The Gutenberg User Experience

You can set your clock by it – the recurring flare-ups of Gutenberg frustrations that turn into tweets that turn into videos that turn into livestreams that turn into… what exactly? I’m not entirely sure. What are we frustrated about? Leadership. Vision. Direction. Governance. Inflation. But above all: Gutenberg.

I won’t retread the arguments about Gutenberg. I’ve been putting out plenty of posts outlining all of the missing functionality I’ve been hoping for (components, version control, navigation/menus, developer experience) in the editor, along with my share of spicy tweets. I contribute. I file my GitHub issues like a good boy. I like to think I’m very honest with you about the pros and the cons. And I’ve long advocated for exactly what others are calling for: spend the next year or so on refining the interface, not on new features.

In page builder circles, it used to be that the block editor was “garbage.” Now the block editor is fine in small doses, but the site editor is “garbage”. This round of uproar was a bit different though, because for the first time, there was an open and honest reaction (this time from Paul at WPTuts) to the idea that you can’t just complain online and be mad that no one is listening to you. You have to- as Matt Medieros said– meet them halfway. So kudos to Paul for being the change he wants to see in the software and commenting on an issue. And I fully understand that this issue could sit ignored for five years or told that it will never happen due to some arcane use case or a real accessibility conflict. It happens to me, too. Like everything else in life, “it’s often who you know, not what you know.” “The squeaky wheel gets the oil.” “To everything there is a season, a time to laugh and a time to mourn.”

And the frustrations rage on.

Here’s my take.

More than any other part in WordPress history, Gutenberg is first and foremost a user experience (lowercase letters). In the past, it was OK that WordPress was kinda clunky and technical, because so was the rest of the internet. At least it was extensible.

Developers showed up and created things like ACF or Elementor or Admin Columns Pro or whatever to smooth over all those gaps. Third-party extenders provided much of the great “user experience” that core was lacking. The fact that all of those plugins still exist and still make money is a testament to the fact the WordPress has legs. People say core should “merge” these popular plugins in, but I say “why?” We pay for them -> they continually get better. If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.

With Gutenberg, the entire block editor is built to control the user experience. It’s not a blank slate for developers, it’s very opinionated. It says what kind of HTML you can use, CSS you can load, where you can edit the UI, where you can’t, and so on.

Want a custom component? Cool, go write a bunch of React and also PHP and also make sure it doesn’t break with each update. Want to learn how? Cool, you’re going to have to read through hundreds of pages of technical manuals that weren’t written for you or else dig through random blog posts from the last seven years to fully understand it. Good luck.

To be clear, this high level of “control” being exerted over the software is also a symptom of the WordPress project in general.

It’s always going to be hard to compare WordPress to other open-source developer frameworks and languages, because Ruby on Rails doesn’t care about your drag-and-drop editor. Next.js isn’t trying to “democratize publishing”. PHP isn’t interested in hosting it’s own Creative Commons media library, micromanaging all local and global meetups/events, owning a supposedly “external” media outlet, or really interfere into any of the other layers of bureaucracy that WordPress core has decided to absorb into it’s central mass. It really is a unique proposition.

Back to Gutenberg. The refrain you hear pretty often is that Gutenberg is trying to appeal to both ‘simple’ and ‘advanced’ users, and thus is doing neither one of them fairly well. I pretty much agree with this take. I’m a big fan of “less is more”, pick one thing and do it right.

But here’s the caveat: Gutenberg’s weakness is also its strength. With a heavily curated editor experience, you can actually give a site built in Gutenberg to a non-technical user and they can happily edit their content. I see it all the time. The advanced developers are using Gutenberg to create better editorial experiences for their clients, who are non-technical users. This is what differentiates Gutenberg from most page builders that are built specifically to appeal to technical users.

But that differentiating feature sort of stops at the block editor and doesn’t need to be a focus of the site editor, because the site editor does not feel like a place for non-technical users.

So I think most people who are reading this would agree with me here as well: It’s time for Gutenberg to pause focus on building an interface for basic users, and put all focus (in the immediate future) on advanced users / power users. Give as much power as possible to the advanced developers, because just like before, they’ll use that power to create the “simplified” user experiences that grow the ecosystem from a product-first perspective.

Now I know that this would have it’s tradeoffs. One goal of Gutenberg is a unified experience of WordPress – a shared visual language for the dashboard and a shared data structure for our content. Unification is still a valuable and achievable goal, but right now it’s simply not happening, even for those of us who don’t use any heavy plugins or page builders. We’re all stuck in limbo right now.

Plus, the new crop of builders running on top of Gutenberg (Kadence, Greyd, Generate, Cwicly) are amazing but are still very much their own unique data and user experience. Yes, you can sort turn one off and turn the other on, but that’s really not going to be very smooth when all their custom blocks and controls break down. There’s still going to be major content/data issues regardless.

I know it’s why they’re being very careful before opening up any extensibility APIs in Gutenberg. I heard Apple’s Craig Federighi say recently that offering public APIs are a lot of responsibility because an API is a promise to developers that you have to keep.

On the flip side, the fact that Gutenberg has a strong modern UI and a suite of components and dataviews means that we’re getting close to a cohesive vision of an admin redesign.

What’s happening in Gutenberg?

My armchair theory: Gutenberg is being led by it’s engineers. What I mean is: feature requests are chosen primarily by developers, who have very little central prioritization or shared incentives. Then at the end of the release cycle, a few user experience people test it out, pick what’s “good enough” to include in core, and spin it into a cohesive narrative for the broader community. And I think that’s backwards.

I’d love to see more power given to product managers, like user experience experts, to isolate key areas of improvement, define a short-term roadmap and then enlist developer support. To be empowered to set the clear expectation that only bug fixes and priorities from the roadmap are being merged into Gutenberg right now.

I know WordPress releases aren’t typically driven this way. Developers want to work on shiny, new, weird. They don’t want to do maintenance or pick up old, half-finished features. I can say this from experience. I’m a developer. New projects are much more fun. But someone needs to go back and finish the damn navigation menu experience in FSE! Or at least make it extensible enough so that we see someone build a true “Mega Menu” plugin inside of Gutenberg.

If you watch Paul’s very well made critique from last week or watch the one Jamie Marsland and I did a few months back, the cleanup of the user experience- specifically the “power user” experience- is sorely needed. And you’ll also see that every one has their own opinions on what the priorities should be. I know that none of this is easy.

So where does that leave us? My vote is that we focus on the power users who use WordPress every day and I promise you’ll see more block themes and more adoption of the block editor from the people with the loudest microphones who are making the most popular content. Do you agree?

Postscript: And for all of the armchair critics of Gutenberg/Full Site Editing who don’t use it anyway, I would love to know what your biggest “existential” concerns are at the moment? If WordPress takes another seven years to get full site editing to a great place, and you’ve spent all that time using Bricks and Elementor and building WordPress sites exactly the way you want, what is the big worry?

Brian Coords
Modern WordPress Development

15 responses to “The Gutenberg User Experience”

  1. Andrew Palmer Avatar

    Well, honestly, I have had my fair share of complaints about WordPress. Frankly though, I am pretty sick and tired of people who promote courses on page builders and add ons, flip flop from teaching a particular page builder then finding another one and then another one, go to webflow for a while, discover it traps you into a price hike then complain about it (after making a small fortune showing people how to use it), and then feel well placed to criticize WordPress. Get a grip. It’s free, it’s open source, and it’s a platform that is ever evolving. Not hard to understand, right?

    PS I like all the people that teach – just maybe not their current attitude to WordPress and its (many) failings. Let’s focus on it’s successes for a while. I certainly am.

    1. Brian Coords Avatar
      Brian Coords

      I completely agree! I have my complaints, but sometimes the entitlement of WordPress users getting free software is a bit overwhelming (myself included). I’m a big fan of everyone in the community, but I think there are some who use negativity and hostility as their “brand”. I can find myself being negative too, so like you said “let’s focus on it’s successes”.

    2. Faton Avatar
      Faton

      “Let’s focus on it’s successes for a while.”

      Criticism / suggestions for improvement are incessant, as long as it is constructive criticism that is intended to help the developers continue to improve WordPress, because only through criticism / feedback do the developers know how WordPresss should be developed, what the wishes of the developer / normal user community are, etc. Those who rest on their success will eventually be overtaken by other competitors.

    3. Rich Hawkins Avatar
      Rich Hawkins

      100% this.

      I don’t mean to be rude, but some of the recent circle j*rks have almost sent me over the edge. YouTubers complaining about accountability—that famously accountable group of people in society!—without mentioning the(ir) wider context of social media (as) income, algorithms and the push towards more emotive, polarised and clickbaity content is, honestly, just kind of sad.

      Also, I will self-combust if I here another “[Whatever random plugin I’m using this 3-year cycle] responded to my feature request in [x] days, why can’t WordPress?” Could we agree a (PPP-adjusted) fine for this kind of statement, all proceeds to EFF/Mozilla Foundation or something?

  2. Hans-Gerd Gerhards Avatar

    Thanks for this great post and I agree with you on many points. And indeed: The navigation block should have been improved a long, long time ago. Try creating a submenu. Horrible.
    But despite everything: in my opinion, block themes are basically a great thing.

  3. Sam Avatar
    Sam

    Finally an honest refreshing take on WordPress today. My initial hot take is I complete agree with everything in this post.

    In my mind websites have 3 main areas a header, content area and footer. The header in FSE as outlined in your blog is absolutely trash. The logo block never filled its purpose and since favicons were added to the settings panel it’s completely redundant. The navigation experience is honestly horrible. It’s difficult to navigate even for WordPress veterans. Basic features are missing like active classes for archive pages, or even the ability to add an archive page link! Wait! Didn’t use the logo block well your mobile menu isn’t branded and looks awful…

    As a user, developer, publisher, starting a WordPress website and using components that almost every website has a logo and a menu it’s a 1/10 from me.

    The worst bit is the Automatic response “just get involved” or “where open to discuss with anyone”. It’s utter rubbish, much like your article I’ve submitted issues, got involved in discuss, I’ve even become a core contributor. Nothings changed… I’ve reached out to individuals on Twitter to discuss improvements none gets back to you…

    Then we wonder why people moan on social media…

  4. JonnMc Avatar
    JonnMc

    I have the most happy time with Bricks and some Addons like Advanced Themer and Gutenbricks, and my opinionated framework of choice, right now with WordPress like ever. But only I went away from Gutenberg.

    My main pain points with Gutenberg builder (page or site) are

    1. the lack of mobile oriented building capabilities. On a lot of sites I have like 90%mobile views… Having to check how it looks on frontend is a bit of a sad joke. Generally the not-wysiwyg backend, I mean …hello? Would be nice to have an app like experience, if I could wish for.

    2. The structure panel, though getting a bit better, is still so UNHELPFUL. I used cwicly for a while and voila it is possible to have a great one in Gutenberg. Now compare to Bricks with Advanced Themer then you know what is possible.

    3. The Where-is-the-feature-now-again feeling when having to use it. Or how it is made, why is it here? What is the idea of doing it this way here and that way there? And why the f is it made like this, like the laughable menu builder in FSE. How is that releasable? The Panelmania and every addon celebrates its own vision. That is exhausting at best.

    4. I like to build with classes and it is a bit cumbersome in vanilla Gutenberg. Why?

    And what I miss dearly is progress with mediamanagement. I mean there are great tools like happy files, but I would like to have a WordPress Mediamanagement, not a mediafolder view. Knowing where do I use a picture or not, is that really difficult to get? And when I am at it, how is it that we still have no cool cpt management? Why is the startup of a wordpress site still so cumbersome?

    Yes, I have figured it out with plugins, but if I could ask, first I would like to get some serious WordPress feature action.

    But thank you people of WordPress for making the great website builder possible I am using right now, that keeps me using it. I am not complaining because in a great twist, you made it possible that I am happy as never with your underlying tool.

  5. Trevor Robertson Avatar

    Thanks for writing this Brian! It’s refreshing to see someone carefully craft their opinion on something so contentious. And to me your opinion caries weight because you also are an active member in the WP community and are trying to educate and improve WordPress.

    I had my 15 year WP anniversary this year (15 years a WP dev that is!), so have seen a lot of changes in this space. I remember Custom Post Types landing and changing everything. So, I’m a strong believer in the project, what is has accomplished and what they want to accomplish. Consequently, it’s hard to see so much WP negativity right now. But, I also feel a lot of the same frustrations other devs do. I mentioned this before in another comment, but my personal opinion is sometimes WP (like many of us) can be held back by dogma. In the case of WP, I feel like the enviable goal of backward compatibility has hampered Gutenberg from the start.

    Controversial statement, but I wish Automattic had just said okay, we are starting fresh here with Gutenberg. We’ll get the Fields API added. We’ll drop all the legacy stuff holding us back. And we will simply build a brand new WP experience. I think (and hope) Gutenberg will get there in the end, but at what cost, and in how many more years (1-2 more I think)? It’s a shame when realistically Gutenberg is so different from WP 3.0, or 4.0, that it’s highly unlikely a bespoke site from those days needed to update to it without breaking.

  6. Anh Tran Avatar

    > With a heavily curated editor experience, you can actually give a site built in Gutenberg to a non-technical user and they can happily edit their content.

    I respectfully disagree with this. In a recent project we did for a client, they requested to revert from the block editor to the classic editor, just for entering the post content. They’re marketers, who have been using WordPress for years. What they want is a familiar interface (like Microsoft Words), which they can enter content fast and easy. They “think” the classic editor does it better than the block editor.

    > My vote is that we focus on the power users who use WordPress every day…

    I love this, and totally agree with it. Combining with your previous say about the decisions are made by engineers, I think it gives an overral of what’s happening in Gutenberg right now: people make it don’t use/understand it as people who actually use it on a daily basis. While software engineers are told to listen to end-users to understand their user stories (sorry, I use a term from Agile methodology), I think it doesn’t happen as a principle in Gutenberg. And the worst thing is we haven’t had a way to fix it. An influencer like Paul left a comment on Github, and many others did the same, but it’s just like that.

    1. Dan Knauss Avatar

      @Anh, you are describing a client that is really locked into their old way of doing things. They’re going to struggle with and resist change to anything else. This has little to do with the tools in use — it is just how people are. Every day other clients (also marketing people) adopt Gutenberg, and if their prior experience is with a *different* enterprise CMS that they dislike, they then to *love* WordPress and Gutenberg. They relate it to MS Word or whatever they find easy and familiar. I see this all the time. If there are things they dislike, it is likely a feature, process, or concept in the old system that worked for them which they have now lost.

      These are change management and client onboarding issues. It’s not the software’s fault. Most users are not power users so they will be easily pleased — or stymied — depending how they are assisted.

      Focusing Gutenberg’s development and refinement on power users (who care a lot about UX refinement) is a good idea that will benefit everyone, but the sense of crisis and urgency power users and site builders have is unique to their circle. The things that matter enormously to power users only matter a little, if at all, to the average user whose workplace has adopted WordPress. People who just want to make a simple site quickly is probably the least-served market in WordPress today, and I wonder if that’s just a lost cause — at least beyond the hosting level.

  7. Max Ziebell Avatar
    Max Ziebell

    As a user of Gutenberg for client-facing experiences rather than Full Site Editing (FSE), I find the current interface somewhat disjointed. For classic themes, I disable Fullscreen Mode to avoid overwhelming clients with a takeover interface for simple blog posts.
    While I appreciate FSE’s concept and have begun exploring it for personal projects using Ollie for Patterns, the need to switch back to the classic Admin can be confusing. However, I’m optimistic that with further UX and UI refinements, we could see a more unified interface under this new approach.

    I’m cautious about introducing advanced features to the standard Gutenberg interface. Instead, I also am in favor of a “Gutenberg Advanced” mode, clearly distinguished by a visual cue like dark mode. This advanced mode could offer file access similar to VS Code, enhanced editing capabilities as seen when combining Gutenberg with Microthemer, a frame of “power tools” accessible via a toggle, and direct access to theme editing without requiring a local development environment.

    For users of third-party builders, I agree that it’s best to either utilize Gutenberg’s existing capabilities or leave it as is, rather than dismissing it entirely. Tools like GutenBricks offer an interesting middle ground, allowing developers to use Bricks while clients interact with Gutenberg.

    Professional developers will always have options like Pinegrow or code editors for theme creation. However, I believe AI will increasingly play a role in these advanced workflows. Recent developments in AI, such as Claude and open-source models like Llama 3.1 running on platforms like Groq, demonstrate the potential for near-instant code rewrites with rollback capabilities.

    Looking ahead, it’s not hard to envision a future where we interact with webpages through natural language and intuitive gestures, fundamentally changing how we approach web development and content creation.

  8. Dan Knauss Avatar

    The WordPress community is actually a mix of very different and highly separate (but still overlapping) communities that aren’t convinced they need each other, and they sure don’t understand each other. Kudos to Brian, Paul, Mark, Matt, and others for working through a lot of the barriers between site builders and the core project this week — it almost makes me think it might be possible to achieve a more united, better internally self-understood community.

    Recently at WordCamp Canada I noticed how much context-switching I was doing when presentations and conversations shifted between the small agency and freelancer context to the big agency and corporate context. For small business WordPress, the question of Gutenberg vs. pagebuilders is a chronic debate in a crowded product market where fundamental things like hosting, security, and performance remain mysterious and elusive. For big business WordPress, there are settled, solved, and obvious solutions, starting with Gutenberg. Ideally, those settled solutions should trickle down more than they do, and the pragmatic diversity of the midmarket should make it our go-to place for experimenting and refining user experience.

    1. Brian Coords Avatar
      Brian Coords

      > Recently at WordCamp Canada I noticed how much context-switching I was doing when presentations and conversations shifted between the small agency and freelancer context to the big agency and corporate context.

      This is definitely the biggest issue. The WP market is so wide and fragmented that it’s become hard to talk about anything because everyone comes from a completely different angle.

  9. Steven Palmer Avatar
    Steven Palmer

    Shiny new features are fine, providing they are the product of starting with prioritized problems, and not with arbitrary solutions… which then calls into account power dynamics, organizational structure, business model, managerial philosophy, etc.

  10. Peter Burton Avatar

    “My vote is that we focus on the power users who use WordPress every day and I promise you’ll see more block themes and more adoption of the block editor from the people with the loudest microphones who are making the most popular content. Do you agree?”

    I wholeheartedly AGREE. If you focus on the super power users they will produce all sorts of block and add-ons – that’s the beauty of WP and make it even better.

    And WordPress PLEASE take note and “go back and finish the damn navigation menu experience in FSE! Or at least make it extensible enough so that we see someone build a true “Mega Menu” plugin inside of Gutenberg”. I run a hobby site. As an early adopter I’ve taken the time to move from Astra Pro to using Ollie Pro. The biggest complaint we have had on the transition has been the lack of collapsible menus on mobile! Such a basic thing that WordPress have chosen to ignore!

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