When a minimalistic, ‘block’ redesign highly reduces productivity and decreases utility

Welcome to the new Wordpress 5 upgrade

To long-time Wordpress classic editor users (there are millions of us, by the way) the new WordPress 5 upgrade is one of the most ridiculous “upgrades” it ever had — thanks to its new and unintuitively-designed block editor.

The new block editor, designed to reduce clutter / be minimalistic, is supposed to be a highlight of this upgrade. However, long-time wordpress users and power editors swear that this new block editor has been unintuitive redesigned.

Its redesigned user interface basically hides the most commonly-used functions of a Wordpress power user/editor. For example, power editors like us now would need to do 2 clicks each to each of this commonly-used function:

• set the featured image
• set / edit the URL slug
• select post status / edit publishing date
• select category or categories which the post belongs to

whereas before these options were all unhidden, all available right there, for us to use without needing to look for them and click to expand the dropdowns.

Now it will take an editor double the number of clicks at the minimum to set all those (plus the lead time of trying to figure our where they are located because they are intelligently hidden).

The Wordpress 5 update features the new unintuitive block editor interface

Perhaps their goal was to get new, non-power users (to be blunt, a simple word — dummies) to start using Wordpress, but they could have done this by offering the user to choose whether they want to use the new block editor, or to use the Classic Editor.

Additionally they should have involved a person who really uses Wordpress as part of the redesign team. The new designer who thought of this user interface is clearly not a wordpress power user (who ironically should not have designed the editor screen in the first place!).

Now this… WORD

2 million users have installed the Classic Editor as a plugin.

In fact, WordPress should see how many users are actually installing the Classic Editor as a plugin. The fact that over 2 million needed to do this means is a clear evidence they have done something terribly unuseful.

We don’t want it pretty, we need it functional.

https://twitter.com/cherylfuerte/status/1080849508206968837?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E1080849508206968837%7Ctwgr%5E%7Ctwcon%5Es1_&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Fluvkosiinday.com%2Funhelpfulblog%2Fthe-unhelpful-wordpress-5-upgrade%2F

Originally published at https://luvkosiinday.com on January 3, 2019.