The
main colors are Baby blue and curry red. These are secondary and tertiary (”muddy”)
colors. Using primary and secondary colors will increase contrast and
readability.
The
tabs are good, they indicate the active section. However, inactive sections have
no tab indication. Consider either underlining these sections or adding an
inset tab look, to remind the user that these are sections that can be clicked.
The
second level navigation (Posts, pages, uploads, etc), are not tabs. This is a
good idea because some sections such as ”options” can have more sub-sections
than there’s horisontal room for. Tabs would stack strangely.
Second
level active sections are currently indicated by the curry-red ”active” color.
Convention state that such navigation links are usually colored and underlined,
with active sections simply black and bold. Contrast would improve and the risk
of alienating colorblind people decreases.
The
”visit site” is a button. Buttons are usually used with instant, inline effect.
Consider using a simple underlined hyperlink, since this is technically a
website we’re linking to.
Generally,
hyperlinks are colored in a nuance of the background color and without
underline. There’s a real risk they might visually ”disappear”, or simply look
like text. Consider using traditional blue underlined links. At the very least,
links should be visually distinct and have a color that is contrastful to the
rest of the design, possibly a complimentary color. Underlining links really
helps, even if the underline is a different color or style, such as dotted or
dashed.
Sign
out and My profile are also links. They should be distinct in color, or at
least underlined.
The
little comment speech bubble above the comments section looks neat. What
happens when I click it? What happens if you have 10.000 new comments? Is it
scalable?
The
font size of the site title seems unnecessarily large. Due to the layout, it
pushes the main navigation several lines down. Consider a smaller font size, or
consider moving the ”sign out” and ”my profile” links down in the same space,
reducing the vertical space.
Dashboard
The
”Dashboard” headline is redundant information. It could be rid of.
The
footer looks good.
The
”Customize this page” link deserves a better space. Consider placing it in the
top right corner of the page.
”Write
a new page” and ”Write a new post” are buttons, that is okay since their
function is clearly administrative. They don’t look like buttons, though.
Buttons are usually outset and somehow bevelled.
In
an ideal situation, UI widgets such as buttons, pulldown menus, scrollbars,
checkboxes and radio groups are unstyled and integrate into the operating
system. That way, the user doesn’t have to learn new information to use the
system.
The
”Right now” box has an attention grabbing curry red color that says ”alert!”.
Consider using warning colors only for extremely important information such as
”There is a security update”, or ”Are you sure you want to delete this post”?
What
is the purpose of the dashboard page? Is it to give information from the
Wordpress community? Is it to be an introductory digest page of the various
Wordpress functions? Consider layouting the page according to the relative
importance of the content.
Write Post
Likely,
the ”Write post” section is the most visited section of a Wordpress admin
system. While I am aware that most of the ”Advanced options” on this page are
usually and probably going to be moved to the sidebar, it is still worth to
consider making this page shorter. The longer the page is, the more complex it
feels to the user.
Currently
the font size is relatively large, both in the Title text field and in the
various box headlines. While more easily readable, text and headlines should be
set according to importance. A good design trick is to ”pronounce the text” to
yourself: the larger the text, the larger your voice. Right now everything
screams to high heaven. Surely the title isn’t that important?
The
blue headlines backgrounds add padding to each section description,
additionally increasing the vertical space. Consider using this space better,
such as with the Write box that allows you to select between ”Visual” and
”HTML”.
Consider
moving the ”Wordpress Bookmarklet” to the dashboard. It’s not likely to be
something one would add to the browser every time one writes a post.
What
is a ”post”? What is a ”page”? Consider describing what the user is doing as an
introductory text. If not in the very top of the page, then possibly in the top
right of the page. On Pages, consider showing the hierarchical tree-view
directly on that page to show to the user where in the hierarchy the page
resides.
While
the ”pods” that exist in the current Wordpress administration section allows
you to show and hide sidebar information work well, it’s still ”hiding” content
that could be integrated better into the page. For rarely used features such as
”custom fields”, ”trackbacks”, ”post password” and ”post slug”, a different
approach might make sense. How about inline shortcut links:
- Add a post password
- Trackback a friend
- Add a post slug
- Add custom fields
These links could reside in the bottom of the post sidebar, and when clicked,
replace themselves with their respective feature boxes. Optionally, one should
be able to pin them to be permanently visible.
Manage
View,
Edit and Delete links should either be visible hyperlinks (underlined, for
instance), or push buttons.
While
”Posts” and ”Pages” are technically very similar, their features are rather
different. Posts live in a continuous reverse chronological stream, while pages
are permanent static pieces of hierarchical content. Most content management
systems treat these two as core aspects, often with a tree-view sidebar as the
central hub of the whole CMS. While Wordpress is a blogging system first, the
Pages feature is a nice one, and it deserves more focus than it has now. In my
experience, people new to Wordpress want to create pages first, posts second.
With the reverse being default, this is tricky. Consider rethinking the role of
posts and pages, and give this an overhaul. One babystep could be to divide the
”Write” tab into a ”Write post” and ”Write page” tab. Redesigning the ”Manage
pages” section to show a tree-view would also be helpful.
Theme selector
This
section has been called ”Presentation” until recently, a word that didn’t do
justice to it’s primary function: changing theme. While the section certainly
does more than change themes (widgets, theme options and so on), ”Design”
doesn’t do justice either. How about ”Theme”, or maybe ”Look and Feel”?
With
no underlined links, it’s hard to see how one activates different theme.
Consider adding an ”Activate” function beneath or next to each available theme,
either as a button or as an underlined hyperlink.
Settings
What
are ”General” options? Are they the options that must, at all costs, be filled
in? Would it be possible to move some options to separate or other sections? Consider
cleaning things up, for instance by moving”Admin email address” and ”New user
default role” features to the ”User” section?
Right
now, each option has a blue box. Why? Clearly all time and date related options
aren’t grouped together in the same blue box. Without a purpose, the blue box
is simply visual clutter.