Liz Danzico of Happy Cog Studios spoke today about her consulting with Automattic on the design of the WordPress admin interface.
As with so many of the presentation today, I’m really hoping the slides will be published soon, as there are some great ideas coming out.
Liz spent a lot of time watching WordPress users at blog. At work, in cafes, and in their homes with coffee and cigarettes, Liz saw real users of all types doing everything they do with WordPress. The slides show some of the results, but I couldn’t see all the details.
She also spoke of the recent trend in using nouns in user interfaces (again, the slides showed some interesting examples), while WordPress organizes things around verbs (“write” and “manage”). Existing WordPressers responded poorly to a wireframe of a noun-ified admin panel, but I thought it looked kind of interesting (though I can’t say that it would actually be better).
There was more, lots of great ideas, so I’m hoping to see the slides again soon to shake my memory.