Navigation block usability study insights

General insights

  • Some people are prone to clicking and exploring, some are more hesitant (this seems to correlate to age/technical experience to some degree
  • A lot of people’s “advice to WordPress” is to make it simpler and more accessible for beginners
  • Most of them doesn’t realise that they are on edit mode
  • Jargon and vocabulary present an ongoing challenge—they end up sneaking into the interface

Terminology

  • Most people used “menu” for the navigation menu
  • Dropdown” seemed to be commonly used for sub-menus
  • Menu items didn’t have a clear name, but “menu item” was used frequently

Prototype

  • Some people were confused by the flexibility of the “search or paste a link” input field (especially those not familiar with Gutenberg)
  • People don’t tend to notice the snackbar notification upon creating a menu (may be a product of the prototype)
  • People seemed to really respond to the visual nature of being able to build a menu this way, even if they were already comfortable with the WordPress Way
  • Some people tried to reorder menu items dragging or at least expects to, the functionality is not present due to prototype limitations.
  • The “add menu item” interface was confusing for some. This may be a product of the prototype—it might be clearer on their own sites, where they’d recognise the content.
  • People immediately opened the drop-down once a menu item had been created—this seemed to be a very natural place for more options.
  • Deleting was super easy for everyone.
  • Several users (2?) expected there to be an interstitial step between adding a menu block and having a menu. 
  • Most people understood renaming an item by directly editing the label, but not all

Recommendations for iteration

See +Nav menu prototype updates