To change things up, I tested a different set of scenarios this morning. I asked the user to add:
- A regular post
- A post with a gallery
- An audio MP3
- A video from Vimeo
You can download the video here.
My observations:
Step 1: Login
No problems.
Step 2: Preview your blog
No problems.
Step 3: Add text post
1:25 – I said “enter the description of “welcome to my blog” – and she didn’t make the connection that I wanted her to add it to the editor (that’s my bad).
Step 4: Where would you click
No problems. She correctly chose “Media Library”.
Step 5: Add gallery post
4:25 – User was confused – thought she’d see the images she just added in the editor (instead the generic gallery camera block was there). So, she tried to go through the process again.
5:18 – “Okay, so I don’t feel like it inserted it, cause it doesn’t show the media”.
5:50 – She click away to the media library, and tries to add the images in the media library to a gallery (we’ve seen this before with one of the other users).
6:45 – She decides to publish it anyway, and view what it looks like.
Step 6: Add Audio post
7:10 – When asked to add a MP3 file to a post (from a URL I gave her), she clicked the “Add Media” button, then clicked “Embed From URL”, and pasted in the URL. When she pasted in the URL, it said http://http://URL.mp3 (with 2 http://’s).
Step 7: Add Video post
8:04 – When asked to embed a video from a URL, she clicked the “Add Media” button and used “Embed From URL” to paste the link.
Step 8: Preview your blog
No problems.
Summary
- This user was confused that she didn’t visually see the gallery images that she had added to the post. If we can’t show a preview of the actual images, could we add a one line description like, “Your gallery images will be shown here”, either just above or just below the camera icon?
- Are we confusing users by having a top level link called “Media Library” in addition to the new media modal “Media Library” link? This is the second time I’ve seen a user resort to clicking on the main left nav “Media Library” link when trying to figure out an issue within a specific post.
- If the user pastes a full URL into the “Embed From URL” box, and “http://http://” results, can we just auto-remove the extra http:// with JS?
- When I asked her to embed a video from a URL, she clicked the “Add Media” button, and tried to embed the Vimeo video URL through “Embed From URL”. I think that’s pretty logical seeing as a video is “media”. How difficult would it be to parse “Embed From URL” for the video embed URL’s, and then treat them different (so that instead of a link being added, the video embed magically happens for them)?