Publishing on WordPress.com

I’ve been on many teams here at a8c over the past 6-or-so years. Switching teams regularly has given me a chance to understand many of the pieces and people that make WordPress an amazing tool. I’ve recently switched again, joining a brand new team lovingly named Link, after Nintendo’s classic Zelda series of video games.

Link is a design and research team working with two development teams within the Delta division. Link’s focus is on the experience of key user flows, which may cover any number of other features or screens. It’s a tough job, and we’re just getting started.

See your new post

One of the early projects we’re working on is improving the publishing experience on WordPress.com. Right now, publishing a blog post looks a little like this:

It’s straightforward, and simple. But it can be better. One common thing that people want to do after publishing is to see the thing they published. We started by exploring some ideas for how to show the user their new post (or page) immediately after it’s published.

Publish confirmation

Along with showing you your new post, we’ve heard that publishing a post can be stressful. It’s not always clear whats about to happen when you publish. One idea that came up in our early feedback was a pre-publishing confirmation step.

Adding a confirmation step will hopefully reduce some of the stress associated with publishing. Our initial designs include the publishing date (which allows for scheduling) and privacy settings (here be dragons). We’re looking at adding more options like tags, and of course adding a setting to disable the confirmation for those who find it obnoxious.

The confirmation opens up potential for stopping some problems before they happen. We can show warnings for things like broken links or a missing title. This would also be a great time to suggest  adding tags and a featured image.

If you’ve connected to Twitter or Facebook (or any one of the other services we support), its not always clear that publishing will automatically share your post to these services. The confirmation step is the perfect time to review your sharing options, before you accidentally share a post to the wrong service. We’re exploring adding a way to preview your shared posts before they end up on Twitter or Facebook, catching any embarrassing typos before others see them.

We continue to work on this design, and hope to have the confirmation implemented and ready for more testing in the coming weeks.