[ad_1]
WordPress is evolving and yada yada yada, but why most plugins look so terrible? No good looking previews for plugins generating things. Terrible text based ui, where you write text or upload something and cannot preview of how it will look. Technology is available to make ui more responsive and better, so why not to use it. I mainly talk about admin facing plugins.
[ad_2]
Most of the time it’s just functionality. Most plug-ins do one specific thing. Hopefully they do that one specific thing very very well. Truthfully, I don’t care anything about the UI. I would rather have a plug-in with good documentation and commenting. Giving me the ability to modify what they’ve created easily.
Because many of devs/programmers are lazy as hell and don’t know how to make useful GUI.
You probably haven’t seen Shopify plugins(apps)
Adding preview functionality would make the plugin more complex and probably slow down the interface. The admin area of WordPress is a no frills area to get stuff done quickly.
1. No standards for WordPress UX across plugins
2. Vast majority of plugins are made and updated by people who do this for free and in their free time.
3. A large chunk of WordPress websites, although marketed as something clients can update themselves, ultimately are updated by a developer. Developers don’t care as much about back-end UX.
Because largely they’re made by developers and not designers, and it’s about function not form.
Free plugin developer here.
On the backend (dashboard) there are standards for UI, but they’re pretty doggone primitive. We can make a UI that looks like the Settings page without too much trouble (once we figure out the whole callback/hook structure of that code). For a lot of option-setting stuff, that’s enough. So, when we can use the settings UI, we do. (https://developer.wordpress.org/plugins/settings/). It’s good, especially for people like me without QA teams, because it’s so dirt-simple. It worked on Internet Explorer 6 and it still works. And our stuff gets out there into the world.
Look, it’s not a simple thing to design UI stuff that works across an ecosystem of many developers of varying skill level. But they did it. And it functions as designed. At scale. That’s good.
Some plugins try to do better. Especially the freemium ones. They DO do better until they add pester-the-user-mercilessly-until-she-spends-money features. I guess those folks have the money and staff to build and test their own UI frameworks and integrate them with core. But those UIs aren’t standardized with each other. And the commercial incentive for all that work is closing sales to site owners, not enhancing the audience experience. So the incentive is a bit perverse.
I suppose sometime Matt will decide its time to go all React on the back-end UIs, like Gutenberg is. I’m honestly dreading that day, because I don’t care very much about my admin pages. I’d rather spend my time on useful functionality.