviewed my responses and in the context of this forum name I don’t know how you can consider either of my responses baiting. I acknowledged that Otto was entitled to his view point. I also acknowledged that my viewpoint is subjective in my response.

I know that it hurts when people criticize hard work. Naturally you want everyone to like and feel great about the work you did, but the name of the forum is feedback and criticism.

Being able to openly offer feedback and critiques is an important aspect of a products continued improvement.

I have one final idea to offer.

WordPress TinyMce comes with an ‘Advanced’ button which offers additional functionality when clicked. Perhaps this concept could be applied to the overall WordPress Admin where menu items such as the Settings Page, the Plugins Page etc are toggled when an ‘Advanced Settings’ button is clicked.

I have to say, this new 2.7 interface is pure hell for me. As a writer, what I liked best about previous versions of WP was the ease of writing, navigating, and editing offered by the dashboard interface. Call me simplistic, but there it is.

This new interface is tedious, every plug-in I have is essentially useless (and I’m sorry, but I am a writer, not a developer, and it took me bloody well next to forever to find what I needed, get it right, and be delighted with it), and I am pulling my hair out over this horrible new layout.

If I had known that the “hey trust us and upgrade now!” link in would have led to this, I would have NEVER clicked it. As it is, I am furious, frustrated, and feeling completely betrayed. I may be one meaningless user in a vast pool of millions, so I doubt anyone out there really cares, but if this isn’t fixed soon I won’t be sticking around with WP. I don’t want to have to re-develop everything I have every time a programmer decides to force me to via an upgrade without warning me that a total change is imminent.

More fool me for trusting, I suppose.

I do apologize for my snarky tone of voice up there, I am just intensely frustrated.

Truly, I do appreciate the hard work that goes in to making WordPress the amazing service it is. I understand that it is a rather thankless job, especially when things like this happen, and I know it isn’t possible to please all the people all the time.

I’m just feeling the effects of the brick wall and my forehead meeting a bit too often tonight over this whole thing…

Seriously, Try Admin Drop Down Menu plugin.

https://planetozh.com/blog/my-projects/wordpress-admin-menu-drop-down-css/

Feels like this is how the 2.7 interface should have been, and looks very nice. Might be a problem for people still stuck below a 1024x resolution… but really, no one should still be on 800×600 these days.

This menu could still be better (like a choose your own order or something), but it’s much nicer to work with.

fesworks, you are my new best friend.

For some reason, I did not see a link in your previous posts. I had the Ozh Drop-Down Menu already installed, and I’ve been loving it for many months now, but it would not work with the new 2.7 installation. I decided, “What the heck,” and clicked on your link, though, and lo and behold, there is a new, updated version of the Drop-Down menu that DOES work for 2.7.

It’s not perfect, it’s not as lovely as the old version, but it is DEFINITELY at least three worlds better than what it was.

So THANK YOU, fesworks!

Hi folks,

There’s a reason you say “Never touch a running system” ??
It’s always hard to get used to something new. But: I really want to try. My first impression was “YEEEKS” but then I tried to work with 2.7 like I had never seen 1.x-2.6 ??

This cleared all obstacles out of the way but one: why isn’t it possible to resize the editor window? Or am I just to blind, dumb whatever to do so?

Thanks for the great work to the whole designer/developer team who has worked on 2.7!

I WILL get used to it ??

What’s the point in having a feedback forum if the moderators are just going to bait people Otto?

So, moderators are not allowed to have opinions?

I encourage you to reread my posts, but this time leave your own bias out of it. I am trying to have a straightforward discussion, not to “bait” anybody.

To me this confirms my original point. Changing the menu to the left was not necessarily the most significant benefit of CrazyHorse. The most beneficial aspect of the CrazyHorse UI was to simply have a large ‘Write Post’ button in the the top left part of the UI.

This is now gone.

Instead the short cut is placed in the top right of the screen which is not a natural place for a westerners eye to view.

… Again, I have to say that this seems extremely minor to me. Left, right, once you know where it is then you know where it is and it’s not confusing anymore.

Also, “Westerners” are not the only people who use WordPress. You might want to consider your bias here.

There are three main actions for the majority of uses:

1. Write Post
2. Edit Posts
3. Moderate Comments

Having three big buttons in the top left corner for these three activities would drastically increase usability and intuitiveness for both new and experienced users.

Two of those are in the very top menu (which stays open if you leave it open) and moderate comments is not something usually accessed via menu. Generally it’s via link from email. And anyway, moderate comments has been drastically improved with keyboard shortcuts for speed and ease of use.

Also note that those actions are hotlinked from the main dashboard area, where it tells you how many comments you have to moderate and so forth. Clicking those links is fairly intuitive.

The Icons are worthless in adding usability and in fact can inhibit it.
Having the Icons in the menu mean that there is less room for the words and therefore the fonts are smaller.
Better to have no icons, bigger fonts, and faster load times.

Graphical visual cues improve usability and help people find things faster. Also, that seems like a minor nitpick to me, since they’re only like 16px.

I find the long left hand menu a pain in my 15.4 inch laptop and even worse on a netbook. Constant scrolling.

I thought you wanted bigger fonts. That would mean more scrolling. You’re being a bit inconsistent here, friend.

1. In theory there may be a benefit that you can get to anything because its only 2 clicks maximum away but I for me its difficult find and see anything with the new left hand menu. The overall effect of the left hand menu is poor readability. Others have confirmed this experience.

You know, font size is up to you, not to the browser. Increase the browser’s font size. WordPress does not specify pixel size fonts, like any good semantic webpage should.

And yes, reorganization will make it more difficult at first, but the reorg is an improvemenmt, over time. You’re judging too early, the thing has only been out a week.

2. Most of the items in the left hand menu are probably accessed less than 5% of the time users are in their wordpress admin. I’m talking about plugins, settings, pages etc. Why have these in the main menu when all it does is clutters the menu and makes it more difficult to see and access the main tasks?

If you’ll notice, they have been grouped together into specific menus, and are at the bottom. Meaning that a) you can close them and they take less space, and b) they’re at the bottom and off the screen, so if you don’t use them, why do you need to scroll all the time anyway?

Also, improvements to the plugins system means that some plugins which make settings pages can now put their settings link beside their plugin name in the plugin list, instead of needing to have their own specialized menu for those options. Meaning that many plugins, if they’d update, would not need a menu item any more. There’s other minor improvements like that as well, intended to reduce clutter in the long view.

This cleared all obstacles out of the way but one: why isn’t it possible to resize the editor window? Or am I just to blind, dumb whatever to do so?

Grab the bottom right corner of the window and drag it down, same as it was in 2.6.

This might only work in Visual mode. HTML mode turns off the pretty javascript editing stuff.

Dear Otto42, janeforshort, & HandySolo:

First, thank you for providing WordPress.

With version 2.7 you are moving in the wrong direction I think. The purpose of WordPress is to write words. The interface should excel at this. Using icons on the left side helps return screen real estate to the purpose of creating posts, but keeping “Publish”, “Tags”, and “Categories” on the right again reduces screen real estate that should be available for doing what WordPress is for: writing words.

Yes it is possible to remove these boxes, but then one must re-enable them to actually make available what has been written or to make them searchable.

I notice that in your feedback forum, the window does not contain any active content on the sides! You make this a standard in WordPress!

Using icons on the left side helps return screen real estate to the purpose of creating posts, but keeping “Publish”, “Tags”, and “Categories” on the right again reduces screen real estate that should be available for doing what WordPress is for: writing words.

Yes it is possible to remove these boxes, but then one must re-enable them to actually make available what has been written or to make them searchable.

You know how you can drag and drop those to move them around? Have you tried dragging all of them over to the left side of the screen? Seen how the two columns becomes one wide column? Without disabling anything?

Yeah, thought not.

@fesworks

Thanks for the tip on the drop down menu. I like the overall feel of this plugin and will make some additional changes for my own users.

I was pretty vocal in my dislike of the WP 2.5 and 2.6 UI. Ick. I disliked it so much that I wrote a hack to turn major parts of it back into something resembling WP 2.3.

I’m pleasantly surprised by the WP 2.7 UI.

I like having the menu on the left. I realize that’s subjective. I like being able to shrink it down to just the icons. It was hard to find things at first, but I’ve gotten used to it very quickly. I like being able to get to any sub-page from any other sub-page.

Can’t begin to tell you how much I love being able to move things around to my hearts content. And banish things completely that I don’t need and that have been cluttering up my screen for eons.

I’m not wild about either of the color schemes. The gray is dreary. And the blue just isn’t my cup of tea. But that could be easily fixed.

The one thing I really don’t like is not having the list of draft posts show up on the Write New page. I tend to write drafts in batches and then finish them in batches. It’s so handy to just click on the link right there to go right to the next draft. I can’t understand why that wasn’t added back in. I seldom use the Edit Posts list – where the drafts are not obvious anyway. I know that the drafts are listed on the dashboard. But I’m afraid that out of sight is out of mind, and drafts are going to be forgotten and languish unfinished because they’re not in my face all of the time reminding me of their status.

Well… that and there’s still no way to attach a category to a page. But I realized that’s asking for a lot and I’m probably in a minority there.

Otto42:

Thank you for pointing out that the modules can be moved. WordPress 2.7 starts out dismally, but can be changed into a very pleasant and useful writing interface.

Here’s a kookie idea: How about you make the items at the left so that they can be dragged to a band across the top if the user so chooses? The other dashboard elements are already draggable to wherever you want them to be, why not let these be as well?