I’ve done a few posts about WordPress Usability Issues before (and the original wordpress usability post..), documenting my experiences with starting to use WordPress from scratch. I still manage to publish loads of posts without tags and categories, so I’ve been eager to find out if there is anything in the new version of WordPress that will solve this issue for me.
Then a couple of days ago an article appeared on wordpress.org containing a collection of wireframes for how the layout in WordPress 2.7 is currently planned. Sadly enough, it seems to place the tags and categories part of the layout to a location which is even harder to notice: Below the items in the sidebar at the right. I just discovered that I have a “Shortcuts” and “Related” menu items there, so I’m quite sure that this will be a place that’ll leave me missing the tags and categories even more often than today.
If the placement is set in stone, I’d strongly suggest adding some kind of visual hint to the Save/Publish buttons that indicate that tags and categories are missing; at least if you’ve enabled an option in the settings part of wordpress. It seems as the boxes are draggable in the wireframes, but for fresh users, this will still be confusing.
I guess most people at least want to add a category for their posts, but the wordpress guys probably have a lot of usage statistics on this from wordpress.com. It’d be very interesting to see any change in the usage of tags and categories between the different layouts, and the number of edits that simply add tags and categories within the first 24 hours after a post has been published.
(and yey! I remembered tags/categories on this one.)