 Wow, y'all look beautiful Look at whatever place you want a Country city a building a wordpress backend If you happen to be a local in that place you can choose to actively take impact on the experience other people That is non locals will have in and with that place To me that place once was the central post office of Sofia Bulgaria And the local who would take impact on my experience there was an elder lady running a newsstand in said post office So I enter the post office on Tuesday morning 8 a.m I've come to post a parcel to Germany only to realize that neither am I able to read the Cyrillic signage All around not as anyone in that place understand let alone speak a word of English or German Getting increasingly freaked out I spent the next 20 minutes running toe and throw the whole standing in line here and there in order to find the right counter to post my Parcel Every counter I go to turns out to be wrong. Nobody speaks my language I got a catch a cap to the airport stress hormones all over my neocortex. You get the picture After 20 minutes it is that lady from the newsstand who decides to take action and change that it is life forever She takes a look at my package and starts walking me towards the right counter Which happens to be located outside the building in another building two blocks down the street That lovely old lady wasn't the president of post Bulgaria or something She wasn't even a staff member in the post office. She just happened to run a newsstand in that building Yet she was the one who would make it her responsibility To take care of my needs when I couldn't seem to find my way around the place My experience as a first-time user of the central post office software Bulgaria and of Bulgaria in general Will forever be determined by an amazingly simple act of human kindness Performed by a stranger who chose to do something. Nobody had told her to do and nobody would ever blame her for if she had not done it to care This is the talk about you. I hope some of you the person who develops a WordPress plugin and Your relationship to a person who uses your plugin on their website It is to talk about real people not abstracted personas. There's no such thing as the average user in this talk This talk is about real people facing a real apocalypse on their computer screen when they activate yet another WordPress plugin and all of a sudden Where they used to be a website they see a blank page and the sky starts falling We talk about real people who've been told they need to set up a website in order to run their micro businesses And they've been told it's going to be easy and when they do it soon becomes hell on earth Just because of a bunch of pixels. They cannot seem to control We talk about real people Who end up blaming random support agents or worse themselves For a problem that might not even exist for professional web developers yet had has the power to destroy hours of their work nonetheless We talk about real stress points on a real scale that takes real effects on the real health situations of real humans on both sides of a Support inbox we talk about people losing money self-respect respect of others or even their customers We talk about all these things because this is a talk also about WP admin a highly popular user interface open and subject to defacement Now we're going to see some specific UI examples toward the end, but right now in order to better understand what is going on here Let's take a look at the state of WP admin in 2016. First of all, we have heard it is going away we probably all agree the rest API offers exciting opportunities and De-coupled WordPress make might WP admin increasingly irrelevant in terms of its UI in the future now secondly WP admin isn't going anywhere, of course There's a majority of millions of real people out there who are and will be stuck with WP admin for years to come Those people we may not see at the word camp We may not even see them asking for help in the WordPress community forum on WordPress org Yet, they are the ones who made and continue to make WordPress the most adapted open source theme as in the world They secure our jobs for most of the plug-in developers among you. Those people are your market So it's definitely worth the time taking a closer look at what kind of experience they get with WordPress and plug-in UI on a daily basis Now when we explore WP admin as a user interface We soon notice four types of user messages providing feedback on how things are going. These are success something went well error something went wrong warning Something needs attention or it might cause problems in the future and Info something of neutral quality a person probably just would want to know about You won't know these types of messages we call them admin notices due to the hook names They are accessible by from outside WordPress core in fact Many of those are really setting errors by definition, but let's keep it simple and call them admin notices here WordPress itself uses admin notices only to communicate system-related feedback things like plug-in activated settings safe post publish update available an error occurred Plug-in developers are ever are free to use the same types of messages via hook Whenever and for whatever purpose they see fit So we see plugins generating admin notices for instructions to install other components so-called recommended plugins compatibility warnings Critical update notes up sale teasers cross-sell promos rating next and we're not talking edge cases Take this from a customer support agent who gets to look at an average of five to ten real-world WP admins in all kinds of languages per week it has become the rule in 2016 to have plugins Stuff in WP admin was sometimes well-meaning, but misguided sometimes plain abusive admin notices Now this becomes particularly interesting when we look at the states of human emotion Related to those four message types Again success something went well. That's relief Error something went wrong. It's fear Warning something needs attention alertness and Info something of neutral quality. That's a shortness as So many plugin developers seem to be convinced that any message important enough to themselves their strategy or their plugin in general Is worth an admin notice and don't seem to care at all about what kind of chemistry those Messages may invoke in the people they try to communicate to the natural consequence is people stop caring as well It has become very very hard to get a user's attention in WP admin When you gamble on and I'm saying that word now user attention, you can only lose and everyone loses with you Being bombarded with dozens of messages from dozens of plug-in people learn quickly not to give a shit Hence even critical critical messages get overlooked stuff breaks and the drama is on Losing a reputation is incredibly easy these days when you run a business based on a WordPress plugin Now plugins and what they do to WP admin or not in terms of UI are absolutely Significant for the interactive experience people have with WordPress as a CMS To a great extent WordPress is what it is because of plugins It is what it is because of you the people who make plugins you bring every possible and impossible functionality from this world In the next into WordPress Many enhancements of WordPress start out as a plug-in and if you the plug-in creators in this community Won't make an effort to keep WP admin neat and clean and usable for the people who use your products will who will There will always be jerks, of course, but my question today is why do even the well-meaning among plug-in providers? Seem to struggle with core concepts of basic interaction design more often than rarely Now to answer that question. Let me fall back on the good old tradition of mind reading for a moment I've been trained as a mind reader by an old Apache tracker That's a native American not a server too So while I'm up here speaking I've been reading all of her minds first of all you think you know WP admin inside out Or some of you may think that but do you really? Unless you check in on customer systems regularly chances are you develop in a standardized environment that has little to do With what WP admin looks like out there in the wild And secondly many of you develop your plugins as if it is the only one people are ever going to install It's not They probably have Yoast and Jetpack Increasingly WooCommerce some sort of security berserk and even want more than one of those a caching solution a page builder and One of the other megaton of sliders custom post times add integrations tracking scripts social pluckets form builders Ecommerce extensions and shortcut generators. You might want to take into consideration that WP admin is not your home It is a shared apartment And you have little to no control over the number of people you will have to live with Nor whether you get the king-size bed or that met underneath the kitchen table Thirdly some of you still let yourself get away with the assumption that people are okay figuring out how stuff works once they activate your plug-in They are not In 2016 people don't figure out how stuff works anymore people expect stuff to figure out itself so they can just go ahead and use it They may find your settings page because you place it in that top Level menu item and then you bumped up its priorities, so it'll appear even above jetpack, but what man These days people expect the user interface to really talk to them and let them know what they can do and not Apps on your phone do that all the time great web applications do it all the time Do we really think we are gonna get away with WordPress plugins just throwing the settings page into the left side menu and calling it a day Human beings and their interactions with user interfaces are subject to studies and incredible marketing budgets Let's break it down to common sense here people interact with people When a human interacts with the user interface on their computer screen What they really do most of the time is trying to figure out the thinking of another human or groups of human The ones who build that interface and to try to anticipate the thinking of the very person who's now trying to make sense of their Thinking in order to use their creation effectively. It's a complicated mess, but it can become the most beautiful thing When we manage to create a state of understanding and agreement on both sides of the computer screen all the way through time and space We all know that feeling When we see something working on the screen and we suddenly realize hey Somebody took care of me When they created that thing somebody spent time and effort in the past to make my life easier today. Wow That is a wonderful feeling, isn't it? That state of understanding and agreement is someone the holy grail you want to reach as a plugin developer And before we finally dive into some specific examples, let's take another quick look at caring in general There is a reason why I picked the term caring over UX buzzwords like empathy or just recently compassion and I hope you really Visited that talk this morning from Morton right there about empathy If not, I highly recommend you look it up on where Pustui once it's published Because he did away with all the buzzwords thing and just talked about empathy Not to care is a verb. It is a do word You can excuse yourself that you just don't have enough empathy or you may tell yourself that you just aren't that compassionate all the time You have no excuse when you don't care insult is implicit Not to care means not given hack. It's a synonym for consciously chosen ignorance Caring is one of those things you either do or you don't like picking up that piece of paper There's no way to pick that up just a little. He either pick it up or you don't There's no way of wanting to care Your inner attitude is irrelevant until it shows outside of yourself by evidence of your actions You don't care until you do Now I'm sure all of your developers out there do care about the experience people have with your plug-in and I'm sure it's awesome But here's some food for thought How much of that ladies newsstand would exist without the post office How much of your plug-in would exist without WordPress how much of your plugins your eye would exist without WP admin? How much of awesome will be left for your plug-in when the overall experience a person has with WP admin becomes annoying or even painful? Do you care about the experience people have with WordPress? Caring through plug-in your eye clink can include the same sort of small simple acts of human kindness that I was blessed to Experience in that post office back in Sofia And the good news is WordPress offers plenty of opportunity throughout the eight states of the plug-in Lifecycle for you to make WP admin an even nicer experience In case you never thought about the plug-in lifecycle before here it is Search install activate configure operate update deactivate delete Got it again Search install activate configure operate update deactivate delete Each of these states usually invokes or implies certain interactions between a user interface within WP admin and a human Interactions that you can take care of proactively Just like that lady from the newsstand in that post office as a local in WP admin You would basically make it your responsibility that a person gets along well You don't want to take them on a sightseeing tour through all of WP admin Of course, it's theirs. You're the new kid on their block You do want to make sure though that they find their way around in terms of using your plug-in When they search for a solution to their problem give them a meaningful description in their search results Your plug-in short description is not the place for generic superlatives the best the most the greatest the easiest Those are not descriptions people would draw any value from for their decision-making Besides you're setting yourself up for failure. It's incredibly easy to fail being the whatever's Write your short description as if you were composing a good tweet Say what your plug-in does and why people would love it and a hundred forty characters and be a little entertaining at the same time There isn't anything for you to do during installation what this takes care of that But once the person does activate your plug-in, that's when you can store score with an excellent first impression Be nice and say hi Give them a clue of what to do next Take them on a quick tour and show them around but make sure you keep them in control over their space They should be able to dismiss that tour for everyone forever Or have it pop up again later if they want If your plug-in has a great deal of settings to configure consider providing some sort of guidance through the initial process Where press itself has a pretty neat setup wizard who commerce has a great one. Could your plug-in use one? If it require if it requires certain setting to be made before a person will be able to use it a quick and decent wizard We'll take that person by the hand and guide them along. Oh, yeah, and that that undo link for safe setting is so annoying said no use and never Once a person has configured your plug-in to run on their website The only thing they would expect from it is that it keeps operating smoothly That is a fair expectation You wouldn't expect your car to display car manufacturer Advertising on the windshield every thousand kilometers or so so don't have your plug-in do that If you think you need other people's WP admin to market your product then at least be creative about it Make your upsell a feature instead of contributing to notice fatigue Create an eye catcher on your settings page that will entertain and provide value and of course keep those Agencies and freelancers in mind who would desperately want a paid version of your plug-in Where upsells will not be displayed for their clients Maybe white label or something now you get a chance to use To get user attention in WP admin about three times a year at least Every time WordPress issues a major core update you can and should run at least a compatibility update to let people know Your plug-in has been tested and will operate smoothly with the new core version That's the time for you to show that you care for plug-in UI Don't just fart that admin notice into people's faces together with the other five admin notices in the top 700 pixels of WP admin Make your update a feature to like show that you care for your people's peace of mind Allowing you to enter their website and perform an update is an incredibly vulnerable moment for most people Have your plug-in automatically detect and solve as many potential issues as possible Carry means to protect your kin Don't let them click that update button and take their chances whether the website is going to survive or not Plug-in authors gambling on system sanity doing the update process contribute to serious problem in WordPress Which is update paranoia as a plug-in developer You want people to update in order for you to be able to keep marketing to them So there's your incentive to make trip assure your update won't break their site And in case it does provide means of immediate crisis management and support It may only be another complaining user to you, but in fact, there are real people in real fear and pain Breeze, that's a good idea In case a person keeps your plug-in deactivated for longer and you have the chance learning about it a polite message in the inbox might make sense People don't always have the nerve to pull up your support page and post their problem Proactively approaching them when your plug-in has been deactivated longer than a week a week can start the support process on your end And may help you can win a customer back Better make clear though that this is solely out of concern for you users needs not for your marketing When your plug-in gets deleted from WP admin the expectation is clearly that it gets deleted delete it as in wiped out completely Files gone options gone custom tables so gone Don't fall trapped to the assumption It wouldn't hurt if a person installed your plug-in again after they deleted it and all their settings would just magically reappear that magic is reserved for Deactivation if you absolutely think your users would love to keep your custom tables and options in their database after deletion Put them in control and make total deletion transparently optional right before the activation maybe So there's lots of opportunity for plug-in developers to really care It may sound like a lot of work But another part of the good news is there are no wheels to reinvent here. Just look around and learn from the best There are plenty of examples of great interactions design out there pretty much all you have to do is explore them play with them Determine how those products apply caring as a design principle coach your own Interactional features into your plug-in and eventually build your reputation as the plug-in provider who whose UI in WP admin clearly shows they care WordPress has become a mature platform for better and for worse WP admin is and will be open for you to create plug-in user interfaces with It is your choice whether your plug-in will make WordPress look pretty or old In any case whether you like it or not your plug-in is not a separate entity it is part of a community of components and Actively or passively it will contribute to the way people perceive WordPress as a whole Think about that for a while and come to your own conclusions Hopefully you find caring the coolest thing you've seen anyone do including yourself The title of that talk is quoted from a peanuts cartoon. I saw on the tweet Thanks to Charles and Charles and the unknown person who put this on the web first whoever that is My name is Casper Hueminger. I'm a plug-and-support agent at WP media The people will build plugins like WP rocket imagine fine sequel press and I show care to answer your questions here Or at the happiness bar