This is a summary of a Hallway Hangout that was wrangled in the #fse-outreach-experiment channel as part of the FSE Outreach Program. Thank you to everyone who joined in! If you’re keen to join an effort like this in the future, please join the slack channel.
Attendance: @poena @paaljoachim @mkaz @annezazu @oglekler and Karl joined.
Video Recording:
Topics Covered
- We started off with a neat issue from Paal around adding the post/page title to the post editor‘s top bar to create a more consistent experience between the site editor and post editor for users.
- We talked about the saving flow and how it’s a key part to build trust with users exploring a new feature for the first time. Currently, it’s a bit confusing and not yet robust enough to be fully intuitive to use.
- We discussed how consistency across saving experiences will go a long way including having similar flows for saving individual block changes, a reusable block, a template, and more.
- We talked through the designs shared around saving drafts of changes along with scheduling changes. This could be a neat but complex feature to manage due to the multi-entity aspect of FSE.
- We talked about how it would be neat for there to be a “builder mode” where certain tool could be more visible when you’re in the process of active building vs maintaining. This is likely a role for a plugin to play in the future.
- While chatting about dismissing changes, Marcus brought up an interesting point around dismissing changes wondering aloud how often do people unselect changes? It would be neat to find comparison points.
- Paal shared a neat design he worked on where if someone unchecks/unselects changes, the save button changes to discard changes. This could be a neat way to act as a confirmation message for the user and a neat contextual nudge.
- We went through template editing and the recently merged PR allowing classic themes access to a blank template. Carolina shared that this is currently setup as being opt out for themers and that one can’t choose from an existing template yet (can only edit the current template or create a new one).
- As we were going through template editing, we paused to talk about how valuable a welcome guide will be at this stage. There is one in progress for the site editor that should cover this as it mentions if a user accesses site editing via editing a post.
- We chatted about the dynamic between editing one piece of your site vs the entire thing and how to add necessary friction to the experience. This included talking about the designs shared around clicking in to edit template parts.
Next Steps:
@annezazu reported a few bugs found and left a comment on an issue to pass along feedback from the group:
- Commented on an issue about adding post/pages to the navigation component to consider making adding pages/post more visible as it’s likely people will want to add more pages/posts than new templates or template parts.
- Opened an issue around hiding the preview button when going through the saving flow to match what’s done with the post editor.
- Opened an accessibility issue around the lack of focus on a saving prompt found by @poena.
- Opened an issue around the “apply” button appearing without making any changes after switching into template editing causing a dead end.