A few events recently occurred: a WordPress developer posted a screenshot on Twitter of the WP Admin of a website he’d just taken over. It was also the day I handed over a site to one of my clients. While I was explaining them where to find what in WP Admin, it struck me: there seemed to be no logic in a lot of the menu-items at all!
While we’ve all been busy designing websites with a focus on the front end, we seemed to have lost track of usability when developing extra functionality for the back end of WordPress, WP Admin. New menu items created by plugins, seem to be all over the place, not to mention the notifications that come with them.
Even though most of us are working with WordPress on a daily basis, taking over a website developed by another company isn’t always easy. So imagine what it is like for someone with less experience.
This talk is a first analyses on the WP admin of a WordPress website, that has the most popular plugins installed. It also presents findings of research done amongst plugin developers, on how they decide how and where the menu of a plugin should appear. Finally, I’m encouraging WP Admin users to participate in an online user test, that will help us to create a foundation for a more user friendly WP Admin.