WordPress 2.5′s admin UI is pretty slick, and by looking at it you can get into the head of the designers. There’s two navigation bars. The first (largely) holds verbs – things like ‘Write’, ‘Manage’, and ‘Design’. The second (largely) holds nouns – things like ‘Post’, ‘Page’, ‘Link’. Your choice on each bar forms a sentence. Select ‘Manage’ and ‘Page’ – you’re managing pages. This makes it easy to pop around from place to place. On ‘Manage : Page’ and want to write a page? Just hit ‘Write’ and you’re there – the fact that you’re working with pages hasn’t changed.
Kind of cool, but it’s giving me usability troubles. Whenever I want to go from managing to writing an object, despite the solution being there in one simple click, I hunt around the page looking for that ‘Write a new page’ or ‘Write a new post’ button. Seconds wasted every time. I can’t even remember what the old WordPress admin UI looked like, so I don’t know if I’m trying to recreate past behavior. But I think I know why I can’t wrap my head around the new interface – the verb bar and the noun bar are independent of each other, but they’re displayed as a hierarchy. The verb bar is on top of the noun bar, in slightly larger text, so my brain thinks ‘ah ha, now I’m in a tree.’ And when navigating a tree, I expect to click on the parent, and then click on a subtask. I’m pretty sure I’m instinctively resisting the UI because I expect it to take me two clicks to get where I’m going, and instinctively think there should be a button to take me there instantly. Which is hilarious, because the UI would take me there instantly, if only I could bring myself to click on it!
There’s some simple solutions to this problem. WordPress could add a ‘related’ links section to the ‘manage’ interface, mirroring the ‘related’ section they’ve got in the ‘write’ interface. WordPress could add ‘write a new page’ and ‘write a new post’ links to the ‘manage pages’ and ‘manage posts’ sections, mirroring what they’ve done with ‘manage links.’ WordPress could lay out the navigation differently, so it doesn’t look like a hierarchy. Or I could poke my brain with a Q-Tip until it stops being so stubborn.
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