[wp-hackers] 2.5 admin menu thoughts

[Andy Staines]

On 19 Feb 2008, at 17:29PM, Stephen Rider wrote:

> To quote Matt Mullenweg on new changes to the admin page (from a  
> recent thread):
>
>> As for the other stuff, these ideas are not necessarily good or  
>> bad, bet they're not backed up by research or usability testing,  
>> which the current choices are.
>>
>> Right now all energy is focused on getting the admin up to spec,  
>> and there is lots of work left to do. After the release of 2.5,  
>> it's fine to re-examine our assumptions again, and we can do things  
>> like look at the adoption/downloads of 2.5 vs previous releases to  
>> get a sense for which of our decisions were correct or not.
>>
>> We have another release in June. :)
>
>
> Just FYI.
>
> Stephen

Yes - I read it first time around. Having been in the commercial/ 
corporate software industry for 25 odd years working mainly as a UI  
specialist I well know the value of usability testing and it is 100%  
down to what you actually put in front of them to try and use. In my  
experience, the outcome is always flawed and biased towards the lowest  
common denominator. Along with a few others I am deeply puzzled by  
some of the design decisions which are going into the 2.5 admin, many  
of which seem like a backward step. But no matter. As to drop down  
admin menus - so easy to achieve - these appear to have never found  
favour with the WP devs despite the enormous gain in usability that  
they offer and their acceptance in just about every major interface  
you can name. I shall now step out of this thread and go back to  
getting my own plugins 2.5 ready.