WordPress importer UX/UI review

[duck_]

The newly improved WordPress WXR importer needs some UX love to improve it further!

A few things that I know need improving:

Results and feedback
Currently you will either see "All done. Have fun!" or a list of errors and "All done. Have fun!". Clearly this isn't really enough information. The old importer listed every single item being imported and associated errors, which I thought was too much information for a large import. My thoughts was to do something like show the red error message block if any errors occur and have a JS enabled link in this to show a more detailed list of items that were not imported, followed by a table of results displaying the number of succeses, failures and skips (for content already present) for each of the separate sets of data imported.

Error strings
These need to be useful, there's not much point in saying something went wrong but not giving enough information to diagnose the real issue. They also need to be displayed well (see above), an example of a weird one is trying to import a WXR 1.0 file with an author with a display name non-[a-zA-Z].

Other
The fix for #13627 needs to be done properly. The role a new user will be imported as is now being displayed but I don't think it's prominent enough yet. You'll see that it's mentioned on step two when choosing how authors will be imported, but if you're someone like me who often only skims instructions it is pretty easy to miss. Maybe some bold/highlighting and another reminder on the final screen?

Anything else people notice as not clear enough when giving the importer a test.

[duck_]

Replying to duck_:

Error strings
These need to be useful, there's not much point in saying something went wrong but not giving enough information to diagnose the real issue. They also need to be displayed well (see above), an example of a weird one is trying to import a WXR 1.0 file with an author with a display name non-[a-zA-Z].

Could also try to give more verbose errors with as many gory extra details when WP_DEBUG is enabled.

[hakre]

The ticket ("The newly improved WordPress WXR importer needs some UX love to improve it further! ") that is Related: #15197

[jane]

Personally, I think it's useful to see the progress of the import, and more than once seeing those individual items has allowed me to figure out when an import went awry.

[duck_]

Replying to jane:

Personally, I think it's useful to see the progress of the import, and more than once seeing those individual items has allowed me to figure out when an import went awry.

My point was that with a large import it is harder to see the failures because of the huge number of (in my opinion) rather more useless success notifications. My thinking was that the user gets error feedback (and that does have to be made better by showing more details about the individual item that has failed) for failures, anything not in that list can be assumed to be successful (and the full number of successes is shown in the table). I can do a mock up of what I was imagining later if my description isn't good enough.

[duck_]

​http://plugins.trac.wordpress.org/changeset/304726/

Improves usefulness of error strings a great deal.

[martythornley]

One error message I find particularly confusing is the message when fetching attachements has been disabled. You get an Import failed message for every image. But that is not a failure if fetching attachments is purposely being disabled. There should be one message warning that you are importing without the attachments.

[helen]

There's a lot that could use some UX attention in the importer - I'm not sure having this umbrella ticket kicking around is helping any, though, so closing out.