We have now paused this test. Thanks to everyone who participated! 🙂
We often talk about scaling WooCommerce from a technical perspective, but it’s a topic we’re passionate about on the user experience side as well. In that respect, one feature that has been on our radar for some time now is backend navigation.
Conceptually, WooCommerce is much more than a plugin these days, and it has been that way for some time. It is a fully-fledged commerce platform, with a vast catalog of extensions and other third-party products that plug in to it. Merchants often tell us they spend more time managing orders and products, rather than posts and pages. So with that in mind we’ve begun to question more seriously whether using WooCommerce should feel like a plugin, or more like the platform it has grown to become.
Last year we reached out to a handful of WooExperts and extension authors for initial feedback around some initial design sketches that explored this idea. The response was largely positive, so we’ve refined those concepts, and would now like to gather broader feedback via public usability testing. We’d love your help with this!
Your say in the future
It is vitally important to us that members of our community feel involved in our design process, and have the opportunity to share their thoughts and feedback, especially around critical components like navigation. Quantitative usability testing is an excellent way for us to kick-start this interaction as it enables us to gather meaningful data that will help shape subsequent developments and community involvement.
To participate in testing this design concept, all you have to do is complete a short set of tasks while working through a prototype. Your input is enormously valuable, and we appreciate your time – that said, it should only take a few minutes 🙂
Clicking the button above will launch the test. Just work through the on-screen instructions to complete it.
After this phase of testing, we’ll talk more about some of the thinking and design decisions in this concept in a future post. For now I’d like to avoid the risk of introducing any bias to participants during testing.
The key principles we’ve worked toward with this design are making WooCommerce more intuitive for merchants so they have more time to focus on their businesses and ventures, and creating something that will scale elegantly in the future, all while still feeling like a native part of WordPress.
On the technical side we’re acutely aware of the potential for anxiety around how extensions might migrate from the current navigation system to any modernized version we implement. This is something we’re spending a great deal of time thinking about as well, and will explore more in-depth in future posts.
Thanks!
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