Thread

@grrramps see my post immediately before yours. Wordpress, Django, Symphony, etc. all have superior UI.

Thjs is where we disagree. WP is nice, yes, but superior? In what ways? WP does not do half of what’s in EE. It’s attractive but simplistic at best. Drupal is a mess. Newer version of Joomla is an improvement, but very limited in scope. Django and Symphony suffer from simplicity (not near the options of EE).

Personally I would have created an extremely plain, simple UI that can then be easily customized to some degree for basic use - similar functionality to Basecamp (not to say that I think the Basecamp UI is that nice, but the flexibility is nice and would suit most peoples’ needs).

It’s just so easy to say, “I don’t like that” but without providing qualifying guidance as to what’s wrong, why it’s wrong, and, importantly, how it could or should be made better (and with a definition of what better is).

Add the same kind of EE complexity to other CMS CPs and you’ll see the problem. There’s just an awful lot going on in EE’s CP. That said, we could do without some of the Javascript eye candy. It’s more annoying than efficient or effective (not to mention the performance hits on some servers).

Well, EE 2.0 is presented as a beta, and I think that’s what it is, no more no less. (uhm, except a fee bucks, maybe 😉

On my safari (Version 4.0.5) the control panel is really quirky and I dont feel like giving that to my client.

After a two days of work on the project, I’m safely switching back to the good old 1.6.8.
I just wish it could make a clean empty install like EE 2.0 did !

I’d like to add one thing:

Veerle’s design of the 2.0 CP is great, it’s beautyfull. It’s just that the user experience is terrible.

I’ve got that white shirt, my wife says I look great in.
it scrapes me…

I’m going to weigh in here because this is something I’ve been discussing with other EE developers in private. This might come across as a rant and quite straight up, but please just take it as my opinion and me venting my frustration.

As far as I’m concerned something went horribly wrong with 2.0’s CP, I’m not sure where, but it did. It feels rushed, unpolished and the usability is just poor. It’s not easy to navigate (for general users) and it’s consistently slow and buggy. Now I have a massive amount of respect for EllisLab, but I would love to see Veerle’s designs to see if they were faithfully implemented because the current incarnation feels like a developer was provided a design, didn’t really craft the implementation and then had to make up the rest of the templates as they were going.

I also saw someone else mention in this thread that they were ashamed to show the CP to clients, and I agree. I generally apologise to clients when they first see the CP because it’s simply not up to scratch, no matter how you cut it. Wordpress might be less complex but that’s no excuse for ExpressionEngine, shouldn’t we be trying to do better, not just settling for ‘we’re better than most’? — I know that’s not how I run my business.

Don’t get me wrong, I know a lot of time and effort went into EE2, but I feel that overall the CP is letting it down. I want to be proud when showing clients the CP, not apologising because it’s a bit ugly and clunky. I believe the CP needs a lot of TLC from a IA, Design and Front-End professionals to get it to a point where it’s something to be proud of, not something we’re making excuses for.

This is the third of fourth time rewriting this. My thoughts on the new CP kind of fall all over the place, so I’m not really sure what direction to go to.

On one hand, the new additions presented in the CP have eased my qualms of making the switch from EE 1.x to 2.x. I stalled on jumping to 2.x for months because I had this thought that without all the add-ons being ported over, it was simply unusable. Then I realized most of the add-ons I do install on 1.x are mostly Control Panel usability enhancements.

On the other hand, the Control Panel feels a bit unfinished. There’s some heavy uses of jQuery in some areas where in other areas, it seems strangely barren. It’s just odd to me how some areas support drag and drop whereas in other areas, it requires a reload. One other thing I don’t like is the menu behavior — I like how EE CP 1.x used hover states to drop the menus rather than a click. It’s all about user experience in this sense, and one click might seem like nothing, but it really kills the flow of motion. I suppose I can make do without the fuchsia/red as in the default theme as well—would prefer something a tad more neutral that led the eyes better.

Time for me to add some thoughts after picking up 2.0x and playing some more:

1. CP themes general
The Default and Fruit themes feel very “clunky”, the Corporate theme I think is far better, probably because it’s a bit more simplistic. Corporate theme pages also seems to be a lot faster/smoother that the other two.

2. CP themes usability
My main concern is the inconsistant way that links are presented. Some are underlined, others are not. Take text links in My Account - underlined in Fruit, not underlined in Default/Corporate. Link colours and weight also vary from place to place and theme to theme for no apparent reason.

“Button” style links also seem to be inconsistant, mainly using various colours that seem to be based on what container they’re in rather than the type of action they perform.

Main nav dropdowns should be on hover to reduce clicks.

With respect to Veerle I do think that a specialist UI designer would have produced something that’s universally more usable and accessible focussing on ease of use rather than eye candy.

3. CP Jquery and all that
I’ve noticed an improvement between releases so things are on the right track. However effects do still feel delayed sometimes, particularly when animation occurs on opening a container. This begs the question as to whether the animated open/close is really needed - why not just have instant open/close without the animation? Less script to load/process and an instant response.

PS - it would be nice to have a bare bones theme that stripped out all the eye candy, no background images/gradients, probably some icons where absolutely needed but the rest pure CSS with Jquery.

I know we’re still in beta, but it is a late beta. I have to agree with the comments regarding the feeling of incompleteness. Ben Lilley kinda nailed it in his comment above: “...the current incarnation feels like a developer was provided a design, didn’t really craft the implementation and then had to make up the rest of the templates as they were going.”

I also get the overriding feeling that the people building this are not checking it in Safari, but then I know that probably isn’t the case. Respect to all the hard work and positive energy to the teams as they work to complete things - but after waiting this long I think my expectations for fit and finish were a few marks higher. Not something I would feel great about showing a client at this stage. I’ve taken some screenshots and would love to share them and illustrate my point, but it’s probably in violation of the beta’s terms (though I haven’t checked).

One constructive point, and it might seem like a small one, but the buttons across all of the admin interface don’t invite clicking/pressing, or provide good feedback in my opinion. I don’t know if you’d be better off with unstyled, native OS buttons, or if you can style your wait out of it (probably). But something about the gradients make them sink in the page - they don’t feel tactile,... as if they were just text links with rounded corners and gradients applied to them. Perhaps they are.

Having actually USED EE2 now for several weeks, I’d like to temper my previous post with the benefit of some new insight. I’d say about 40% of my negative reaction to the new interface was not deserved, was the normal reaction to new-ness and the frustration of not being able to find things. Obviously, committing to use a system forces you to experience it another way. I recommend that anyone ready to flame EE2 based on the visual design of the CP actually spend a week using it first. Not saying that will quell ALL of your concerns, but it could help give you another perspective.

There are also many amazing aspects of the new EE which will save time and help me to work better. Publish page customization is amazing - is it perfect? No. But it’s such a great start - in another year (or two) I am confident it will be even better. Now that Playa and Matrix are EE2 ready, the whole package has become very attractive. (indeed, Brandon’s work is some of the best UI you’ll come across)

Overall, I am still concerned about the lack of attention to detail in the UI of the control panel in many places. To everyone who says “go fix it with your own theme”, I’ve also expressed some concern about the viability of that idea in this post. Things actually look so disorganized on that front that I am holding off on building a CP theme - not because I couldn’t wrangle it together, but because it seems like a good idea to me that large chunks of the default CP CSS be rewritten and reorganized entirely before launch. In other words, the effort might be wasted.

@Pascal I’m concerned about the idea that you guys are using some sort of scripting to create rounded corners, instead of just relying on progressive enhancement with CSS3 on modern browsers. As many have pointed out, the interface does feel sluggish in places, and adding scripting on top of that for the sake of some rounded corners seems like a mistake.

Sorry, I know this is kind of off-topic, but it’s a passion of mine. 😊

I’d also like to chime in on the idea to “go fix X with your own theme”. I think a good deal of us use (and pay for) ExpressionEngine because it’s a stable, professional platform. It feels like it to its core, and the control panel is a huge part of that. While many of us might be judging these changes too harshly based on beta code, it would go a long way to making me feel better if I knew that the themes are receiving fixes, polish and attention for the official launch. I do want to tinker with the control panel theme because it’s fun, and I’m an anal bastard, but the idea that I might HAVE to really sours me on the transition.

There are a lot of huge improvements in EE2, a lot of big changes to get used to, and I think EllisLab has done a great job overall. Pink as a standard highlight color is one of the most curious choices I’ve encountered, however. 😉