I had some time to contribute to WP, and I’ve always loved how the Full-site-editing outreach program lets anyone jump in and quickly get to testing specific features and functionality. Today, I worked on QA’ing the latest one: FSE Program Testing Call #15: Category Customization
Questions
Did the experience crash at any point?
- No crashes! But a few odd states when navigating via keyboard nav.
Did the saving experience work properly?
- Yes
What did you find particularly confusing or frustrating about the experience?
- While writing posts in Gutenberg, I’ve come to love being able to press enter, then forward slash to choose a new block quickly without leaving the keyboard. Under FSE’s editor, this workflow seems more buggy.
- Performing some of the actions would lose focus. As a concrete example, removing any lock setting via keyboard nav seems to drop the user back into the global context, needing to tab to the location they were previously at. I think that’s likely due to the lock DOM element no longer being present.
- Working with a group’s layout could be improved via the keyboard. I think getting more comfortable with the UI would help, but having additional feedback around what is selected and where I can move things would be helpful.
What did you especially enjoy or appreciate about the experience?
- So cool to see how far FSE has come and all of the improvements related to templates. We’re getting closer to the power of the template hierarchy of traditional themes!
What would have made this experience easier?
- This was great! I love how these FSE experiments are targeted and have clear instructions for me to jump in and do some QA as time permits!
Did you find that what you created matched what you saw on your site?
- Yes
Did it work using Keyboard only?
- Not quite.
Did it work using a screen reader?
- Didn’t test.
Video and Timestamps
- 0:00:00 :: Start recording notes
- 0:01:43 :: Minor thing — when tabbing to the main editor area, the editor area jumped up 10px
- 0:03:56 :: Question: Should I be able to navigate through all of the “Patterns” using the arrow keys when inserting a footer?
- 0:11:34 :: UX consideration: When selecting an option for the Query Loop block, it would be nice to have the left and right arrows (or similar) be able to advance through the various options.
- 0:20:19 :: Usually when pressing “enter” at the end of a block, a new block will be inserted after the current one. For some reason, this “Directions” block won’t insert a new block after it when pressing enter.
- 0:22:53 :: Bug: Tabindex lost when lock icon is removed from the block menu.
- With a locked block focused in the editor
- Navigate to the lock setting with keyboard nav using “Shift+Tab”
- Disable lock settings.
- Note that our focus is now on the main window and not somewhere within the block we were editing.
- 0:26:05 :: Re the “enter” for new block issue. As a workaround, I think I can hit enter twice, and then backspace once to get to a new block setup.
- 0:36:15 :: Another instance of not being able to insert a new block by just pressing enter
- 0:40:15 :: Editing the layout of a group is a little tricky. I think getting more comfortable with the UI would help, but having additional feedback around what is selected and where I can move things would be helpful.