WordPress.com User Experience

I’m embellishing a bit here, and experienced WordPress users may think the Admin Dashboard is obvious, but try to imagine how this process feels to someone who’s never used WordPress? How would they know that customize isn’t the website editor? How would they know they needed to find the Admin Dashboard?

My wife is always so frustrated with the authoring experience on WordPress.com and this review reminded me of how bad it actually is.

2 Comments

  1. Couldn’t agree more. While I love WordPress, the user experience isn’t great (especially beginners or occasional users). All one needs do is see how simple Wix and Weebly are to use to understand how far behind WordPress is.

  2. Neil Murray says:

    I agree it definitely feels complex for novice users – but that’s common with most learning experiences.

    For example learning to play a guitar is really, really hard at first. Those steel strings just hurt and it’s so hard to get your fingers to stretch over 3 frets.

    Novices I suspect often think “why do the build them like this – it just makes it too hard”.

    With practice and experience however playing a guitar becomes easy and you undersand why it is built exactly as it is.

    Of course you could start with a Ukulele – only 4 stings & they’re nylon with much smaller frets. It’s a much easier place to start playing a stringed instrument. But you may discover that one day you can’t do everything you want on a Ukulele and find yourself getting ready for some finger busting discomfort.

    I think you often have the same issues with web software, including WordPress.

    The art comes in creating an interface that is welcoming, relatively simple and above all not overwhelming for newcomers whilst nevertheless offering the functionality & complexity that experienced users need.

    In my opinion WordPress is getting better at balancing these two often conflicting requirements each release.

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