 Mae'r ffordd ystafell am y bydd yma yn Llywodraeth Tangle. Mae'n bobl yw'r ffordd yma yn ymolod yn lle'r ffordd ar y bwyr. Mae'r ffordd yw'r ymddangod eich amser i'r byw ymddangod. Gwyrdyn ni'n gwybod ar y bwyr, mae'n modd i'r bwyr i'ch gweinio a gwirio ar eu bwyr yma, a'r gwirio ar y bwyr i'n gweinio a chydigio i gydigio i gydigio i gydigio i gydigio. Yn y ddweud rywch yn ei gwybod, yn ddangorol. Chwyddech chi'n gweithio o gweithio gwybod, ac mae'r ddrygiadau yn cyfrifiadau o'r sgwyl yn y dyfodol ymennol. Mae'r ddweud o'r hir, ymraith, neu'r llwyf, mae'r ddweud o'r llwyf, ac mae'n rhaid i'w ddweud o'r tas. Yn y ddweud, mae'n ddangorol yn y ddweud ac mae'n ddweud o'r ddweud. Dych chi'n meddwl yn y ddweud, If you're a nidder or if you're a do, you can't actually knit with that. You can't actually function. If it gets really so tangled, you have to snap it. It's really, really important that we work on this. Thank you for your question. Do you remember the first ever time that you used WordPress? What about the first click? The first post? The first time you learn how to use tags or you learn how to use categories, what about the discovery of how to add a theme or how to add an option or a plug-in or just some really simple things that you take for granted now? Well, likely you can't remember the year unless you have a really good memory or you can't remember where you were, what you were exactly doing. You might have that vague memory and it depends on how long ago that you did this, but that experience is going to be faded. There is something about looking back, so when you do that, there's these rose-tinted glasses of simplicity. Everything just seems easier and, in a way, it probably was. If you look at early WordPress, it was easier because, well, you could actually do less, so by that it was easier. And if you were starting to think about how you do a simple task such as write a post, after all, our roots are in vlogging, so that should be fairly easy, right? But if you think of the path to just write a post, the long route, the way that you have to know things, this is kind of a problem because how many presumed things are there along the way? How are you going to know that you have to publish? How are you going to know where to go for that post? How are you going to know about tags? What assumptions are we making with the product? To start thinking about really how we can simplify and get entangled, there needs to be a bit of consideration of what the daily activities are going to be, and how has WordPress really been used so that it can then be improved? What are our issues? What lurked in that tangled ball of yarn? How complicated is the experience of WordPress? Now, there's going to be some good news. We can all improve things, but we have to be realistic and we have to admit how tangled our yarn is. There's almost a point term by use by many, and I know that I've used it myself in the past. We talk of the WordPress way, and we use that term, as if it's an unspoken but known rulebook and that it's going to be okay. This is one of the foundation issues. There is an awful lot of presumed knowledge within our product. From the words we use to the past and interactions we expect to just make sense to someone, which in nobody's surprise doesn't actually make sense unless you know the WordPress way. For example, think about the multiple places for menus and widgets. Why can't we just have one place where we do these things? Simplest also, we have to be careful, doesn't mean easiest. If we have this presumed knowledge, we both expect someone to use it, but we might be judging what the simplest and easiest route is. If we know what is in the kitchen drawer, for example, we're going to be able to find the tea strainer, but if we actually don't know where the drawer is and we actually don't know where the kitchen is, we're probably not going to have much success finding a tea strainer. One bigger problem is what even is WordPress. How many people actually interact with it and they think it's their theme or their plug-ins that they're using? Which it is to them, that is WordPress to them. However, when we talk about things like call and we use those terms, we don't include those. We don't think about those modified and completely different experiences often. The experience is far from just WordPress admin. It's that tangled, it's layered. The bones are lost under a completely different surface with so many that interact on a daily basis. Never mind adding in headless or any other combinations or things or even the simplest thing of an admin color way. It really is added confusion. In a world where you can combine anything, the basic experience just isn't the same for everyone. The result is often the confusing, often precarious experience. A big problem of that sensibility is opening to inconsistency by allowing different buttons, different toggles and different styling. This creates a patchwork and a confusing interface that befuddles and demuses even the most experienced users. How do you start when everything is changing or different? You can't even maybe follow a tutorial because it doesn't look like the thing that you have in front of you. It's like trying to use a product whose experience is constantly morthing and nobody likes unexpected experiences. You shouldn't need a map to actually write a post. As I noted earlier, a large issue is simply the passage of time and how long WordPress has been around. This comes in many forms from it being built for desktop first to backwards compatibility trying to keep supporting what once was. The experience is web, but more and more it's needing to be app-like. It exists in that kind of messy middle, static, little bit stuck. There are ways to do things and multiple ways to do things and this really, really confuses. This means that that learning curve is fast and mountainous to start off using. So in all our options, we've created something called a paradox of choice, which is simply you just can't choose because there's too many options. It's a space for those wishing to move are stuck and everything is always on. We've surfaced so many of the options were actually overloaded by the sheer number of them. Too many places are available to do the same thing. What might have been thought of as helpful by just surfacing it often confuses. For example, this shows how many different ways there are to get to media. There's quite a few. There are some foundational problems with the interface itself that we really can't ignore as a problem. One of the biggest of these is there's no clear start, no obvious way. We have a lot of repeating interfaces, the same elements used over and over again, even on the same page which creates a seize of components. There are simply too many ways to do the same thing. Beyond that, you have to hunt for what you need and it's not where you need it. Users quite frankly often lost. So one of the great examples and experience that I often refer to is supermarket. I know that doesn't sound very exciting but bear with me a little bit. If you think of the supermarket, there is a plan, a flow that you get carried along and pretty much that applies to any supermarket that you go to. This isn't, of course, a mistake. It's actually by design. The way that finding works and you can go there at the supermarket so you know what to expect. It's soothing. You know where the hours are and you know the flow. You don't have to learn new models of moving around that space. You know where to go. The paths are pretty much the same, even across different worlds as well. Similar products are grouped so easily that you get what you need. You flow through the experience and you end up then checking out. But the end, signs clearly mark the way above and if you need anything, it's pretty clear what you're going to get. But if we were to look at the amounts of clicks and moves and the walks around WordPress and if we were to think of these as miles or an activity loop, we would really have reached our walking target pretty quickly just trying to do the simplest of tasks. Because we hide so many things, we make so many long interface journeys, really bringing things closer, that's where what we really, the assents of need to do. It's kind of tiring how much we have to navigate around to get even the simplest of tasks done at this point. I'm going to go into some kind of design exercises. You don't have to be designed to do this. Of how we can really start thinking about and tangling the experience you are, because it's really, really worth on tangling. And we can start to maybe think about things a little bit differently. So, really simple task. What if we removed all colour from the admin experience and not suggesting we do it and we ship it in a release? By doing this, we get to see everything. What does it look like? When you do this, you get to see the hierarchy or the lack of. You get to see what is the predominant focus. And it's a really great way to start considering what is important. What could matter? And where are our paths? And what do we want to be at our paths? So if you take this dashboard screen, it's a lot if you take this hello away. Where do I go from here? The primary action is to customise my site or save a draft. But is that the thing that we want to do the first thing that one does? The screen has a kind of lots of directions, but no particularly clear direction, no hierarchy. It's a lot of the same. What about this? That publish button is really calling to me. You can see it quite faint on this screen, but it's there and it sounds out. But there's a lot of the sameness and everything is kind of the same level. By taking the color away, we start to think about what we are doing with our hierarchy here. Maps also help us to see the flows where things are joined and how they connect. By charding our experience, we can begin to see where our sea monsters and our shipwrecks are. This is a media flow. This is a media flow about a few months ago. But this is still, and it's very faint on the screen, I do apologise, but this is really intense as a flow. You can really see the complexity of it when you start mapping out and you start seeing everything. Story arcs are probably one of the simplest forms. I would encourage you all to start exploring these. There is a link here of Donna Litchhouse book. So what they are, if you think about a movie or you think about it, it's literally where you go up. You have the expedition, the exciting incident and then you have a crisis and then you go down to the end. Really starting to think about these and think about these in terms of the product and the experience. I think it's actually the story because we're telling a story as people are interacting and using it. If we think of the story arcs in WordPress, there's a need to plot these and just start thinking of that experience, both to know how people are using it and also so we can change the interface as well. One thing I'd like to know when you're thinking about story arcs is that the crisis is really, really important. If you think of all the good movies and all the good stories, they all have a crisis, you know, they have a all they want they moment, are they going to survive? That is really, really important to this. So having a tension within an interface is something to explore. A really easy exercise to do is look at a screen and think about what can be distilled, what can be taken away and you do not have to be designed to do this. I call these flanker marks which is basically just sticking things together and then seeing what happens. What is extra and how far back can you actually take it? Here's a dashboard. Now what is actually needed on this dashboard? What is going to be the first action? Now I've experienced some different things here but you can do lots more of these. What are these links is or isn't needed? What could be surfacing? What could we change? Could we move things around so we have editing at the top maybe? Another point to consider is what state has someone reached this screen? Is all of this important to everyone at the same time on their journey? Along with looking at distilling the navigation and distilling dashboards and all these kind of things that we're considering, we need to think about our settings. Here are the amounts of pages you have to move around to just interact with settings. Is all of this needed? By thinking about what is needed we can think about what we really want to surface. Perhaps we just have one settings page and a lot of these things are advanced. That's sort of hiding things in a drawer though, right? I would argue we need to look at this further. What can we truly remove and take the strain of understanding from those that's coming to this experience? To truly be experienced first, we need to be aware and think of mental models. To ensure a mental model is the way that we think. Common illustrations are if you're walking through a corridor and all the doors open in the same way and the last door doesn't, you hit your nose. That's a mental model changing. But if we think about the experience of a supermarket who has gone into a supermarket thinking they know the aisle, that the biscuits are on and they go to the aisle, the biscuits are on and it turns out there's no biscuits there and they've moved the biscuits. I know that's happened to me quite a lot. When that happens, that's a broken mental model. We've all had these moments and those moments make us feel stupid but it's not us. It's the experience. We don't know that though. And if a mental model fractures too much, not only does our trust go but our anger rises because as humans we really don't like being made to feel stupid. Beyond looking at specific techniques and I would encourage everyone to start really thinking about this distilling and these paths and these stories that we're telling with our product. As a project we need to collectively look beyond where we are really today. But how do we do that though? The first thing we need to be thought about is, is it fit for the purpose? The fit could be for the human using it and that's making it accessible or culturally fitting and right for their situation. It also is about making it work for the right purpose. In the past this has been about someone consciously changing or interacting with an interface. Over having it run, this is about creating an experience that adapts. It's one point not really fully explored yet and starting to dabble in this. But a contextual interface avoids a lot of the issues of everything on and a paradox of choice. So I'm going to add as a note, the blunt end of this is often what adapts is adapting experiences. I have a bad name and that's a giant list of options for a setting to age. Even worse, a mode switch that you have to think about doing something and then think about clicking something. That's really a kind of friction in your mental model. What I am suggesting is an adaption and that's natural without having to consider. The experience would be aware of the person, the situation and of the purpose. This probably sounds a little bit magical for a Saturday morning, but it really is possible. And it really is possible with the tools that we have. After all, we walk into different rooms with specific purposes and our experiences should be just like that. Those using the experience don't have to be conscious about what things are. They are there for them. The tools are right by them when they need them. They aren't unexpected. They also aren't scarily overthinking because nobody likes an overly clever, freaky interface. That's kind of like if you think about Goldilocks, that's the middle-bare porridge. That's just right experience. The perfect experience dance is really, really possible for us to create. Taking it even a step further to the device you are experiencing on might in the future. Over the same mobile first, this is about really being experienced first, which for the purpose is the device that you are using this on. Well, it just works on any device you happen to be interacting with. It isn't about squashing the desktop experience. It adapts and it distills and applies to fit the device that it's really being used on. Different needs need different experiences, not limited reduced ghosts of interfaces. If we all looked, if we looked at many, many screens that people use most of the time, it's likely not everything in Wordpress. This goes back to those stories, the pathways, the arcs. By focusing on tasks, we can reduce that always on multiple flows. And focus on the best ones, the fine, and ensure you get what you need when you need it. As I've mentioned, there's multiple ways to do things, and this just leads to confusion. We're designing for everything at all the same time. This means the learning curve is fast. For example, do we need to start on the dashboard? We need to ask these questions. Is there a better start? Do we need to have the amount of things that we do in the cyber? Maybe at the start you choose what you're going to use this for and it adapts, fits for the purpose. Maybe there's no sidebar at all. These are ideas that we need to start exploring beyond our love of sidebars and accordions. And the Wordpress kind of do like those as well. As a long-standing project, part of our practice really needs to be triad. This is where we can clear the channels and see those flows. Beyond this looking honestly, critically, and with an open heart at our functionality and what we need. Do we really need everything today that we have? What is getting in the way? What could be done better? What truly is something that needs iteration? And part of this has been okay with its sensibility. If the baseline experience is solid, we have those roots of its sensibility. Beyond this, let's take a look at what we can refine and distill in its distinct interface. What isn't serving as well? What can we do today better? And what can we iterate? These are all questions we should be asking. The company I would suggest we don't really have a welcome mat in the Wordpress experience. By starting to take a journey and focus on the work that we do and that experience-first mindset, it's really something that we can do. We can have that welcome mat that includes everyone. One of these experiments was tips within the editor and also we have like an onboarding in the editor. So we have a couple of these different things going now, but these are just a couple of little approaches. Because a welcome isn't just a guide. A wizard isn't a welcome alone. It's kind of a shiny user's gesture if it's not backed up with real magic. Wizards that don't do magic are just not great wizards, are they? We need to be able to see and try before committing and really explore the interface and know what we are going to be doing. For example, a tiny little way of doing this is you can preview a block in the editor so you can see what you might be able to use. This reveals what we will be able to pick. It removes that fog of surprise in the interface because when it comes to an interface, nobody likes surprises. They like delight, they like it working and they like predictability and they like their mental models to not be broken. As I wrap up, I want to take a little moment to consider and really to think about putting experience back at the heart of everything we do. Because this isn't just the designers and this isn't just the talk that will only be for them and it isn't just about design. This is about performance. It's about function. It's about every aspect of the WordPress product. We need to build for the future, not just for today. This will involve considering what we do support, what we push forward and what we have graceful and gentle and respectful pullbacks for. If the experience is truly adaptive, that means we should consider pushing forward whilst adapting to that which we support. By skating to the park of interfaces and technologies, experimentation can lead to pushing beyond what we actually have today. There was so many things possible in an experience that a few years ago was just a dream. The plug-ins are great and things are absolutely wonderful, but they shouldn't be a requirement for good experience. Out of the box, WordPress should have a warm welcome, a natural flow that leads someone through their first post, their first few weeks, and then if they want, into the world of extending to truly create their own WordPress world. By offering consistent tools, potentially even a design system, those extending can keep that consistent experience. They can go beyond it and not against it and not have to create these conflicting interfaces because there just isn't any tools or anything available for them to do this with. Everyone benefits here and not the use of using it who don't have to play guess what this component does or guess what's going to happen when I click this. Those of us creating, those of us who've been around a little bit of time within WordPress, we really need to check ourselves because this is probably not creating a majority of this for ourselves. We need to remember that first experience or try and hold back. Whenever we start a new feature, we need to start simple, release often, and then the WordPress has actually been founded on iteration. Let's start embracing that again. Surface is the thing you need, right where you need it and bring the experience simpler and to those who need it. In kind of knitting terms, we need to remember that first time we made our first row or the time we made our first piece and that excitement. What is true that over time products get handled doesn't mean that we should accept that and raise to add new features, fix the most bugs and build more higher, more complex. This is an honesty, a point of reflection that's needed to recognise that handled wall with experienced yarn. Well, natural, it does need improving. The process is beginning across WordPress and I would encourage us all to just start continuing to do that, to create truly a product for the years ahead. A product that puts experience at the heart and entangles its yarn. Thank you. Okay, so now's your chance to ask me all the difficult questions. Thank you very much. Has anyone got a question they would like to ask? We've got ten minutes or something. Neil, thank you for that talk. You work for Automatic, and what I was wondering is, I completely agree with you, but to what extent are these changes going to happen through qualitative testing versus quantitative analysis? I mean, I've got a lot of data about how people use things. I'm just curious about how that actually gets put into practice. Yeah, so it's observing, right? The foundation is we can't create for that, but we don't know. It doesn't matter what company I work for, for that, right? Like it's about all of us. I think it's very easy. I use this term headspace, which is basically, it's very hard to design outside the space that we're in. We're in the body in the head, right? But we do it. So there is usability testing that goes on at the moment, and we need to do more of that. We need to work out in Europe. There's been testing tables. We need to do more and more of that. We need to listen. We need to look at the support forums. They're a goldmine of information. Every single contributor team is a goldmine of information. So it's about that. Going beyond just even the countries in and our language is incredibly important. We are building a product that is global, and we sometimes forget that when we're doing it. We make it for maybe our closest word count, or maybe the clients that we work for. So it's a very rambling answer I'm giving you, but I am so... I agree we need to look at any feedback that we get, any story to do this, and we just still do that as part of it. It's a slower process doing that, but that's a really important process. And sometimes what that involves is putting something out there and seeing what happens with it. So we have this amazing feature and core feature plug-ins, so doing things like that. The design team, I can speak about team, we have an awesome experiments plug-in. So things like that are great because they're just a way of going, I have this idea. I think it's kind of based on some research, but what happens if, oh, yay, right? There's something more of that, and I think that's something we do as a community, and that's something that different companies can give back, hosting companies can give information. So it's about us collectively as a project all doing that. Incredibly rambling answer, but I hope that helps. Very interesting and very annoying. I'm doing, improving lecture. I just wanted to, no question, but I just wanted to thank you that my day is made. I am in the right place because say one month ago I didn't know anything about WordPress, and I found it equally confusing, and everybody's telling me that you don't need to do WordPress because the plug-ins will go away and things will stop, your site will stop working, but I'm so glad that I'm here. I'm going to make most out of it. So your story is the story we should all be listening to. Because you're so close to it. I had a business plan. I'm from India. I talked to so many people on Upwork, but everybody's telling me a different story altogether. I finally ended up creating my own site to whatever extent it is. It has products, newcomers, and I am not sure whether whatever I have done is correct or wrong, and that is what I'm here to learn for you. I don't know one plug-in tells me you can do this. Another one also tells me you can do this. I invented a kind of word on Wikipedia and they deleted my post because that was not the correct approach. I didn't even know what visual editing is and what, you know. So it is confusing and I think it's a very, very, very nice start thing. There are so many people who are going to be coming into our gym and we can hopefully help you and listen to you. Anybody else? I apologise if this question is kind of outside the realms of what you do, but I'm interested in your opinion on this. So if we want to extend these ideas out to themes and parts of plug-ins and things like this, at the moment I would say a lot of the criticism that WordPress comes in for security issues and just looking generally for some things like that comes from what is mainly plug-ins. At the moment, not a huge amount happens to trying to enforce these themes and plug-ins to follow us that the standardised design that the core puts into place even at the moment. I'm thinking if we're simplifying and putering it as you suggest, do you think we should be pushing more towards plug-ins and themes following that design as well? So I've reacted strongly to the word enforced, but that's me and that's the person of the word. But I think everybody does and I think why the reaction to that is because I'm going to use an analogy like we're in an art space, right? So I'm going to use an analogy. If you have an art box and you have everything in it to create everything, you don't need to go to an art store. This is a Saturday morning analogy, right? And the thing is, I think at the moment we don't really have that good kit, so how can we expect some consistency when we have inconsistency in the base product itself? So by having that consistency and by offering more tools and more awesome things that people confuse, a consistent component styling, and this is something that is happening at the moment, refining things like maybe the colour text or refining things like the range control and having these things available that you can put in your theme or your plug-in, that by the nature improves. It's like a cascade effect itself, CSS in that sense, right? So I think that happens and it's about collectively looking at that. I don't think we should necessarily pause everything, spend four years on a design system and then we're good to go because a design system isn't a solve that solves everything unless we look at we have to audit and we have to have a foundation that we build up. I think we're on the path to doing that but we can't expect someone, if you're a new plug-in developer or a theme developer, you have to learn the way that we do themes or plug-ins. So there's all this kind of, we need to sort out a house first and the core before we can do that. And I think it's happening but it's a cascade, also a very kind of roundabout way of saying it, but I think we will, by the nature of having better in the core product and more assignment in the core product, that will happen. Okay, thank you everybody and thank you Tammy very much. Because some idiot went rambling on too long at the start, obviously we're running late already. If anyone wants to come and find me, I'll be here all day and I love talking to people. Please do, that's why we're here and that's why it's such a great event and chance to actually talk to people after. So Tammy, thank you very much indeed.