Usability Evaluation of WordPress

By Wenyan Li

Introduction

    WordPress is a free and open source content management tool, which can be used to create a website or blog easily and efficiently. People can build their personal websites using WordPress even without the programming and design experience. It provides a variety of design materials such as themes, widgets and plugins. It also supports the functionality called “customize” which allows users to change the site style in an easy way to show their personality. 

   However, there are still some usability defects on WordPress. I have performed the WordPress usability evaluation by following Nielsen’s 1990 heuristic principles. In this post, you will see some major issues I found and their suggested improvements.

Usability issues

1.   Two places for edit widgets

    When creating a new site page or a post, there are many edit widgets such as Align Left, Center Text, and Align Right, but most of them are hidden in a dropdown button (Fig.1), which is not necessary. Furthermore, many settings like text or color settings are displaying at the right sidebar (Fig.2). It will confuse users by displaying these settings in two places. The problem violates Heuristic #1, use simple and natural dialogue.

Fig. 1.Edit widgets with some of them hidden

Fig. 2.Text settings and color settings at the right sidebar 

Suggested improvements

    All block settings are recommended to show as a list on the top of each block when editing the block, and the setting section at the right side can be removed. It will save users’ time to explore the whole page to find the settings that they want to use. 

2.   Require typing URL when inserting a link into image captions

    When inserting a gallery into the page, users can write a caption to each image with a link to another blog post. It only allows to paste URL, or to type title to search before giving any selective options. It is not convenient for users because users may not always remember the URLs or names of posts. It does not follow Heuristic #1, which states the software should use simple and natural dialogue, and Heuristic #7, which says provide shortcuts.

                     Fig. 3. Insert a link into image captions

Suggested improvements

    In the search box, the existing pages and posts within the site should be listed as default options. In this case, if people want to choose a link from these sources, they can just simply choose from the list without typing anything.

3.   Inconsistent settings of Gallery and Tiled Gallery

   We notice that there is another type of gallery called Tiled Gallery (Fig. 4). People can choose different shapes of images in it (Fig. 5). But these styles cannot support captions or links on images, which should be improved. The problem can be included in Heuristic #1 and #4 because it is inconsistent with Gallery setting. 

Fig. 4. Two types of Gallery

Fig. 5. Block styles for Tiled Gallery

Suggested improvements

    The setting of Tiled Gallery should be at least as the same as Gallery setting. 

4.   Difficulty in adding unclickable labels to menu 

   The current way to add an unclickable item to the menu is to choose a “Custom Link” and set the URL to be #, but it is hard to figure out. User-interface design should give it high priority because it is a common and popular setting in menu management. The problem relates to Heuristic #3, which states minimizing memorize load. 

Suggested improvements

   A guideline or sample should be performed on the top of menu management. For inserting unclickable labels without any links, since each menu item can belong to attribute Custom Links, Pages, Posts, Categories, or Tags (Fig.6), it is suggested to add one more attribute called Labels for instance.

Fig. 6. Customizing menus

5.   No message when exiting Customizer without save
   When finishing some managements in Customizer, users can click Publish on top to publish changes. But when clicking on “X” (exit) before Publish, the system exits Customizer without asking users whether to give up the changes or not before quitting the window. It is also a high priority issue because people are likely to click this exit button and lose all the changes. It violates Heuristic #6, provide clearly marked exits.

Suggested improvements

   Add the message saying something like “Are you sure to exit the Customizer without publish?” when users try to exit Customizer in case of losing any important settings. 

6.   Misunderstanding what is “Write”

     On the dashboard, there is a button “Write” at the top right corner (Fig.7), but we do not know if it is used to create a page or a post even after we click it and open a new edit page. Actually it is a post create button, because for a page, there is no permission to choose from “stick to the front page” or not (Fig.8). Users might misunderstand the design and try to create a new page using the button, which would turn out wrong results. It violates Heuristic #2, speak the user’s language.

Fig. 7. “Write” button at the top right corner

Fig. 8. Option of "Stick to the Front Page" when creating a post

Suggested improvements

   The information will become more understandable if simply changing “Write” to “Write a post”. Another recommendation is to add the information “create a new post” when hovering the button. Furthermore, “Write” can be changed to “Create”, and two more sub options “create a new post” and “create a new page” are reasonable to be added.

Conclusions

    In conclusion, although WordPress has supported a variety of powerful features, there are still many usability issues, especially about the block editor Gutenberg, which is a new content editing concept but takes responsibility of most tasks in the new version WordPress 5. Even experienced users would have troubles when preforming tasks in this version. WordPress needs to improve the user-interface design. For example, the content of the website should be clear and understandable, easy to navigate and important items should stand out.