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For the first stage of my Google Summer of Code with WordPress, I conducted an expert review of WordPress and 4 other personal publishing systems (LiveJournal, Vox, MoveableType, ExpressionEngine) and compared how well WordPress rates to its competitors. I used the 10 basic interface heuristics as a guide for five areas of focus: Admin panel overview, writing and managing entries, organizing content, plugins and extras, and advanced options.

I have to say I was greatly impressed with Vox’s interface design. It was very clean and consistent design, incorporating a lot of best practices of form design and some of the best uses of web 2.0 for good and not bling. They also took the philosophy that the interface was a web application and not just a form on a web page, and provided Save and Cancel buttons as well as disabled buttons for actions which were not available.

(Some) Key Findings

• Most of the pages have a clean interface design; there are some pages which could improve consistency and layout of the forms and information on the admin pages.
• There is no contextual help and very little explanatory text for some areas and all documentation and help forums are external. Adding additional text or contextual help to advanced topics may help newer users learn the system faster.
• Error messages are available, but better position and feedback in the error messages would greatly improve them.
• Submission buttons in the Comments and Links management interfaces are inconsistent from the rest of the interface and should be changed from from “Edit …” to “Save …”.
• Spending more time on the design of forms and dialogs could greatly enhance the user experience. Vox provides a good example of featureful, yet simple form design, practicing good interface design with clearly marked fields and properly disabled buttons.
• Different methods have been used to hide advanced options in the editing interface. WordPress’s approach to using collapsible menus is better than the tab approach, but improvements on interface design may make it look less busy and cluttered.
• Other personal publishing systems allow users to preconfigure advanced options in the entries templates so less work needs to be done during editing. This may be a valuable functionality for WordPress to consider.

Next Steps

The results of this review have provided a roadmap for the next stages of the project. Contextual help was one of the points that WordPress did poorly in. You may be familiar with the concept of contextual help via “What’s This” or other brands of direct help links in software and dialogs. Basically it is quick access to help or documentation in the context of the element.

The next stage of the project will and consist of several small steps: 1) reviewing the WordPress Dashboard and creating a list interface items to include help for; 2) writing the short help statements and linking them to Codex documentation; 3) Mocking up visual display of the help for review before writing code. This stage will be very short and last one or two weeks before the final stage is begun.

The final stage of the project will be conducted over the remainder of the project and involve implementing the contextual help in to WordPress trunk and submitting patches to be included in the codebase.

seele :: Jul.03.2007 :: Design, Open Source :: 1 Comment »

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