jonschlinkert

+1, this would be great

Aaron, thank you. You make some really good points, I appreciate you taking the time to share your thoughts.

I’ll check out the plugin too, thanks a bunch for that.

No one should be losing sleep over this, I just wanted (in my OP) to get some things cleared up, and I was really more concerned about the “why” than the “what”. Hence the title… Up until now, I haven’t received the clarification I was looking for – and I’m glad that lots of other folks jumped in to share their thoughts so we could all benefit from the exchange. I could make a few opposing points again, but at this point I think I’ve said everything I needed to say, and I’ve personally already belabored this issue to a point where it’s way out of proportion with how much I’m actually concerned about the feature itself (clearly I can’t speak for others).

So hopefully my previous post along with Aaron’s (and others’) answers, provided enough detail to draw this to a conclusion.

Thanks for the great perspective. The important thing is that the core contributors keep creating and innovating as freely as they would in an agile startup, because users like me really benefit from the speed and frequency of the improvements we receive. I care about that more than the menu.

Thanks again for the menu plugin, Aaron. I’ll check it out now.

“No matter how beautiful, no matter how cool your interface, it would be better if there were less of it.” I love this quote from Alan Cooper. It’s great advice, and it has helped me make lots of tough design decisions.

Unfortunately though, it seems like this debate is not about “simplicity” or usability. It has spiraled into a debate between people who are upset about losing the baked-in features they value and use a lot, and people who didn’t use those features and so have already committed to the change. The first camp seems to consist almost entirely of “users” and the second camp seems to consist almost entirely of “developers” who have been around WordPress for years.

Regardless, I haven’t seen a convincing argument as to why the menu in 3.3 is an actual improvement in either form or function. Any superfluous change is a tax on productivity for existing users. IMHO, this menu change is a bad idea, and I’m not the only one who sees this as a problem. If we can keep the emotions out of it, that makes this a debate worth having until the matter is closed.

It’s more effective for us to do that when people are not trying to sort people they disagree with into buckets. It comes off as divisive and elitist to the rest of the community when you say or imply things like “anytime something changes some people are going to resist” (sounds like a cop-out to avoid debating a good point), and “they’re power users, not new users” (so, what? the new users haven’t learned enough to know what to hate yet? we only want new users from now on, so we’re taking away things that power users like? clearly not what you mean, but too many flaws in this logic to even debate it here), or “I’m sure there were users then that demanded an option to switch between the two types of menus, yet here we are, without it, and doing fine.” (no one is really demanding anything, just debating a point. and yes, here we are despite people requesting functionality they don’t need? every time people complain about a change it’s because they can’t let go of the old way of doing things, not because the change is a bad idea?).

These kinds of comments aren’t even new or creative. If you have something to say about the menus, let’s hear it. But we can do without the opinions on other posters’ psychography and how we are just having a hard time dealing with change. If you’re a programmer, awesome. I can’t do that and I respect you for it. Let’s move on without the passive-aggressive attempts to diminish the value of people’s posts.

So here are some reasons why I don’t like the menu system in 3.3. (I’m open to feedback or clarification if I am either missing the point or just wrong somewhere):

1) USABILITY: as a plain old “user” I think the usability in 3.3 is poor. I disliked it from the moment I hovered over the first menu because it was obvious how much more time it would take to get the same things accomplished in the future.

2) NECESSITY: from a product management standpoint this seems to stand out as an unnecessary change that took developer and designer time and resources away from more important things. What business value does this new menu provide? what problem is it solving? it seems like a solution looking for a problem.

3) BEHAVIORAL PATTERNS: if you don’t use the menus expanded, then you won’t realize how much it will require users who do to learn new behavioral patterns without providing an equitable reason to do so.The new menu unnecessarily removes functionality that is materially useful to a lot of users, apparently to accommodate an aesthetic preference. That’s form without function.

4) MOBILE ACCESSIBILITY: Clearly, the new menu was not architected, designed or tested with mobile devices or mobile users in mind. There are extra clicks required in 3.3. The mobile experience in 3.2.1 was already frustrating. It seems out of character based on what little I’ve read about the dev team that a decision was made to change the menu without specifically looking for ways to improve the mobile experience, AND without even conducting usability testing with the menu on mobile devices, before or after the fact. Mobile devices aren’t getting less popular. @ipstenu:

Checking 3.2.1 and 3.3 on the iPad. Flyout menus work for me on SVN 3.3 – Click once, they fly out. Click again, go to where I want.

Yes, only if you know where you want to go in first place. Try “click once they fly out, change your mind and click elsewhere and no flyout. Click a third time to expand menu so you can see the options. Wait for page to load. Click fourth time to go to the page you decide on, assuming you did find the page you wanted on the third click…” Versus “click once, go where I want”. I really want to agree with you on this @ipstenu, because your depth of knowledge of WP intimidates the hell out of me. But I just did this on my iPad for the 4th time to be sure I wasn’t smoking crack.

5) INFORMATION ARCHITECTURE: Minor usability issues aside, there is no apparent progress being made towards solving the bigger information architecture problems that continue to get worse over time; like UI scalability, which is especially evident with people who run multisite and have no way to reorder, sort or search for sites in the menu. Currently we’re stuck with a picklist for “My Sites”, which is find, I’m thankful to have a tool like multisite in the first place. But if your going to overhaul the menu, my first thought was “what were they thinking?” Picklists are a good choice for static options that rarely or never change, not for lists that were built to grow. It would be nice if we didn’t introduce new problems before the old ones were solved.

6) PROGRESS: the menu redesign that was implemented in 3.2 was a big, obvious step forward. I was really geeked up about it, as I have been about almost every single change WordPress has made to date. But by all visible accounts, the “value” of the changes to the menu in 3.3 are neutral at best, even to its supporters. So I can’t see the new menu as anything but a step backwards, especially out of consideration for anyone who prefers to keep the side menu expanded (which again, to me just makes more sense if you work on an iPad or tablet. the alternative is clicking twice to get to each menu option).

7) SCALABILITY: The expand/collapse menu system in 3.2.1 is infinitely more scalable than the menu system in 3.3. Plain and simple. The more options you add to the flyout menus, the greater the need you have to keep them expanded. This is not a debate about preference, or “why you shouldn’t have too many plugins”, WordPress was made to be scalable, the new menu was not.

It’s interesting, as much as this conversation has turned to discussing “edge cases” or “power users” versus “normal users”, it’s not really that at all.

It’s developers versus users. What is a “power user” anyway? Do developers equate “power users” with power functionality? Or power users with edge case needs? I’m pretty sure that normal users become power users when the system works well enough for them to do so. And every time a company starts alienating their power users, a shark starts swimming in the distance that just begs to be jumped.

@esmi, allow me to clarify: with a flyout menu specifically, yes, each hover is the time and effort equivalent of a click.

Focus is the true “click”.

is a completely separate point, although also true.

@ipstenu

You’re not going to get ‘options’ no matter what. WP wants to give you decisions, not options. It’ll be one or the other, but no option to pick a third.

I “get” and agree with the spirit of your point, but WordPress gives you all kinds of options, Permalinks, single site or multisite, sub folders or subdomains… If I have to choose between “flyout” menus and

Checking 3.2.1 and 3.3 on the iPad. Flyout menus work for me on SVN 3.3 – Click once, they fly out. Click again, go to where I want.

Yes, cool. So you reproduced the problem. I wanted to make sure it wasn’t just me that had to click twice to get when I need to go on the iPad, versus 3.2.1 where the menu was expanded and I only needed to click once.

Also, Ipstenu, please try this as well: click on a menu option, and then click on a different menu option (not a sub option, a different main menu option) on the side menu. Do you see the second usability problem?

First, remember that “simply hovering” IS considered a click by itself in web design. So anything after that is a second click. To suggest otherwise is naive or wishful thinking.

The entire point of WordPress is to make it easy to write.

Well, then please focus more on that and less on the menus. I love the drag and drop loader, though, that’s pretty awesome. Btw, can you point me to where the “easy to write” copy is on WordPress? I found tons of plugins and themes that have that marketing copy like “we make it easier for you to write with WordPress”, but not so much luck on www.ads-software.com or .com themselves.

Fundamentally, having plugins/themes add “3 different menus to different sections” of the nav menu is a huge design flaw in the plugins/themes.

For clarification, I know of two: Themes and Plugins, what’s the third? In any case, who says it’s flawed? I think that it conceptually it makes more sense to have separate menus for these completely different concepts: different in purpose, utility, function, form, business model, economics, execution and amount of time administering. The last one is key. However, assuming you are right (and you probably are), and there is a really great way to combine these concepts, that point is irrelevant to this particular thread.

Having a huge menu with several sections open all the time further detracts from this primary use case.

Causal flaws regarding the establishment of your use case as the “standard candle”, I disagree. If you personally can’t concentrate with the menu open, close it. I don’t have a problem at all getting things done with the menu open. Please remember that the admin area is where some people spend all day working. All day. Not just “writing” like a machine without ever leaving the posts section. I, like a lot of other folks, like to move around a lot and I like to do it quickly. So I don’t like having to look for what I need, I want to click once and be there, not hover, scan, click. Hovering is fine on a website, it sucks doing it over and over again in the admin area. It sucks on a PC/Mac, but it sucks even more on an iPad, to the point of being unusable. Go test it yourself, then come back and share your comments, I look forward to your feedback.

The majority of the community uses WordPress to write …

Are you absolutely sure about that? Sounds like it makes sense when you just say it like that. But let’s think about it. Besides the fact that there are no numbers to substantiate your claim, I personally can write even more easily with Microsoft Word, a plain text editor, a loose leaf notebook, sand, a Sharpie, a sparkler (although sand and sparklers aren’t good if you want to save what you’re writing), or even a block of quartz if I’m thus inclined (admittedly the quartz is probably be more difficult, but imminently longer lasting and more secure than WordPress). But don’t take my word for it, let’s quote the front page of www.ads-software.com:

WordPress is web software you can use to create a beautiful website or blog. We like to say that WordPress is both free and priceless at the same time.

“Beautiful WEBSITE OR BLOG”. WordPress is not Twitter. In your quest for oversimplification you seem to be conveniently forgetting the fact that the WordPress community, and “power users” like me, have come a long way on this journey with WordPress, and us power-users make up the head of the proverbial long-tail and probably carry far more economic weight and network effect. Remember the law of increasing returns? It says that “each new node added to a network increases the value of the network exponentially”. Also remember that the “nodes” in WordPress’s network is USERS, not blogs or sites, but USERS. And us “power users” are the super-nodes of this network. You wouldn’t have the externalities to recruit or attract the rest of the community in the first place. I’m thinking that’s worth considering. As for learning curve, how do you think the “rest of the community” actually learns how to use it? Let’s get real for a second, I’m good at picking up technical things, but I had to get help with WordPress early on. Who helped me? The power users and developers. The people who were evangelically passionate about the platform. Now I do the same for others. I see how people use WordPress, I recently helped my sister start using it and she is not in technically inclined in the least. The very first things I said was, “Okay, first expand all of your menus, then open my email and start at number one.” Now I’ll have to modify that to say something like “hover over the side menu options until you find X. Did you find it? Keep hovering it’s there.”

Also to your point about “being simple to write”, I personally chose WP because of the very fact that it’s scalable and extensible, AND as of 3.2.1 it’s simple to use. WordPress is being architected AND designed with principles that support my use case far more than yours. If you don’t agree, then why does multisite exist at all? Why themes? Why plugins? I think it’s because these are things that give users whatever environment they want so that they can be at their most creative. You know where I stand on “easy to write”.

…not to hunt for settings on different admin pages and tweak options.

Of course not, that would be a strange use of one’s time. (Unless you’re hover-searching for pages that just might hold the key to your timezone settings and permalink options).

Last Eric, can you tell us how many of the people who constitute the “majority of the community” use WordPress for just “writing” versus company websites, social media marketing, PR, light e-commerce, reviews, domain name sales, ad revenue, affiliate programs, etc. etc. etc. You’re going down a slippery slope with your viewpoint, because you’re not paying homage to the millions of sites that now use WordPress for much much more than “just blogging”. That kind of thinking is going to alienate lots of influential WordPress power users.

@kevinjohngallagher thank you for reminding me about usability on tablet devices. I can’t believe I didn’t even think about my iPad concerning this change yet, I travel a lot and use the iPad for all things WP while I’m on the road. I sure I’m the only one who does that as well.

So I just logged onto my WP 3.3 install with the iPad. The menu doesn’t even work. You have to click on a menu option to get it to show, but then when you click on another side menu option the menu doesn’t change until you click it a second time, which activates that menu section. Was this tested at all on iDevices?

This is a perfect example of why a fly-out only menu is a bad idea, no matter how well executed. As of today, it’s simply not even possible to make flyout menus an attractive UI element on tablets and mobile devices, because at best it always adds an extra step, at worst the menus don’t behave and cause you to not reach your destination at all.

I strongly encourage anyone who has an iPad to do the same and test a WP 3.3 install on it ASAP so you can come back and tell the rest of us what you think. The WP team does great work and they always try to do the right thing for the community, but they need to hear your opinion to make an informed decision.

Looks like I was hasty in my assumption.

@jaredatch, huh?

Here is an image of a single book page on Amazon.com, 17 pages in length on my screen.
https://i54.tinypic.com/2na7dky.jpg

Here is what I see on my screen if I don’t want to scroll. 1 page.
https://i53.tinypic.com/n6wbaq.jpg

It’s known in the design community that a big factor in Amazon.com’s success is that they don’t require users to click on tabs to see reviews, or tags, or forums, etc. You just…. scroll. You can disagree as much as you want. Designers often want less because it looks nicer (and I’m a designer by the way), but that isn’t always what is best in practice, over time, and amongst a broad set of users.

By the way, the book in the images is a fantastic web design book called Don’t Make Me Think, by Steve Krug. Might be worth a read.

@ipstenu, I see your points, and I want to clarify that I do actually like the new design, a lot. It’s very clean and light and I’m glad to see that part of it get implemented. I also agree that the flyout menus are awesome in some scenarios, and for certain styles. That’s why they’re so popular they can be been found on the front end of most websites made since the mid 90s.

I just disagree that it’s a good design choice for a backend admin area that: 1) has a ton of standard functionality, 2) can expand to have even more functionality through the use of plugins, and 3) is accommodating to people whose job is use the admin area of WordPress all day.

Nonetheless, I’ve made my point(s) and it sounds as if the decision has been made with finality, so no point in wasting more time debating this point. Thanks for the comments and feedback.

@jeffr0, I still don’t understand what you don’t understand.

If anything, this should make finding newer links quicker versus slower.

Seriously? I have to say you have me at a complete loss. How is having to hover over each and every menu option even remotely comparable to just ‘looking at your open menu all at once’?
That’s like trying to read a book that has one word on each page.

I personally like the change.

I’m not going to debate you about your opinion of “how nice the design is”, it sounds like you’re emotionally attached to the idea of the new design rather than arguing a point based on need. I’m focusing on utility and whether or not the new menu is actually better from an information architecture and usefulness standpoint.

The problem you bring up exists with or without this change. In WordPress 3.2.1, you have to go down each top level menu item, click a mouse button to expand the menu, see if the plugin option link is within the menu…

Yeah, in 3.2.1 you have to do that ONCE, to be precise. But with 3.3 we’ll have to do it every time we want to look at any menu option.

if not you can collapse the menu or move on to the next one.

No, YOU do that. The reason for this entire long winded post is that I don’t, ever, collapse my menus – accept for menus that are not used often. I strongly prefer for the menus to stay expanded at all times. With menu system in 3.2.1 you and I both get our way. With the new menu system, I’m losing something, you’re gaining nothing.

In fact, despite the fact that I have installed hundreds of WP sites, when I activated multisite on a fresh 3.3 install yesterday I had to try to remember where the Network Setup button was, so I hovered over a bunch of options until I saw it. I don’t want to *have to* remember, which is why I usually leave the menus expanded. For new users this will be a PITA. Especially when you consider the grab bag of menu changes you’ll get with each new plugin.

P.S. Here is the link to the ticket which has discussions around the implementation of the feature. https://core.trac.www.ads-software.com/ticket/18382

Yep, I saw that. I’m still searching for the problem they were trying to solve. In other words, the feature was requested by a WordPress core contributor, but not as a response to outcries from dissatisfied users or usability testing which suggested that certain problems with the menu is hurting adoption or power users from being productive.

There are a few ideas in the thread that standout as being useful, such as the concept of getting anywhere in fewer clicks. Beyond that, the entire process for how the menu was conceived of and designed was a solution looking for a problem to solve, and not the other way around.

So I guess we’ll just have to agree to disagree on this one, @jeffr0,
Being required to hover over each menu in the admin menu is not a scalable design pattern. Maybe making it optional so that nobody is losing out on things they use consistently is a much better way to go. We’ll have the best of both worlds.

(First, if you upgraded from 3.2 to 3.3 and you don’t see the change, no need to comment on it further to that regard. The point has been made. If you want to get a look at what’s coming in 3.3 do a fresh install so we can focus this thread whether or not the new menu is desirable.)

@ipstenu, thanks for contributing to my post, I’ve read a ton of your other posts over the past year and your comments have helped me through countless questions and issues with WordPress. You’ve been invaluable…

six of one, half a dozen of the other

I don’t agree. With the menu in 3.2 we can choose whether we want the minimalist collapsed feature. We won’t have a choice in 3.3. So this is a contentious feature change.

there’s no way to please everyone on this.

Again, I’m not sure I agree. Who was asking you to remove the expand/collapse feature? Can you point us to that request and the support for it? I disagree with you point again. I’ll eat my words if you prove me wrong, but this is a case of designer self-indulgence (albeit fantastic design), without regard for the actual utility of the design choice(s) being made with the menu. In other words, why is the designer “fixing” something that wasn’t broken? If these were complaints about the menu before, this isn’t going to fix that. And the decision has been made to make this change only so you can “jump out of the frying pan into the fire”, then it’s a superfluous change, and I believe that goes against WordPress philosophy.

So again,

there’s no way to please everyone on this.

I think there is:

at some point down the road, the Feature Pointers in WordPress 3.3 may have an API added on to them so that Plugins can point out new features or point out where the configuration option pages are located right after installation/activation.

Fantastic, I love that this is coming. My suggestion is that you release the new menu simultaneous to API additions, so that both plugin developers and users can prepare, and give users like me the ability to find workarounds to the functionality they’re losing and embrace the change.

Not to be dramatic, but WordPress administration with 500+ sites takes up hundreds of hours of my time each month, and the menu change is something I am *passionately* unhappy about.

Newbies are always going to have a problem.

Good point, so the menu change is less important to new users than existing users. Clearly the WP community is huge and still growing, and we all benefit from recruiting new users to WP.

So if I had a vote in planning the releases I would strongly urge that the menu not be changed until navigation and information architecture problems can be solved the “right way”, so that new users can find their way around quickly, and to simultaneously release an API which enables third-party functionally so as to not alienate existing users. Especially evangelistic power users with hundreds or thousands of sites, who will be frustrated that the menu system was overhauled WITHOUT even fixing what was wrong with it in the first place.

The menu in 3.2 has all kinds of problems, but primarily related to information architecture and despite having a better appearance, and without the aforementioned API, 3.3 is only going to make those IA problems worse. Releasing the new menu system at the same time as the API is a change I would embrace wholeheartedly, and that is a situation everyone could be happy with.

Until that situation becomes plausible, please reconsider this change. My OCD brain is already counting the minutes I’ll lose in productivity every hour, fumbling over a new menu system that doesn’t even solve the usability problems that the old on had.