an update is brewing…

this in not an april fool’s post. i really am revamping the plugin.

so wordpress recently released their latest version 2.5. the main changes revolved around the administration console, so i decided to install it into my development environment and check to see if it broke my hacker’s diet plugin functionality. luckily it didn’t (that I could tell), but while surfing around the new menus I had a bit of an inspirational moment. i visualized how my plugin would best fit in with their new look. i quickly sketched down my idea and got to work. it turned out to be a case study on usability.

since starting my job @ yahoo, my focus on the user has been amplified. generally speaking, i specialize in back-end development. that means that most of the code i write isn’t what you see, it’s what turns the wheels behind the scenes. but since my background is in web development, i sometimes like to brush off my CSS skills and make something that people will interact with. placing yourself in the spot of the user and asking “what’s the best way to give the user exactly what they need, but not overwhelm them?” is a great way to really flesh out your feature set. it requires bringing the important stuff to the forefront and keeping the less important things hidden until needed or even discarded altogether.

when i first made my plugin, the question driving my design was “what features do i need to have in order to replicate the diet plan?” this time around, i had more to draw from. namely: a year and a half (wow) of plugging in my weight every morning, and tons of feedback from users.

so what came out of my rethinking? as a user, i need a few important things right at my fingertips:

• putting in today’s weight
• finding out my current “real” weight
• seeing how that weight has changed recently so i can adjust if needed

and that’s really it! anything that doesn’t fall within those 3 items has been de-emphasized. the other features still exist, but there is no reason to have any of that stuff on the main plugin page, “above the fold”. (which means stuff you see without scrolling down) how often do you really go back and add/change a weight for a previous day? once a month, maybe? so why clutter the page with all that old stuff when what you really want is today’s information.

and of course i gave the UI a little polish. i switched out the graph to use YUI charts so that gd is no longer required and so the charts are much more interactive. round corners are still in, right? :]

look for an update “soon”. (1-2 week timeframe)