Look and Feel

• 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.