Code by Tom

I recently re-watched Dave Smith‘s proposal and demo on making the WordPress editing experience simple, and it resonated with me.

I’ve been using WordPress for well over a decade, so a lot of its terminology feels natural to me now. But that’s probably because I’ve internalised the relationship between the UI and the underlying architecture. For many people, that relationship is not obvious, and often the product exposes implementation details directly in the user experience. I’ve always known this was a problem but never had the space to really think about a solution that covered all of the surface area of WordPress, but Dave did.

Rather than focusing on one isolated part of the experience, the proposal looks at how people understand the whole act of creating and managing a site. It questions whether the language, structure, and mental models we expose in WordPress are helping people move forward, or asking them to first understand how WordPress works.

Dave’s proposal touches on this in a number of ways: rethinking labels, bringing related concepts closer together, offering clearer guidance, preserving familiar experiences, and exploring other concepts of how people move between different parts of their site. The specifics are interesting and I encourage you to watch his video on it below but the main point is that they all work towards the same goal of helping people create and present their content without first needing to understand WordPress.

This caught my attention because of how I feel about Woo. Woo has similar moments where the relationship between what someone is editing and what a customer ultimately sees is not always clear. In these cases we’re expecting store owners to understand WordPress and WooCommerce. They often have to navigate pages, templates, settings, and flows that make sense to me, an engineer, but not necessarily to your typical merchant.

That’s why I’m so interested in this direction. WordPress and WooCommerce are powerful because they are flexible, but thats only useful when the experience feels understandable.