Make Yourself Heard With The WordPress Editor Experience Survey
If you’re a regular user of the WordPress editor interface, you might want to make your thoughts known by completing the Editor Experience Survey.
The survey, part of the WordPress project’s attempt to understand how WordPress bloggers and professionals use the tools WordPress provides shouldn’t take more than a few minutes to complete and will provide valuable information WordPress’ developers can use to focus their efforts as work continues to improve the editing experience.
The WordPress team doesn’t collect data from self-hosted WordPress sites, so it’s hard for them to know what users really want. Millions of people use WordPress every day, but without input, developers are working in the dark. Most WordPress users spend the majority of their time with WordPress using the editor. That’s not the case for WordPress developers and professionals, so it’s difficult for them to assess the pain points and needs of professional writers and bloggers.
As WordPress developer Morten Rand-Hendriksen pointed out a couple of months ago, there’s a considerable gap of knowledge and expectations between the average WordPress user and WordPress developers. The developers want to make the WordPress editor a world-class writing and publishing interface — it’s one of Matt Mullenweg’s focus areas for 2017. We’ve already seen some indication of where the editor is heading, but any extra information can only improve the final experience.
The survey includes questions about how WordPress users interact with the editor and which features they find useful, including whether they use the markup editor, which formatting features are useful, and whether the no-distraction interface is regularly used.
Of particular importance are questions concerning the accessibility of the WordPress editor. If you find that the WordPress editor doesn’t provide a positive experience when used with a screen reader or other assistive devices such as braille embossers, voice recognition programs, or screen enlargers, the WordPress team would love to hear from you.
It’s worth noting that the survey itself isn’t particularly friendly to those with accessibility issues, so Amanda Rush from the WordPress Accessibility team has written a blog post with some guidance for people with accessibility issues who want to complete the survey.
The team also wants to know about any plugins you install to change the functionality of the WordPress editor. Discovering how users modify the editor could give developers information they need to decide which feature to add (or to remove).
If you’re a regular user of the WordPress editor, I’d encourage you to take the time to add your two cents. In the absence of telemetry data showing real-world use, surveys of this type are hugely helpful to developers and designers. The results of the survey are likely to shape the future editing experience, so it’s well worth making your thoughts known.
