Usability Test: Gutenberg for Professional Writers
Sarah James on
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4 Comments
The next major release of WordPress is slated to include Gutenberg, a new content writing/editing experience that will change how we craft content inside of WordPress by modernizing the interface and increasing control over the layout and structure of pages and posts. 10up is actively contributing to the development of Gutenberg and is deploying it for some of our clients, and we’d like to better understand how professional content creators will perceive and adopt to the change.
We’re conducting a professional usability study on the current build of Gutenberg. Our goal is to augment existing user testing to better understand a particular subset of the user base: professionals who write and edit relatively standard, news-style content inside of WordPress. We want to observe how this audience perceives and adjusts to this new experience by watching them use it to create some basic content. Our ideal participant has experience creating content with WordPress, and brings a reasonably fresh and unbiased experience to Gutenberg.
Would you like to help us?
Participant Criteria
10up is looking for user testing candidates who:
- Create basic, news-like content for a living using WordPress. Candidates with significant customizations to the editor or writing experience are likely not a fit.
- Feels reasonably comfortable reviewing in development software and providing feedback.
- Are not actively involved in or contributing to the development, testing, or analysis of Gutenberg.
To conduct the study, we are using UserFeel, a remote usability testing application. The test itself will require approximately twenty minutes of your time.
If you’re interested and meet this criteria, please fill out this participant screener survey. We will reach out to you and let you know if you are good fit.
We will be sharing test findings and results, as a part of our efforts to collaborate with the community building Gutenberg; no participant will be personally identified without their permission.
Actually you should do a study and look for user testing candidates who: Create & maintain content with WordPress used as full featured CMS, with multiple admin and editor roles, with adjusted capabilities, a few hundred author or contributor role accounts, access locked to different categories or custom post type parts of a website, multiple menus and layouts used for different parts of a website, etc.
That’s where the real problems are with Gutenberg.
Take a look at the current REST API tickets at github, these are just the tip of the iceberg, and the Gutenberg titanic still goes full speed ahead to merge.. oh wait.. submerge in this case.
We are really worried that Gutenberg, if launched in its more or less current state, will hurt the whole WordPress brand a lot, if not burn it for a very long time…
We share your goal – to ensure Gutenberg is ready for prime time.
The problem with a “full featured CMS” user test is that, by definition, those implementations and workflows tend to vary greatly between WordPress adopters, making it almost impossible to conduct a wide user test that lines up with anyone’s current plugins, configuration, and workflow. You’d be comparing a highly (and often professionally) customized implementation of WordPress to a generic stock configuration.
It’s also worth pointing out that, for the foreseeable future, the classic editor will remain available. Adopters savvy enough to make a full fledged CMS implementation with hundreds of authors and many post types will likely find it easy to keep the “classic” editor enabled until Gutenberg is “ready” for their needs.
I write daily on my own blog and build websites for small business owners in my rural community who don’t have much technology experience at all. I train those with some aptitude to update their sites and maintain them after we completed the build.
As I have created content for many international clients in my own multimedia companies and for a children’s publisher back in the day, I think I may be an ideal candidate to interact with this new software and evaluate it appropriately.
Thank you for your time and consideration.
Fill out the application linked to in the post – sounds like you’d be a good fit!