I’ve been thinking a little about the design of PowerPoint, WordPress, and WordPress.com lately. More specifically, I’ve been thinking about Edward Tufte’s criticism of how the design of the PowerPoint software is to blame for the Challenger disaster.
I spent a couple evenings a week or so working on an updated design for WordPress. I just wanted to see where I could go with it. There’s no current plan to implement it (other than maybe spinning up another MP6 and fiddling with things). It’s far from feature complete, but I think it’s at a good point to share and get some feedback.
The site activity head map is the headliner change here (other than, you know a bunch of other stuff). I think it’s time we did some encouragement right up front from the dashboard at a glance. If you look closely, you can see the dropdown that I was imagining would allow changing what information was presented on the heat map (comment activity, viewers, etc).
The top bar has been totally removed as a thing. You’ll see a bit more in the next screenshot. It’s still there in spirit, but no longer feels like yet another toolbar.
I took some ideas from some of the work we’ve been doing on WordPress.com as well as some of the ideas I implemented in Press This V1. (still missing pieces like the kitchen sink) I’m not sold on the right column meta boxes yet and haven’t messed much with custom fields, but it’s a start.
I think it’s about time Settings got some major love.
I’d love to hear your thoughts and if you’re interested on jamming on something like this. Go!
Kinda fun! Usually just mess around with my guitar, but started playing around with other stuff this weekend.