 So, I want to talk to you about designing for your users. I'm a developer and sometimes I forget that I'm not the person who's using the product that I'm making. I'm building a website for somebody or I'm building a plug-in and I'm not the person who's actually going to be using it. But spending so much time building it, of course, it's so obvious to me that this is how this thing should work, you know, right? Of course, you just go to this page and hit this setting and do this thing. We fall into this trap in WordPress too. There are a lot of things that we just kind of forget are hard. You know, we kind of forget that setting up a homepage for your site, you know, setting up a front page, we've all kind of gotten used to that, right? Like, it's, okay, well, we know we have to do this or I want to set up a menu, but first I have to make sure the page exists so I have to get out of the menu page and go to the page thing, add them, then go back to the menu page or the customizer or whatever. We've put up with these things. But we shouldn't do that when we're building things for our own users. Those can have disastrous consequences. So there are a few things that we need to focus on. First is you need to build things that are easy to understand as best you can. So for instance, I loved this thing here. This is a Vietnamese yamaha fiora. It's like a little scooter, a little Vespa scooter. There's a lot of hearts, so someone was very happy. In fact, it looks like it uses hearts as gasoline here. If that's what the icon says, I'm not sure. What I don't know is how can I tell if I'm empty or if it's even half full of gas? There's like two little extra diamonds there. Also, am I only supposed to be going either 40 or 100 kilometers an hour? There's a big gap there. Why does 20 have one star next to it? Zero has four stars. Or hearts, excuse me, is that happier? I don't really know what the design here was, but admittedly, it would be hard for me to look at this and kind of quickly figure out the things I need to know. How fast am I going and am I going to run out of gas? Now this is just a simple little, you know, whatever, I can work with this. But what happens when you get to a machine that is a little bit more complex? So this machine here is an airplane. Now there's a difference between the one on top and the one on bottom. Unfortunately, the little arrows might be a little hard to see, but the one on top used manual controls and also used manual gauges. So with the top aircraft, you can very quickly see what position all of those different gauges are at. I can't tell you what any of them actually do, but I can definitely tell that the ones on the left are all pointing really high and the ones on the right are all pointing really low. The one on the bottom was an updated one. This was in the mid-80s, this aircraft was introduced, that it used a new fly-by-wire system and it also used these new digital gauges. And you probably can't see from a distance where those gauges are pointing at the bottom. So let's say you're in a situation where the plane is shaking very violently, there are lights flashing, there are sounds, there's stuff going on, and you need to quickly tell something going on upon these gauges. This specifically, if anyone is familiar with the Kegworth air disaster, this specifically was named in the report as one of the causes for the airplane disaster, that the pilots were unable to easily read these gauges and determine that they were getting a little bit too close to the ground. In this one about a third of the passengers died, and I'm not trying to be super down here but I'm pointing out that it was specifically a design flaw in the official report, excuse me, a user interface design flaw, was found to be a reason that this disaster occurred in the first place. They were a bit too distracted to tell exactly what was going on. You also want to make sure that these interfaces that you're building are easy to use. You need to do a few things that can allow people to consistently utilize them. So first of all, I want to make sure that first time users can use the things that I'm building. I can't assume that everyone who's going to use my plug-in or start setting up my theme has already been using WordPress for a long time. I love playing the Wii. I love video games, tell them I'm a shirt, and I love the fact that so many people were touting it when it came out as this amazing device that was bridging generations together because people could just pick it up and just swing it along, and it's the same motion I make when I'm going bowling, so I was able to translate something that I already knew from the real world into a digital experience, and that makes grandma very happy. I also want to maintain some consistency when I'm building something. These are pictures from the same building. Maybe somebody put the handles on the door, and then they realize, oh, crud, whatever, I'll just slap the signs on, but there's no consistency here. So I'm betting that they fairly often have a lot of people walk up to that first set of doors and for a while try to figure out why they can't open it. You need to think, if I'm doing something one way, then can I continue that along through my experience? If somebody goes directly into the page to edit some content, then it's not their fault that they don't realize that this other bit of content is in a widget over on a completely different page, or that a menu on page A is set in an options panel, but in page B is set through the menu page. I remember that when you're building things, people are going to look for the path of least resistance. They're going to try to find patterns and try to figure out what the heck you were thinking when you made it. Make it easy for them to do that. I also wanted to point out, this is when I submit these slides, this is more of a problem. There is a new unified login coming to wordpress.org, which is enough reason for me to applaud, but the very first screen up top is me trying to log in to the wordpress support forms. You can see those little yellow boxes that have my username and password. When I'm on the get involved, the make page, it's not quite as simple to figure out where to log in. These are sites. These are on the same website. I want to point this inward at us to point out that we also have this problem sometimes. Can you figure out how to log in on the make page on the bottom there? I don't know if anyone, I mean, if you already know how to do it, then that doesn't count, but there is little text near the bottom under the hide threads and keyboard shortcuts that says log in to leave a comment. It's very light gray. It's tinier and it's hidden amongst other texts. It's not where I expect it to be. Again, I'm pointing out something that, yes, thankfully in the past few weeks has been, they're starting to remedy. But the fact that I'm looking at a site here and on two separate pages, I have two separate things to do. That doesn't bode well for an end user. You want to make sure that your designs are as error-free as possible. You're never going to get rid of every error that you have, but if you can start working on things in advance, then I can see this as a place that people might have problems. That's a good place to start from. So there's another fun disaster. I'm guessing a lot of you know what this wonderful place is. If anyone happens to be familiar with the story of Three Mile Island and the failure there, again, one of the things that led to it was a user interface problem. There was a specific shutoff valve that was not shut. And there was an indicator light that indicated that it was shut. Why was the light on when the valve wasn't shut? Because the light was tied to the press of a button. I pressed the button to shut the valve. The light turns on. I pressed the button to open the valve. The light turns off. The button was tied to a separate system that actually controlled opening and closing that valve. There were no sensors on the valve to determine is this valve open or closed. That light was tied to the button press itself. So the valve itself failed, but everyone thought it was fine. I'm not going to post any other pictures of this thing. Again, you cannot solve for every problem that your users might have. But one method that one company that a lot of us use has done is take the things that their users have made. For instance, retweets, hashtags, and doing at somebody. None of those were built into Twitter when it started out. Users are the ones that came up with these different features, and they eventually built these in. Finally, you need to make sure that your designs, your experiences are effective for your users. I'm sorry, I'm going a little faster. For instance, Evernote. This is both the web interface and the Mac interface for this app. It is something that I can navigate easily. It's something that I can tell what I'm doing, where I'm at, and they match one another. Mailchimp. When I'm utilizing Mailchimp and looking at reports here, at the end I'm hovering over a specific day. I can see the exact numbers that I want to look at very easily in one place. It's an effective design because with one glance, I can see what my campaigns have done. I can see how well they've worked or not worked. And that was, yeah, I'm sorry, out of time. Oh, that was actually my final point. Excuse me. You can very easily tell what they intended you to do. So again, you want to make sure that you will have easy to understand, easy to use, effective, and error-free design. Sorry, over time. Thank you. I'll be back in five minutes.