Advanced Common Sense

I decided that one of the [many] reasons why I don’t post to my blog regularly is that the tool I’ve been using to do it (WordPress) is just not very welcoming.

It’s kind of like what David Allen says about items on your to-do list: If you experience a sense of dread just reading them, you’re not very likely to want to start doing them. (One of his primary rules automatically makes them friendlier: Every item on your Next Actions list should be just that—the very next, and usually very small, action that you need to take to further the goal, not the whole goal itself. So rather than “Get car fixed” you’d put “Look up mechanic’s phone number” which feels much less tiring, and hence much more doable.)

In the same sense, I realized that I’ve always approached opening up the native WordPress editor with a sense of dread. It just always feels like I’m wading through a swamp in a pair of hip boots that are way too large: everything just feels kind of cumbersome. So I decided to look around for some way to write blog posts that felt friendlier.

From my do-it-yourself usability testing forum:

“I've designed and facilitated a dozen or so tests on startup sites over the past couple of years but the last round I did was for a large publishing company and boy was I nervous.

The results were outstanding.

One forgets how bloody fantastic it is when that behemoth of an issue shows it's face for the first time... Priceless.”

pete_blatchford in Testing Success Stories