(WUWT readers, please excuse this distraction while I holler at WUWT’s hosting provider, wordpress.com. As Willis would say, “my blood is mightily angrified”.)
I have generally been supportive of most wordpress.com upgrades, for example the recent upgrade to allow the top editor bar to float with scrolling is a HUGE time saver.
Unfortunately, the new Beep Beep Boop “upgrade” is a crash-and-burn moment in user interface design.
Top 10 reasons the new WordPress Beep Boop Boob editor is a stunning failure.
1. It turns a process that used to take 1-2 seconds into something that takes several seconds, sometimes as long as 30 seconds. My timing this morning was 17 seconds to get the create a new post dialog. A second attempt took 32 seconds after I cleared the crash dialog (see below).
2. It is visually annoying. It makes me want to scream at the screen while it takes all those extra seconds to load, seen below.
The reason for the “beep beep boop” is that whoever programed it, realized it takes longer, and they needed something to let the end user know the program was doing something. Classic bloatware failure.
3. It makes wordpress.com seem juvenilized.
4. It is inconsistent with the rest of the wp.com user experience. For example, no “beep boop” appears when you try to create a new page.
5. It presents a smaller editor than we used to get, which isn’t fully representative of the CSS settings for width of your theme.
6. It was foisted on us with no warning. And this is the thing I hate the most, many of these “upgrades” just appear overnight. Microsoft learned this lesson of just foisting unwanted upgrades on end users without notice and allows you to opt-out. You should learn this lesson too. New is not always better.
7. It crashes:
8. The “Welcome to an easier way to create on WordPress.com! Missing the old editor? No worries, just switch to classic mode. “ feature doesn’t seem to “stick”.
9. It comes up in text editor mode, more work, more wait to switch to visual editor mode.
10. Whenever I accidentally stumble on it now, I realize my mistake and back out of it, and find the correct link to bring up the real editor. When users actively work to avoid using a new piece of software, because it wastes time, annoys them, and crashes, you know you have a MEGAFAIL on your hands.
Whoever came up with this idea, along with the person who approved implementing it deserves a virtual 2×4 upside the head to knock some sense into them.
For me, it may be the tipping point to abandon wordpress.com and go to a paid service where I at least can control my own user experience by choosing not to install inane upgrades.
UPDATE 8/27/14 :
WordPress seemed oblivious, but I and many others continued to bombard them with emails, posts, phone calls, and anything we could do to tell them how bad this change was.
Today, all of the sudden, things were back to normal, and this appeared above the editor page:
That “new and improved posting experience” aka the “beep boop” editor, is corp-speak for “we took this turkey out back and shot it in the head”.
Two thoughts:
1. Users win. Lesson to WordPress – trust your users.
2. Thank you WordPress for finally seeing the light
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Anthony, you are totally correct on two counts:
1. Putting the free classic shell (classicShell.net) onto Windows 8 gets you the best of both worlds: the great features of Windows 8 (like the fast boots) and the Desktop UI of Windows 7. (Tiles are for Tablets). The millions of downloads of this great add-on should send a clear message to Redmond.
2. The change-for-the-sake-of-change has got to stop, which is particularly bad on the Web. I hope some project managers read your thread and realize that the cost of wholesale replacement in terms of bugs and re-education is staggering, and needs to be considered more carefully.
(Thanks for you blog; I read it every few days)
Yes I find it very annoying too and go into dashboard-posts-add new to write all my posts. I dont like the new beep beep boop way of creating a new post at all, and its not because I’m resistant to change… I can cotton onto improvements pretty quickly, like everyone else. And that’s the point… it’s NOT an improvement! Why fix something that isnt broken?
These have got to be the same people who keep “improving” Yahoo’s email.
Having worked in a number of corporate IT environments where “productivity” tools were dropped on us like pianos from a high rise by central planners housed in a dome of clue-lessness, forcing us to deal with / develop work-arounds for said dome of clue-lessness tools, I came to understand this approach to software development as:
Encouraging innovation by getting in your way.
A software flame war on WUWT! I love it!
Anyway, I saw a few GNU/Linux fans out there. That’s good. I run Debian.
It’s also true that a very large proportion of the young ‘tech’ crowd are simultaneously liberal left wing and CAGW proponents AND freeium open source advocates – as opposed to FOSS [free and open source] – who favor small screen touch devices to real computers as well as everything ‘easier’ and shiny new rather than decently written and working software. It’s a rather strange set of belief systems strung together. I have several of these individuals as friends, and it’s very frustrating. In their world, CAGW isn’t about ‘the facts.’ It’s about the good feeling of doing something for ‘mother nature.’ It’s about post normal science. And most of them are full believers in CAGW and that science is too exclusive and needs to stop telling them what to do… Very hard to convince someone like that about the insanity of the climate alarmism nonsense.
Re Zorin: Will it run on Macs? (Intel Macs, I assume.)
/Mr Lynn
I pay for wordpress.com – doesn’t give me control. (Isn’t it more the other way round, if you run your own install, you have control? Wish I had the time).
L. E. Joiner asked @August 24, 2014 at 7:27 pm;
Zorin is a mainstream, ordinary Linux, and ‘linux on mac’ is a common Linux-community topic and rich search-term. I think it’s a normal thing/expectation to run the Linux OS on Mac/Apple computers. Hope it goes good for you! – Ted
Beta Blocker: the problem with Windows XP is security – v 7 is better, v8 has a very good feature added, and XP cannot run more security versions of MSIE.