Ross Wintle

Thanks, Tammie. You’re doing a great job here post-Gutenprompt!

In the classic editor, pretty much everything you can do is on-screen. It’s easy to see what is possible. Excepting, of course, the screen options menu which is often unnoticed, and the “Kitchen Sink” (I know, it’s the toolbar now or something). Nothing appears or disappears. I know where I am and what I can do at any one moment. And that’s comforting.

You know about affordances. The affordances just aren’t present. If you displayed ALL the controls at once it would be overwhelming. But displaying them on hover makes them hard to discover. And in many cases they aren’t clear: I’ve mentioned before the confusion of the cog and the three dots in the top right. Even after using Gutenberg several times over the course of several months I still don’t know what these really represent.

The layout options for images are another example. The icons tell you what they do on hover with a tool tip, but at least three of them are unfamiliar icons for things that I probably don’t want to do most of the time. And then those blue re-sizing handles are sometimes present/sometimes not. I just find all the user interfaces icons, buttons, handles, menus, and so on so confusing.

Occasionally the UI chrome all disappears and I need to wiggle my mouse to see where I am.

There are also just too many blocks. If I’m writing I want paragraphs and headings and lists and that’s about it. That’s all the choice I need. Someone elsewhere mentioned that they write first and format later. This is probably what I do. Even things like images and videos are probably after thoughts for a simple blogger like me.

Having individual blocks for headings and paragraphs just doesn’t make sense in this context. And the classic block is not promoted as an option at all in the same way that quotes, headings and HTML are.

If you removed individual blocks for paragraphs, headings and lists, suddenly the UI would be much simpler because you could keep it all on screen at once without overwhelming people. This is basically what the Classic block does.

At the moment I write in the WordPress editor. I can sketch an outline for a post. I can flesh it out. I can add formatting later. I can totally see myself, if forced to use Gutenberg, writing in something like Bear notes or SimpleNote or a classic block and then pasting in and/or converting to blocks later.

But why should the simpler “just writing” experience be removed if that’s what people want?

Thanks. Will look forward to this. Have continued conversation on the Vanilla Forums Forums…if that makes sense.