eren emre kanal, UI Designer & Coder

Lovely Wordpress Logo

I remember it when there were not so many choices to use as a blog CMS. Actually Drupal was very weak and complicated, Nucleus CMS was great and Wordpress was very simple. Nucleus is almost dead now, Drupal became more than a blogging tool; a powerful CMS and Wordpress is the most popular blog CMS.

And I chose Wordpress for my personal blog again. Why? Because it is really easy to install, configure, customize and use. It also has tons of plugins. If this site wasn’t my personal blog, I would prefer Drupal. Because it lets you to do everything and it’s more than personal.

Arguments on Wordpress’ administration panel design is one of my favorite topic. Some think, the administration panel design before Wordpress 2.7, HappyCog’s design was a dead failure. They say, it wasn’t usable. I don’t. I think, the problem with that design was, it was not designed by real Wordpress users. A professional team designed it without any real user experience. It was usable, it was clean but users couldn’t get used to it.

And then, Wordpress team, the real Wordpress users designed this interface again. They asked their users, they did polls and most of the users love this new admin panel. I am very new to Wordpress admin pages but I find everything I’m looking for easily. So, it works for me.

But there are some mistakes, maybe a bit of incoherency in it. Button replacement is a very controversial topic on user interface design. Apple places buttons with negative meanings to the left side on dialog boxes. But Microsoft does exactly opposite:

Button placements on MacOs X & Windows

The thing is, they both use this style of placement everywhere.

What about Wordpress? Let’s tall about Quick Edit and Widget Edit layouts. The Quick Edit feature let’s you edit some of your post’s fields like the title or publishing date with some AJAX scripts quickly. Widget Edit boxes are little boxes with 2 text fields that help you edit your sidebar widgets. And here are the button placements for these:

Wordpress button placement

The first part is for Quick Edit, second part is for Widget Edit. An user that is accustom to one interface can easily click on the Remove button and loose data right? Or can have a hard time trying to find where the cancel link is.

Another thing from the Usability Post is about the dashboard: A Slip in the WordPress 2.7 Dashboard Interface.

These are little things but it’s all about usability. Don’t make your users think!