Hello! 👋🏼 I’ve just joined the project as a designer, and before I start diving into any kind of work, I wanted to write about my first impressions trying the plugin, since so far I’ve only seen the demo videos.
I have to say, I feel like a kiddo unboxing a new toy right now, so… expect a bit of chaos in this post. I will be sharing ideas and feelings in no particular order. 😀
To make it very real, I’m using my beloved unkai.blog: it’s my content and my ways of working, so I’m familiar with the surroundings.
Let’s dive in!
Onboarding
Unkai.blog is hosted at WordPress.com, so the only thing I had to do was search for the plugin, install it, and activate it. Super easy.
After that, you are welcomed with this splash screen:
My first reaction was: this is done with AI. Which is totally fine, the project is still young, and most of the branding and design isn’t defined yet, but I think this could be delivered with less text and more showing.
💡 Maybe we could use a slider like the one we use on the editor:
Into the dashboard
Then I went straight into the dashboard. This view made it crystal clear I could move things around, resizing, minimizing, and so on. I love the UI affordances 💖 it really looks like an OS, so I started to click literally everything…
But when I minimized a window, I expected it to fold down into the bottom dock, with an animation like the macOS Finder. Nothing really happened. Luckily I’m familiar with the wp-admin icons, so I knew where to click, but I wonder if we could give a bit more guidance through animations, as long as it helps and keeps accessibility in check.
💡 Add minimize/maximize animation. It would help with usability (affordances) and with learning where things are kept.
Managing content
When opening all my posts, I expected to see a table like the one you see in Posts. I found the pin icons a bit redundant (perhaps we could show the post cover instead?) and the draft tag a little too prominent.
And here’s an idea that got me hyped—could we drag things into things? 😀 I always struggle with sorting content into Categories/Tags, so I’d love a quick way to select a bunch of posts and quickly move them from one window to another.
I absolutely loved the whole flow: sticky note → draft, but it’s a pity that the sticky note disappeared after opening the editor. I’d like to keep both and delete the note myself — like I do in real life.
And the last one (I promise).
Is there a way to save the existing setup/view? I ended up liking my desk combination very much, but if I close and come back tomorrow, what happens? I think you can set each widget individually, but it would be cool to do a “group” save.
That’s all for now. Amazing work @prismiwi2015 @roberto @miguel @nick 💖 I’m super excited to get hands-on with the design part, but I have to say you got so much ground covered! Kudos!