Community Feedback on EE2 Compiled
The vote is in and…okay actually CCO of EllisLab James Mathias has prioritized (by frequency of request) and listed out what kind of changes the community is asking for.
Topping the list for interface changes is “more consistency across the CP.” For user experience changes, the most requested was “Main Navigational repair and rethink.” For feature requests, the top feature is a “Customizable homepage” (wow, really?).
Finally, there were two requests or suggestions for process improvement and those were “user testing” and “Feature/feedback voting.” I think the beta releases we’ve seen should help with the former and the blog post and follow-up by James is hopefully a sign of the latter.
Speaking of voting. James hopes to set up a voting system for the feedback he compiled so he can confirm that his priority list is correct. I hope we see that soon, as I think it’s a great step.
Let’s be honest: the EE2 control panel needs a lot of work and everyone has their own priorities. Some think it needs to step away from the jQuery buffet, others can’t stand the design and some others wish so much of it wasn’t just copied from the previous version of EE. Whatever camp you’re in, I think we can all agree that this public feedback-gathering, list-making and (hopefully soon to come) voting is a step in the right direction.
Read James’ entire blog post: Feedback Compiled
Posted on Jun 15, 2011 by Ryan Irelan
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Steven — 00:14 on 06.16.2011
I hope they sort out the laggy edit page. If you click on a link too soon you get a new Entry page. Clients find this extremely annoying!
Ryan Irelan — 00:18 on 06.16.2011
That’s part of the overuse of jQuery, I think. The edit listing page should be fast and reliable.
Kristen grote — 00:24 on 06.16.2011
Frankly, I’m a little skeptical of those results (only one week? only 18 emails?). I didn’t even know he had asked for improvement suggestions in the first place.
Many of the items in that list seem both impossibly vague and deal with tiny, nit-picky issues. Improve the button styles? Give me a break.
I fear that these kinds of small beans complaints are drawing EllisLab’s attention away from the more fundamental fixes that should be addressed (like Brandon Kelly’s proposed custom field model). Seems to me they should take a larger sampling and advertise it better next time.
Derek Hogue — 09:49 on 06.16.2011
Personally, I was hoping that EllisLabs’ new hire would be someone who had a strong, opinionated design vision for EE, driven by a well-cultivated sense of user behaviour, good design patterns and a keen visual aesthetic.
A voting system for a laundry list of changes doesn’t totally inspire confidence (when was the last time Apple opened up voting for what you’d like to see next the next version of an OS?), but I certainly do hope to be proved wrong. It’s early days.
Ryan Irelan — 10:01 on 06.16.2011
Let’s be fair here. EllisLab gets crap from the community when they’re not transparent enough and don’t communicate/take feedback. And when they do things like this they also get crap.
That seems like a tough situation to be in…
Derek Hogue — 10:08 on 06.16.2011
I would argue that there’s a difference between transparency (when can we expect new builds? when will bugs be fixed? are you hearing our concerns?) - which EL have vastly improved on the past year - and product design/direction.
I’m not giving them crap, I’m just stating what I think is a fair point, borne out by experience - it’s not often true that the best design decisions come from asking everyone what they think.
I’m excited that James is working on this full-time, and I’m sure he will do great things for EE.
Kristen Grote — 11:00 on 06.16.2011
My hope is that they’re working closely with the developer network and the big boys in the field like Ryan who are in the EE trenches on a regular basis. Those are the folks who are going to have the most valuable feedback, not the weekend warriors who are still pining away for Wordpress. Ryan - have you had any one-on-one time with EllisLab regarding your feedback?
runningwithscissors — 12:10 on 06.16.2011
i agree, crowd sourcing is not the way to go on something like this. hire experts and talk to experts.