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Introduction to UX for WordPress developers
As a member of this community and a former plugin and theme developer myself, I would like to introduce everyone to some basic concepts of UX — a field of study that can make the life of all the people who use your products so much easier and your products so much more successful.
First of all: Respect to all the great people who are working to make WordPress a thriving community by creating plugins and themes!
Why this guide?
I’ve been creating WordPress solutions for the last 10 years or so and I’ve seen a lot of third party plugins and themes during this time. Some of them were easier to use than others and there were some that took a lot of time to figure out.
I’ve also created several dozens custom products for my clients. Working freelance and being a team of one has thought me a lot about adjusting my work to suit the needs of the people I worked for. Looking back, I can see how I could have done it better by introducing more UX concepts, research and methods into my development workflow.
I also know how difficult it may be for a developer to focus on usability and user experience of the product. We developers tend to put too much emphasis on making things work, creating features and writing good quality code. Those are all good — by any means, do them.
But my own experience shows that the interface we expose to our users may often be an afterthought or at least something that we assume is the best solution. We rarely validate this assumption.
The issue with developers creating user interfaces is often such that the exposed interface can sometimes only be properly understood only by those who created it.
We know the ins and outs of the product and we tend to assume our product or UI is straightforward and easy to understand to the users. Sorry to break the news, but no, it rarely is.
Thus, we often end up with sub par interfaces that turn out to be inaccessible to some users. This will reflect poorly on the reviews of our products and require much…
