This week I did not make any big sweeping changes, just a few smaller but still important ones.

I went back to making the first thing on the homepage an overview of the blog instead of the blog post.I also considered making the “new blog post” a dropdown but that might take quite a bit of time with my Axure skills.

However the problem is it is difficult to predict people’s workflows. For instance, many more experienced users won’t use the homepage at all to create a blog post draft, they will go into the “Posts” menu because they feel it is more trustworthy. It is still nice to keep the option to have that quick draft though so that’s why I put it after everything.

I also went back in this blog to revisit some of the more abstract changes I wanted to make to WordPress:

• Autosave for drafts (Like Google Drive)
• Confirming leaving the page if there are unsaved changes
• 1 column/2 column layouts
• “Distraction Free Writing” (Was I the only one who didn’t know about this?)
• This dude who redesigned google news.
• How to apply the simplicity of the WordPress mobile app in my desktop redesign.

Another thing I was thinking of integrating was a true WYSIWYG editor, so getting on the Live site and making text edits there. This and the list above is what I have to figure out to convey. The other part of this is that I wanted to make a short video with screenshots and some of the user testing videos I made. This is something I will start putting together this week and trying out in iMovie. I will also start putting together a script that will be read over the video.

After a slightly uninspiring week, I did another first-click user test. The person I tested showed me the new WordPress style (below). It is definitely more clean and modern but not necessarily easier to navigate. In some ways, it may even be more difficult. But I decided to take to clean parts of this new WordPress design and combine it with the original restructure I had made.

I also changed the home page and made it more focused on creating a new blog post. I was also considering combining the “Menu” and “Pages” items since those will always be in one way or another linked. Here is my newest version:

Next week, I want to work even more on the homepage and prioritize the most important sections.

So far I have rough drafts of three pages prototyped with Axure. Here is the link to the live prototype.

The Home Page:

Add a new blog post:

Add a new page:

These pages are all linked up on the homepage main menu. I will add more styling to these pages later, after a few more iterations of user testing and redesigns. I will make a copy of these pages so that I can show my process at the end.

I have been slightly concerned with what the deliverables will look like. At first, I thought the prototype would be the deliverable. However, at a glance, my redesign will not look dramatically different since I am not doing styling. Therefore, I have been toying with the idea of make a short video going through my process and iterations. This will be simple enough to do in iMovie hopefully. This way, I can more quickly communicate what changes I made. This will also make it easier to call out certain features that would be harder to convey with prototyping. “Automatic Saving” like in google docs, for one, and editing posts in the live view of the site.