Is there Improved Usability in WordPress 2.7?
Warning: This post may offend WordPress fanboys. Feel free to grab a handkerchief and move to a seated position. I recommend a towel for fanboys, but everyone else should be fine. References to the previous redesign refer to the Happy Cog redesign in WordPress 2.5 released in March, 2008 and WordPress 2.6 released in July, 2008 (only a few months ago). Handkerchiefs ready then… everyone say EVOLUTION… (another Kodak moment).
WordPress 2.7 is coming out and it’s smoking hot by all accounts with some sweet under the hood changes, a new Dashboard, and a brand new administration interface that will make it more usable. Did they say more usable? What area of usability research has ever said changing a content management administration area’s interface several times in a year will equal greater usability? Most users I deal with struggle with their email applications – small to medium businesses and smaller Not for Profit organisations.
In fact, as someone who has to deal with client education I’m going to have to field a number of business related client calls that are going to ask me WTF happened to the buttons? Where the hell did that feature move to? Is this the same program? What have I done to them while they were asleep? To many of them there will be an attribution of fault laid on my professional doorstep.
There are a number of problems that can be identified here:
- WordPress is getting feature creep – I’d like a pool if you could add that? And a horse?
- WordPress has mixed up usability and change – one makes my life easier and the second Makes Me Think! Makes My Clients Think! The usability for existing non-technical users might not be so hot.
- WordPress is listening to a developer an academic community not all of whom are delivering their product commercially to clients.
- WordPress have forgotten most clients aren’t developers – most clients struggle at the email level. Most clients are definately not us.
In a bright new world where everyone is a technical expert I’d have to smile and say I welcome the redesigned redesign of the WordPress administration section. But I don’t, especially in the name of usability. It is never good for software to keep moving things dramatically around. The trick is to improve features and improve code without impacting the user at all. True, the new interfaces may aid usability for someone opening it for the first time in 2009, although it has only been claimed not proven although testing at Ball State University’s Center for Media Design appears to say I am wrong on that score. But, in my opinion, for the real world – usability will negatively be impacted because of the change.
From a business perspective I now have to ask myself whether I need to change my preferred platform for small to medium business because WordPress doesn’t offer my non-tech-savvy client base the stability. Training manuals need to be rewritten from the ground up, as well.
I can only say that usability is a little more complicated than listening to ten thousand people with a wishlist in your developer forums and making a pretty design with some fancy new spangled widgets in the wild might not necessarily match the testing results that have been conducted at Ball State. So, please, tell me that the WordPress 2.7 administration interface redesigned redesign is prettier and more efficient. But don’t tell me it’s more usable. Usable to who? And when?
This should have been discussed, thought out and executed when they were dealing with Happy Cog on the last iteration. Seriously, altered interfaces are going to impact the end users. These end users are mom and pop everybody, not the developer community. The developer community will keep asking you for everything. Everything! Users will only ask you for consistency and understandability so they can change content.
Any time you significantly change the user experience you are going to put cognitive barriers in front of your real world users (not developers, users). But yes, the new interfaces are very pretty. Unfortunately they will cost me commercial hours explaining, retraining and redocumenting them for my existing clients (again).
OK all the WordPress fanboys can unblock their ears and blow their snotty handkerchiefs that not everyone is elated. There, don’t you feel better? Now say it after me – usability improvement my arse! Please show me the metrics of that study for existing users.
October 25th, 2008 at 7:49 pm
OK let me put it this way in very simple terms…
How many people were really really happy when Microsoft Office 2007 came out and it took a month to figure out where all the ordinary functionality went? Not many. It may have, on the surface, been an improvement in design. However, it messed up pre-existing mental models of existing users in the wild.
WordPress. Please stop changing those admin interfaces…
October 26th, 2008 at 2:02 am
Hi Steven Clark. After 2.5 was released, the WordPress community was pretty vocal in its divided opinion on the Happy Cog design. Matt decided to spring for third-party usability testing to see what regular users thought of it. Ball State University’s Center for Media Design (for whom I worked at the time) conducted testing, using a test group ranging from utter newbie to tech-savvy admin. Half the participants were wordpress.com users who’d never touched PHP or a database: definitely regular people. They had an age range from teenager to Baby Boomer, intended to cover the variety of user types.
After identifying all the issues with 2.5 through the testing (we used Morae and eye tracking for data collection), the Crazyhorse prototype was developed to find ways to address about half of those issues (we were limited by time). We gave the test group access to Crazyhorse for a couple of days, then brought them back. We had them do the same tasks they’d done in the 2.5 test, and asked for their opinions. The users were all faster at completing tasks using Crazyhorse, and all said they would choose it over the current (2.5) interface. Even though it was a hacked-together prototype that wasn’t pretty, they still preferred it. That’s the reason behind the decision to change the design so soon, not a movement by developers. For the record, a lot of developers told me they hated Crazyhorse. The switch to side navigation caused plenty of developer complaints on the hackers list.
Many people don’t like change. Some people have trouble adapting to change. But if our test group was faster using the prototype after only two days, compared with using their own 2.5 blogs for 3 months (and previous versions beforehand for most of them), then it seems like the learning curve for the new design won’t be too big an obstacle for most people. We’ll be releasing new help resources around launch time as well, to assist those people who require a walkthrough of the revised interface.
If you were using both 2.7 and 2.6 like I have been lately (2.7 for my test blog, 2.6 for my wordpress.com blog) you might find yourself comparing the ease of tasks on each version. I have to say, I find it much easier to get things done quickly in 2.7.
October 26th, 2008 at 7:38 am
Hi Jane, thanks for filling me in. When 2.7 is available I’ll have to definately give the new version a run myself and see. Regarding usability testing, I’ll just have to take your word on the results and what it means in the real world. But forgive me if I’m cautious on that one and not entirely convinced regardless of the findings. It’s good to see that research was actually conducted though, kudos.
I still have to consider the viability of commercially using a software product that is asking my clients to learn yet another admin interface layout. Regardless of anything you wrote. A usability study does not extract the bumpy move to 2.6 out of the equation and people like me in the middle are going to have to re-explain how everything works.
Would you appreciate if the interfaces were regularly changing in Photoshop – 2 interface designs in six months? Or your Word Processing application? It’s not that I don’t like change so much as I am commercially having to pick up after these changes and it’s costly in the real world, as opposed to the theoretical one at Ball State University’s Center for Media Design.
Now if 2.6 had actually been UNusable, which it isn’t actually… there may be a case. I think Matt will survive this, as will WordPress, but it’s a rubbish way to develop software and a rubbish way to treat the community, regardless of the high moral ground of the user experience. Users, most of all, require a consistent experience IMO.
We’ll have to agree to disagree I expect. But thanks for explaining the process and testing regime. I’ll give 2.7 a whirl when I get the chance.
November 15th, 2008 at 11:28 pm
I tend to agree with you Steven but also think that if change for change’s sake had to be done then it should have been done properly, and at a time when endusers would expect to see interface changes. Version 3 springs to mind.
I have been testing 2.7 since the release of Beta 2. IMO, it is far less usable and is also considerably less accessible.
The top-level menu items are not intuitive. Clicking on posts or pages launches the screen for adding a new page or post. Until a user hovers over the area to the right of the top-level menu item there is no indication that this can be expanded. For people who have difficulty using a mouse the area in which to select the drop-down will cause problems (it causes problems for people who expect to work quickly too – I’ve lost track of how often I miss the button!). This is also not keyboard accessible so those who cannot use a mouse will find 2.7 much harder to work with.
The interface is somewhat usable with JavaScript off, but only in a convoluted manner. I am finding increasing numbers of business users have JavaScript disabled at the firewall. With JavaScript off the drop-down button does not exist so the only way to get to the list of posts or pages is by navigating to the new post screen, whereupon the expanded menu magically appears. I cannot see how anyone using assistive technologies, such as screen readers, will be able to find their way around the new interface.
This, to me, calls into question the value of the usability testing that was undertaken. The earlier interfaces may not have been perfect but they did at least work for the majority of people. 2.7 does not.
Jane is correct in one way – entering new posts is faster than with 2.6.x. However, I find that all other tasks are slower and after using 2.7 beta extensively over the past few weeks I am inclined to stick with 2.6.3. The new nested comments is just not outweighing the disadvantages of the UI.
November 16th, 2008 at 1:48 pm
Lynne, thanks for the assessment. I’m yet to find the time to give 2.7 more than a cursory look but from your comment then there are significant issues that might impact the WordPress userbase. It will be interesting to see how this pans out for them.
Particularly as this redesign is a response to the mixed reception that the 2.5 Happy Cog redesign received.
It’s a bit unfortunate that at the moment I sense an unwillingness for people to say negative things against WordPress in any shape or form – thus my fanboys comment in the post – but I’d guess things will get more discussable pretty quickly when it moves out of beta into mainstream.
I particularly feel a little pissed that I’ve spent some time drawing up documentation that I’ll now have to replace, and retrain non technical users that I only just retrained. In their eyes I can seem less than competent at what I do… how else would they judge.
That being said I’m pretty much tied into WordPress for the next few years via exisiting work and clients so for me it’s a big deal… all I can really do is grit my teeth and rewrite the docs etc…
It would be interesting to see someone like Gez Lemon or Bruce Lawson or Mike Cherim do an accessibility audit of the new WordPress 2.7.