When it comes to establishing an online identity, our mind sticks to building visually appealing web designs. Put it simply, we have a tendency to believe the fact that we’ll fail to drive users’ attention, if we can’t deliver them innovation-driven and stirring designs. Though, this fact may seem true to some extent, however, achieving success in your online endeavor requires you to provide “rich user experience” (UX): more than just aesthetics.
So, rather than pouring in all your efforts into crafting stunning web designs, it would be better if you’ll work upon rendering a solution that deploys exemplary user experience, such as the WordPress dashboard.
The dashboard serves as the control panel for the WordPress admin panel. It is has been designed with attention to detail, and is a great inspiration for novice designers looking forward to delivering great UX. In this post, I’ll discuss about a few lessons that designers can learn from the WP dashboard:
Fluid, Responsive Layout
Any design having the ability to adapt to varied types of devices and platforms, can help you succeed as a designer. With the continuous growth in the number of modern devices and platforms, it becomes needful for us to shape our designs in a manner that help them adapt to different screen sizes and resolutions effortlessly. In fact, adaptability also plays a crucial role in terms of how you make arranging elements easier for the users as well as website admins.
If you’ll evaluate any website analytics report, you’ll most likely notice immense growth in the number of visits by mobile users. This clearly indicates, how important it has become to create a website that’s compatible with a diverse range of devices, for bringing a good amount of traffic from such sources. And failing to create a design that adapts easily to all major devices and platforms, will eventually result in high bounce (or website abandonment) rates. This further leads to a huge drop in traffic.
How WordPress Inspire Us to Introduce Adaptability?
Besides featuring a fluid layout, the WordPress dashboard takes adaptability a lot seriously. To better illustrate this fact, I’ve included a screenshot shown below that illustrates how well the WP dashboard adjusts according to the device it is being accessed on. When you are accessing the dashboard on your Smartphone, you can clearly see that none of the elements present on the desktop are hidden on your phone.
As you can see in the above screenshot, the WordPress dashboard screen is available in two different views: desktop view and mobile view.
Irrespective of whether you’re accessing the sidebar menu or any other elements visible on desktop versions, you’ll be able to view everything on your mobile device as well. In simple words, the dashboard will behave in the same manner whether it is being viewed on a desktop or a mobile device.
Applying the 2-Click Rule
We all love to save our efforts and time in every possible way we can. One such excellent way that helps cuts down the actions we need to perform is minimization of clicks. The less we click the more time and efforts we can save for ourselves, resulting in increased efficiency. Moreover, this even save us from the wrath of frustrated users that often complain about excessive clicking. This is where the 2-click rule comes in handy. The 2-click rule implies how web users can perform any action or access a piece of information, within 2 clicks of a button.
This is an excellent rule for the not-so-patient users, however, it’s pretty much irrelevant for the ones who’re willing to stay a little longer on a site than just a few seconds.
How WordPress Dashboard Inspire Us to Follow the 2-Click Rule?
WordPress dashboard is probably the best example demonstrating the 2-click rule. No matter, where you’re in the dashboard or whatever you wish to access on the dashboard, you can do so with only 2 clicks at the most. That has been possible, because of the strenuous WordPress developers put in while building the wireframe of the final dashboard.
For example, you can easily add a media file from the WP dashboard in just 2 clicks (as shown in the screenshot below).
Wrapping Up!
When creating website designs, we usually end up squandering lot of our valuable time and efforts in improving aesthetics. But, there’s a lot more we need to pay attention to than just the design aesthetics. Most importantly we need to focus on providing optimal user experience (UX). Fortunately, the WordPress dashboard comes with every single tool that can help inspire designers to deliver out-of-the-box user experience.
About Author
Emily Heming is a professional WordPress developer for WordPrax Ltd a PSD to WordPress conversion company. She has served many companies helping them in developing user-friendly website. So feel free to contact
