Earlier this week, a few of us met to discuss the design direction of the Plugin Directory. Myself, @michael-arestad, @hugobaeta, @melchoyce, @helen, and @samuelsidler looked at the current directory and challenged ourselves to look at it from a fresh perspective, exploring flows, UI, and content. The overall goal was to set a direction for the design.
After a couple days of whiteboard drawings, we’re a lot closer and I wanted to share some explorations with you.
Please note that the below explorations are wireframes and heavily subject to change. They’re only meant to give you an idea of the direction we’re looking at.
We discussed three views:
- The landing page (wordpress.org/plugins/)
- The Search results view
- The Single Plugin View
Plugins Landing page
Plugins Search Results
Plugins Single View
Some pictures of our whiteboards
On each view, here are some thoughts on the direction.
Plugins Landing page (/plugins/)
- The title block is much longer, with a more prominent search field at the top. Search is the primary action in the directory and we’re working to improve it.
- The addition of a slider for featured plugins… yes that’s not misspelled, I wrote “slider”. 😉
- Sectioned plugin blocks around various “filters” of plugins. As a sample, we used popular, trending, and beta, but these could be anything in the future.
- The “Developer Center” that currently exists becomes a small “Plugin Authors” callout at the bottom of the page since it’s not frequently used. We’d add other blocks (like the ones show) where relevant.
Plugins Search Results
- Search results maintain a similar style as the landing page.
- Search field remains prominent in the title block.
- In fact, when searching from the landing page, everything under the search box is replaced with results.
Plugins Single View
- Maintain a large plugin banner at top of the view.
- The plugin name will no longer be over the banner.
- Below the banner, we show the name of the plugin, author, and a Download button.
- The Translation Information displayed will note if a plugin is available in your language or, if not, allow you to click and see it on your localized site with a callout to begin a translation.
- Tabs are removed. Instead, content blocks act as accordions on the page, revealing information when a visitor clicks to know more. The main column holds the following information:
- Description
- Changelog
- Screenshots in the form of a gallery/slider (to be explored).
- FAQs – We debated this section a bit, but FAQs are still quite important, when they exist. Ideally, these could be added in the plugin author dashboard instead of the readme so the format is more consistent. If that happened, we could show a list of questions with accordion-like answers when clicked.
- Reviews – Becomes a section on this view where you can click to see more reviews.
- “Contribute” is the new “Developers” section. Here we’d show relevant developer information, contributors, a donate button, and all available translations. As we experiment, this may become another view similar to Reviews where you click to see more detailed information.
- Meanwhile, the sidebar remains, but becomes more condensed. In it, we show:
- Ratings – a break down by rating.
- Support – a “widget” that shows relevant support information and allows the visitor to click to enter the support forum.
- Active Installs
- Last Updated
- Category
- “Designed to work with” option, if relevant.
Overall, we worked hard to keep the most relevant information for visitors as information that’s important to plugin authors moves to the plugin admin dashboard.
Thoughts?
As a reminder these are wireframes to give you a general idea of the direction we’re heading.
What do you think about the direction? Are there things you think should be removed? Things that should be added to the main views? Leave your feedback in the comments.