Lila and Eva posing on a rick in the river at Canyon Falls.

On our drive to my parents’ house in the Keewenaw, we stopped at Canyon Falls and hiked into the woods for a little sight-seeing. Enjoy the photos!

On Saturday I made it down to the National Pistol Championships at Camp Perry, OH to visit my dad (Ron Granroth), old shooting buddy Bob Gardner, and the Springfield Armory/Ottowa Sportsmen’s Club Junior Pistol team.

Congratulations to the junior team on winning the .22 caliber Junior championship! (These junior shooters went through the Ottowa Sportsmen’s Club Junior Shooting Camp.)

It was great to visit with my dad and Bob, and I ran into some old friends.

I haven’t competed at the nationals since the 1990s, and being down there on Saturday brought back a lot of memories. I stood at the assembly line for a while during the team .45 match, watching the teams compete. It was a hot sunny day with a strong breeze, and it was easy to imagine being on the firing line negotiating the wind and the shots. I’d like to make it there again.

Fear the Evil Silo!

After I was put in charge of a newly created user experience department, a young professional gravely warned me about silos.

He had argued against the new department because it would just create another silo in the company.

The passion of the warning gave the impression that this silo threat was real, imminent, and inescapable in anything but a flat organization.

Beware all ye who manage departments! Dread the ghoul of business quagmire: silo!

The warning was overzealous. The fear of silos is a bad reason to force an organization’s structure into any particular shape. No, instead shape the organization to promote sustainable excellence in performance for the whole business.

That said, for all you suffering from silophobia, let me tell you how to spot silos and what to do when you find them.

How do you spot a silo? Watch for the symptoms.

I found this description after a quick web search for organizational silos. (It’s a nice short read on silos, so go on and read the whole article.)

“The symptoms of the silo effect are easy to recognize: lack of cooperation, internal competition and breakdown in communication. The result is that one division gets pitted against another – head office against operations, one department against another.”
Marcel Côté, A matter of trust and respect, CA Magazine, March 2002.

As Marcel says, the symptoms are:

• lack of cooperation
• internal competition
• breakdown in communication

Doesn’t that sound like squabbling children? Interdepartmental gossip may be another symptom.

Okay, let’s say you spot a breakdown in communication between departments. Do you have a silo? Don’t jump to conclusions. Maybe you just have poor communicators. Relax. You may not have a silo on your hands.

Now, if you do see all these symptoms, you have a problem, no matter what you call it.

The question is, what can you do about it?

How to solve a silo problem

Let’s say you manage an IT department and you have just spotted a silo in that other department, Communications.

Look out! You’re standing in your own silo peering out. Good job, you have just spotted two silos. Now what?

Now you do a gut check. Ask yourself if you have felt competition against Communications. Have you been looking out for own department at Communication’s expense? Think about your budget and your own maneuvering. When you think about your department’s plans, do you consistently consider how to keep the people over in Communications in the loop?

The key to tearing down silos is to go out of your way to help other departments.

(Fortunately for me, this is natural to user experience. We help other departments, like product development, marketing, and sales, do their work better.)

So, your next step is to go over to Communications and find out how you can help them the most. And then do it. Yeah, even spend a little of your own budget on the solution. And don’t begrudge it. Earn gratitude.

What will happen is that you will start strengthening relationships between the people in your department and the other department. With that will come respect, collaboration, and better communication.

Oh, and if you consistently help that other department, eventually they’ll get the idea and return the favor.

The idea is simple. Business silos exist when departments look out for their own interests instead of the whole business’s best interests. The solution is to get back in touch with the main objective of the company and help each other out in pursuit of that goal. Bingo.

In short, grow up and play nicely together.

P.S.—Or take this ITIL expert’s advice and admit that silos are a good thing and systematically work to strengthen them.

Stopwatch graphic by Casey Marshall

Recently, I watched a series of people observe informal usability tests.

Two of the observers have recently graduated with Masters degrees in HCI or an adjacent field.

Both recent graduates used a watch to record time-on-task and completion of the task. One actually broke out a stopwatch while the other referred to his wristwatch.

While these stopwatch fixations livened my day, I do wonder about graduate education in the usability field.

I recall that for the first half-dozen website usability tests that I moderated, I also recorded time. Then I realized that timing tasks obscured more important observations, and I haven’t bothered with timing since then. Besides, we can get times off the recordings.

Is the working world really that far off from graduate studies?

So why did these two graduates pull out timers?

Well, I think they were parroting “proper” methods they were taught without understanding when it is useful. If, in grad school, they only practice for ideal research situations, they’re missing out on the realities of the work world.

I’ve worked in an Agile development environment for the last couple years, and for the decade prior to that I worked on fast-moving projects that used whatever SDL I applied to them. The mission: Deliver value, ASAP.

With that charge, decisions are made that don’t allow for insight from in-depth, long-term studies with huge numbers of participants. I’m grateful for even the small, quick sessions of user and design research.

Regardless, I got a chuckle out of seeing these two bring out timers for a completely informal, one-off usability test. As expected, they both missed seeing key interactions because they were watching the clock.

When to be concerned about time, usability-wise

Okay, I’d hate to give the impression that time doesn’t matter. I just find that a long time to complete a task on a website is rarely the issue, instead it may be a symptom of other issues which become apparent during research.

However, I do find response times of a system to a user’s actions to be very important because too much delay in a system’s response can really hurt the user’s experience and even distract people from completing whatever they set out to complete. Still, this class of problem is often noticeable during observation. (Unless you missed it while you were fiddling with your stopwatch.)

With that in mind, I’ll gesture towards Nielsen’s take on response times.

The cup and Vader, courtesy of Alaina and Lisa.

I have a coffee cup at work. It resembles a jumbo marshmallow with a handle and “Pause.” printed on the side. There’s a small story behind the cup itself, but today I write for another reason. It was abducted, and I received a series of sinister photos.

Due to a back problem, I had to leave work for a few days. It was during this absence that two of my co-workers showed their true colors. Dark, dark evil.

Read their confessions and view the evidence for yourself.

• Coffee Cup Shennanigans by Alaina
• Coffee Cup Shennanigans: an Epilogue by WasabiJane

Home page of Newsweek.com, May 31, 2010

I don’t know when it happened, exactly, but Newseek.com was recently redesigned. There is so much to say about it, and it is mostly good.

I’ll start with the most obvious: the design.

In short, the home page is easy to scan. There is a clear visual hierarchy. The lead photos and articles have been spot-on for Memorial Day news items, and the clarity of the layout made certain I couldn’t miss them.

The article pages are easy to read and keep enough of the patterns, like the byline and publication date, that it’s easy to figure out what’s what.

My biggest complaint is one that they no doubt haven’t figured out how to get rid of yet: the banner ads.

There’s more talk about the visuals for the new newsweek.com at nymag.com. I won’t go on about that, myself, other than to say, gee, it looks like a professional blog. Oddly, that’s a compliment.

Now let’s look at the markup.

Newsweek.com's namespaces point to interesting uses of meta data.

I’ve had a penchant for information architecture since the late 1990s, and about the first thing I noticed when glancing at the markup for the home page is the references to the Dublin Core meta data definitions and other meta data sets.

I was suddenly intrigued. Good use of meta data is sadly absent in many large-scale websites, and it’s really great to see an effort to play the game for real.

So, at a quick glance through the markup you’ll notice some unusual pieces, first this:
data-track="{'title':'stories being discussed'}", which is an attribute with a value that looks a bit like JSON.

I admit to being behind the times with studying HTML 5, but that attribute spurred my suspicion that this page was using HTML 5. I stopped wondering a few lines later when I spotted an article element, followed soon thereafter by a header element, and a nav element sporting an attribute of role="navigation". Whoa. Newsweek jumped right in.

So what about the meta data? Well, I can’t really know what they’re actually doing, but here is an observation. In a sidebar, they have a list of quotes. Each quote is marked up as a blockquote with an id attribute. Following each quote is a span with attributes like property="dc:creator" and about="#q1". The about attribute refers to the id of the blockquote in question. The content of that span itself is the name of the quoted person, plus which publication the quote came from.

Pretty cool idea: internal markup references like this can build relationships into the content. It could provide some interesting opportunities for parsing later on. Yeah, that’s right, the semantic web.

The problem with this all is…it’s half-baked!

Newsweek.com used "http-equiv" when they needed "name". Oops.

That list of quotes with the ID attributes? All that meta data is duplicated and thereby meaningless! Further, why use a span element when they could have used a cite element? More semantic and those attributes would’ve played as well. Gah!

And back at the top of the markup by those meta data namespace references there is another set of meta tag elements which are sadly marked up incorrectly.

There is a stack of 5 meta elements that use the http-equiv attribute when they should have used the name attribute. I’ll bet whoever coded that knows the difference, but I wonder if they were rushed to get this version out. It feels like a beta.

They are so close to providing some really great examples of meta data use in HTML 5! I hope they release another version soon that gets more precise and cleans up some of this code.

View from top of Yerbe Buena Gardens, San Francisco, March 2010.

Saturday PM: Sunshine!

I actually began to sweat under my blazer from the warm sun shining brightly through the window.

I had arrived in San Francisco a little early on Saturday, dropped my suitcase off at the Intercontinental Hotel, and walked around the corner to a sandwich shop for a bite to eat and to get online. As I draped my coat over the back of the chair, I decided I really like San Francisco. It’s the sun, I admit it. Oh, and I had already noted that the two billboards I noticed on the taxi from the airport were pure tech: one for an enterprise search system and another for PGP. Billboards talking to me? Amazing.

After settling in at the hotel, I had dinner with my old colleague Chris Burley and his girfriend at a nice Italian restaurant. Chris is awesome. I love talking with him because he has such passion for what he does, which currently is to help lead efforts like urban farming in the Bay area.

Sunday AM: 3 good things

The next morning I woke early due to the time zone difference, and I had three excellent experiences:

1. In the aching fog of caffeine deprivation, had the best cup of coffee of my life, thanks to the Blue Bottle Café. (I admit, I ordered a second cup to go.)
2. Paused in the Yerbe Buena Gardens where some elderly practiced tai chi and parents snapped photos as their little children hid behind a waterfall. I stood on a bridge and watched the morning sun ripple on the glass of San Francisco skyscrapers.
3. Crashed a church service at a music venue called Mezzanine put on by a group that calls itself IKON. I was the oldest person there, amidst a crowd of art school students. We sang, we listened to a teaching from the Word, we had communion. It was good.

Sunday PM: MX day 1

Sunday afternoon saw the start of the 2010 MX Conference.

MX2010 is largely focused on managing user experience and less on the tactical end of UX practice, and there were some thought-provoking presentations from people who have been managing user experience for a number of years, in a number of different types of companies. Off the top of my head, presenters represented firms in financial industries (Vanguard), publishing (Harvard Business Review), retail sporting goods, and online media (Youtube).

The series of talks was fantastic, and was kicked off with a keynote by Jared Spool in which he shared insights like that Gallup’s Customer Engagement (CE11) metric has high correlation to the quality of user experience. Spool’s keynote actually turned out to predict some themes that carried throughout the many presentations. Among them were the importance of establishing a vision for user experience and that experience ultimately must be addressed well across multiple channels (web, mobile, physical space, etc.).

Spool talked about three core attributes necessary for great user experience: Vision, Feedback, and Culture. He posed three questions that UX managers should ask.

1. VISION: Can everyone on the team describe the experience of using your design 5 years from now?
2. FEEDBACK: In the last six weeks have you spent more than two hours watching someone use your design or a competitor’s design?
3. CULTURE: In the last six weeks have you rewarded a team member for creating a major design failure?

After the conference reception, I wound down the evening by taking a walk around a few blocks and ending at a nearby bar. I ate a burger and watched the Academy Awards for a while. Back at the hotel I watched the end of a Clint Eastwood Western flick and fell asleep.

Monday AM+PM: MX day 2

I woke at 4 in the morning. I checked analytics, email, and my usual RSS feeds. I stretched, washed, dressed, and still had time to kill. I read a few chapters in The Shack, a book Adam gave me last week.

I chatted throughout the day with Haakon, a usability specialist attending from the design company Tarantell in Norway, and as he sipped his coffee, I decided to not mention my mere three hour time difference.

The rest of the day was another series of excellent presentations. Themes: customer (more than user) experience, vision that guides the business, new models for working in the network, UX leadership stories from Youtube, customer experience in renovation of thinking at Harvard Business Review Online, understanding the holistic customer, data-driven design decisions (and when not to rely on data for design decisions), experience design as business strategy, and operating as a chief experience officer in your company.

It was great to hear first-hand the stories from these user experience leaders. Now, for what to do with it all when returning to the office.

Tomorrow and then

Tomorrow morning I fly back to Michigan, and need to get my head back into product owner and user experience work. But I also need to hold onto the ideas from this conference, and shift into actively leading user (or is that customer) experience work at Covenant Eyes.

The purpose of release notes is simple:
Release notes explain what changed with this version of your software. Period.

I hope this article will help you write release notes with clarity and brevity.

Title format for release notes

The title for your document should include specific information:

• Name of product
• Version number

For example, if your product is RubberDucky and this release is version 3.3.5, the title for your release notes document should be RubberDucky 3.3.5 Release Notes.

Make the title big and bold at the top of the page. Refer to it in links exactly as the title reads.

Consider following the title with these bits of information.

• One sentence overview of the product
• Date of the release
• System requirements
  • Note changes, like “Discontinued support for Windows XP.”
• Link to installation instructions
• Link to a user manual
• Link to a release notes archive

Other sections in release notes

Break the release notes document up into sections, each with its own heading. Here are some sections to consider.

• Additions
• Removals
• Changes
• Fixes

Keep the actual descriptions brief. Release notes are often little more than a bullet list of updates, and that’s fine. If there are a series of small technical changes, try to describe them as a theme. For instance, “Improvements to the communication between the software and our servers.”

However, if there is an update that is important for users to understand, do not sacrifice clarity for brevity. Write enough of a description to explain the feature, but no more than necessary.

How do you know if an explanation is too short or hard to understand? Ask someone who is familiar with the software but doesn’t really know about the release to read the explanation and explain it to you in his or her own words.

What about personality?

Release notes should be easily scannable, and inserting witticisms should be avoided. However, if the company is proud of some feature, it doesn’t hurt to brag about it, so long as it is brief.

Here’s a nice example from TextWrangler 3.0 Release Notes.

BareBones Software inserting a little attitude into their release notes.

What about posting existing, known defects?

This question quickly becomes a philosophical one. In my opinion, a company should be transparent about known defects with their software and earnestly try to fix those problems. You can see this type of behavior with some open source projects in that they have a public defect tracking system. The bugs are out there for the world to see. With enough of a user-base, defects with your software will probably become known eventually anyway.

However, I do understand that in some cases advertising known-defects is a security and stability liability and just shouldn’t be done. My preference is that that sort of decision is made on a defect-by-defect basis, and not as a corporate blanket statement.

Regardless, known defects or incompatibilities do not belong in your release notes document. You could, however, link to a list of them in your release notes.

Organizing archival release notes

What do you do with all those release notes from prior versions of your software? Archive them on your website so you and your customers can get to them.

One page, all release notes

If your release notes are brief, you might want to include each version on a single page. The most recent release notes should be at the top of the page. Fetch Softworks currently takes this single page for all notes approach.

One page of release notes per version

For the sake of clarity, I would prefer to have release notes for a specific version on that single page, with a release notes archive page that links to every version. BareBones Software takes this index of release notes approach.

Some companies keep a current release notes page up-to-date so they don’t have to continue updating links. Again, BareBones follows this approach: http://bbedit.com/support/bbedit/current_notes.html

Do you have good (or bad) examples of release notes?

Not having seen any “best practice” document for release notes, I wrote this article. Do you agree? Disagree?

If you have examples of great, or really awful, release notes, please comment with the web addresses so we can all see them. Thanks.

I’m still getting these crazy fliers that really sink the scores. Most of my fliers were high and right, although a few were off to the left.

Here are the targets.

The scores were 89 and 88 for slow fires. 86, 91, 94 for NMC. 96 and 91 for timed fire. 97 and 92 for rapid fire.

The slow fires were good scores for me, but the rest was too erratic. It’s those fliers. I’m shooting too fast. Some of the timed and rapid fires I probably shot in 6 or 7 seconds. I forced myself to hold the gun up for the whole rapid fire string, even though I finished shooting. I could’ve fired another 2 or 3 shots.

For the next match, I intend to hold the slow fires about where they are, but shoot nothing lower than a 95 for the rest. I’ll do that by slowing down so I can take each shot when it’s ready, so as to do away with those fliers.

The basic functionality is to provide a checkbox on web forms to reveal the password text, so people can choose to view the password they are entering as they enter it.

Throughout the 1990s I competed regularly, but in about the last ten years I’ve competed in only one sanctioned bullseye pistol tournament. That was about three years ago. Sure, I’ve shot in some pistol leagues here and there, but it’s not quite the same.

This one was a couple weeks ago at the Grand Rapids Rifle and Pistol Club. The match was called well, the indoor range was in great shape, and it was a neat surprise that 9-time National Champion Brian Zins showed up to compete. That was cool.

At 785 of 900 possible, my own shooting was a bit of a, well, a debacle. That’s an 87.2 average, for a middle-of-the-road Sharpshooter score.

I still had a good time. I really like being on the firing line, and I’ve been more driven since that match. Next time, I’ll be a bit more competitive.

I’ve been dry-firing, and in a league shoot this past Tuesday, I broke out of a 4-week rut of scattered groups and fired a 284 in a 300-point National Gallery Course. That’s a 94.67 average, which is an excellent match for me. I’d like to see that level of shooting become normal.

Photocredit: Tony Hall. Click photo to visit Tony's photostream @ flickr.com

Pen-less. It’s 9:30 in the evening, and I need to write out some thoughts (about a split-complementary color set).

At work last Friday, the pen that I’ve had with me for some months now finally gave up its last ink. It was a Pilot Precise V5, black.

My habit has been to have that pen in my left front pants pocket, reliably at hand. I guarded it, making sure to have it back if I let a colleague or a daughter use it for a moment. I gave other pens like it away, but kept that one.

Of course I have other pens. Bic ball-point pens: the kind you get in bulk in the plastic bags during back-to-school sales. I hate those pens. They fail so often, and you have to drag the ink out of them, scraping across paper. Scribble in circles first just to get them warmed up. Lazy bastards. Then you have to draw across your strokes again, filling in ink on the empty indentations of your first pass at writing.

I’m irritated at myself for getting into this pen-less position. Luckily, I have Plan B: pencils and a sharpener.

One of Adam’s projects is Nephtali: a web framework that focuses on security and considers the usability of the framework itself. Adam has labored over details in his latest version of Nephtali that will make life better for developers. For instance, he planned the naming convention and namespaces for functions so that in an IDE like NetBeans, the functions appear grouped logically in an easy-to-access format.

Nephtali is up to version 3.0.5 at the time of this writing, and the earlier versions were completely Object Oriented PHP. In version 3, Adam re-thought Nephtali away from the OOP base and rewrote it utilizing FP, Functional Programming.

For the last month or so, Adam has been lobbying various hosts to upgrade to PHP 5.3 or higher, because Nephtali requires at least that version. It is right on the cutting edge. I asked Adam a few questions about Nephtali, and that dialogue follows.

Davin: Nephtali requires the latest version of PHP, version 5.3 or higher, but many hosting providers don’t provide that yet. What about PHP 5.3 is worth waiting for?

Adam: PHP 5.3 includes many enhancements and bug fixes, but the features that facilitated Nephtali’s general approach and architecture were support for namespaces and the new Functional Programming (FP) capabilities.

Davin: I’m familiar with object oriented programming, but you’re talking about “functional programming.” Can you summarize the difference, and explain why you decided to go with FP instead of OOP with Nephtali?

Adam: Most programming languages offer the ability to define functions, however that doesn’t necessarily make them functional programming languages.  It’s easy to to get into flame wars over what a “true” functional language is, but I’ll lay out some general principles:

• Functions can be passed around just like other datatypes.
• Closures allow variables that are in scope when a function is declared to be accessed and carried around within the function.
• Side effects (changing the value of a variable within a function) are limited.
• Many FP languages natively support currying (the ability to define a subset of a functions arguments and then allow other functions to finish defining the others.)

PHP now supports the first 2, and with some discipline, you can limit the impact of side-effects within your code (there are even some clever hacks for the currying issue.)  But the big question is, “What does this buy you?”

Simplicity.

Object Oriented Programming (OOP) bundles variables with the functions (methods) that directly interact with the variables.  This does provide a degree of encapsulation, as the accessor methods make sure that instance and class variables contain what is expected.  However, the issue often isn’t “What” a variable is changed to, but rather  “When” a variable is changed.  This problem of “When” is most glaring for OOP developers when implementing parallel processing, an issue that has produced many complex, clunky answers.

Taking an FP approach simplifies the question of “When”, as you move from a paradigm of altering variables to one of acting on values returned from functions.  Relatively speaking when following general FP conventions, writing unit tests is simple, writing parallel processing apps is simple (see Scala, Clojure, Erlang, etc.), and as it turns out, writing a capable web framework is simple, too.

Davin: What about models? So many of us in the web field have become familiar with the MVC (model, view, controller) architecture in frameworks, and it seems like Nephtali doesn’t use the models concept at all. Is that right, and if so, what do you do about databases?

Adam: Simplicity.

In terms of DB interaction, I like PHP’s PDO capabilities and security.  Performing simple DB work is easy in Nephtali, as you can generate code very quickly using the Nedit, the online code generator for Nephtali.  Nephtali provides some simple enhancements (functions that automatically table inserts, updates, and deletes; easy connection management; etc.), but you’re always working close enough to the basic PDO capabilities that it’s still very easy to perform transactions, connect to multiple DB’s, work with existing tables that don’t follow particular naming conventions, and whatever else your unique environment may entail.  One line of code is all it takes to grab a set of rows from a DB.

Second, utilizing the parallel processing capabilities of CURL, Nephtali provides some special capabilities for web requests.  A couple lines of code can retrieve a web request (in parallel with any other web requests) and format the retrieved data into whatever container (object or array) you’d like.

Davin: I saw the post on the Nephtali blog about Nephtali’s parallel processing for web requests. Can you explain when that would be useful, and when I should not run ahead and parallel process everything?

Adam: If you have a page that only makes use of one web service, you don’t gain anything.  However, if you have a page like Nephtali’s homepage, which makes a request to Google Code for the latest download and also makes a request to the WordPress blog for recent entries, you can gain a significant performance improvement by processing those requests in parallel.  Instead of ending up with serial calls to the two services (GoogleCodeRequestTime + WordPressRequestTime), the parallel request now equals the greater of the two requests (GoogleCodeRequestTime -OR- WordPressRequestTime.)

Nephtali handles the processing for you automatically.  Always use the request() and response() functions, and Nephtali will make things faster when they can be faster.  That’s it.

More about Nephtali

Learn more about Nephtali at nephtaliproject.com. When you’re there, check out the screencasts on using Nephtali. One of the great features on that site is NEdit, a tool that you can use to write up a lot of the code you’ll need for Nephtali pages.

Oh, and don’t hesitate to use the contact form. Adam loves talking with people about Nephtali, and I’m sure he’ll happily answer questions or respond to comments about the framework.

Too strong? With WordPress, you can try to use custom fields or innovative hacks like Bill Erickson’s approach to multiple content areas using H4 elements in his excellent theme “Thesis”. Unfortunately, neither of those approaches really deals with the depth of the design problem that often requires multiple content areas for pages.

As an information architect/user experience designer, I’ve been involved in many projects that required more types of content on any single screen than WordPress is designed to handle.

Let me draw out what I’m talking about here.

Exhibit A: Page content that WordPress is designed to handle

In a standard WordPress page or post, you’ll see these author-controlled pieces of content.

• Post/page Title
• Body
• Excerpt (often not-used)

Standard WordPress content fields include the title, excerpt, and body.

There are other sets of data for a page or post that an author can control, too, but these are meta-data such as tags, categories, slug (shows up in the URL), and possibly search engine optimization information like title, description, and keywords.

For a normal blog, many online trade journals, and a lot of basic websites, this really covers the bases. The body contains the bulk of the content including images, video, and audio that can be intermingled with the text itself. This model is very flexible, and it has definitely proven itself.

Exhibit B: Page content that pushes WordPress too far

In 2009, there was a small project at work to develop the website Covenant Musicians, and because the person who would keep the site updated was already using WordPress, we made the decision to build this site with WordPress too.

Well, if you look at one of the destination pages for this site, the musician profile page (here’s one for example), you’ll notice some different pieces of content which may or may not be present on any particular musician profile page. When they are present, they need to be in certain places and sometimes with certain content.

This custom WordPress page uses fields in addition to the standard options: Musician Image, URL, and Video.

The problem is, to control those extra pieces of content: the video, the band image, the link to the band’s website, the site owner needs to use WordPress’s custom fields in very precise ways, without the benefit of WordPress’s content editing tools. What a drag!

To make life easier for the site owner, we ended up recording screencast instructions on how to use these fields and delivered those help files with the site itself. (We used Jing by Techsmith, by the way.)

It would’ve been better had the interface been clear enough so that we didn’t feel the need to document the process of updating these destination pages, but that’s the trouble with stretching WordPress beyond its default content fields.

Ask too much of WordPress and ease-of-use is the casualty

Do you see the difference? When an effective design solution requires multiple types of content per page, using WordPress will actually make your website difficult to manage. WordPress is usually so easy to use that when you hit this wall, it is very apparent.

When you’re at that point, WordPress is probably not the right CMS to choose.

Should WordPress improve in this area?

Whether through the core application or through an excellent plug-in (is there one already that I missed?), if WordPress is going to grow in the content management systems field, this shortfall will need to be addressed.

However, WordPress is really excellent at what it does already, and the better course might be to decide to keep the features in check and let other systems compete in the mid-to-enterprise scale CMS arena. Scope creep never stops, and a good application strategy knows when to say “no.”

Am I wrong?

Am I off-base here? This is just one aspect of WordPress that should limit its use. Another that should cause designers to think twice is when dealing with faceted-navigation which requires more than one dimension (tags can probably handle one dimension). But, again, those are more complex design requirements.

I’m not a WordPress consultant, and I’ll bet some of you would like to point to the errors in my thinking. Let’s hear it.