First a disclaimer: I am not intentionally bashing BB as I personally love BB for building pages. I’m a front-end developer and designer and I feel like it gives me all the functionality I need to really tweak it. Plus I love your approach on white-labeling the builder.
I plan to have a small agency that focuses on a niche demographic and allows them to build their own pages quickly using the page builder.
I just did a round of user testing with 3 young designers who only somewhat familiar with html and css (if any at all). However, they’re really talented in terms of design.
So, I put them in front of it, recorded the sessions and gave them pass/fail tests like “how would you place an image on the page” or “how would you change the background color” to more advanced tests like “how would add a gallery”.
I was shocked to find each person failed every single test using Beaverbuilder. All of them!
Then it hit me… This is really designed for coders or people that understand CSS and html but don’t want to code or worry about coding.
That really set me back. So to see if any of the builders made sense, I set up a new environment and installed qards by designmodo. They passed every test I threw at them with the exception of figuring out how to add links to other pages and deleting a few options on the page. I admit, they have a sexy UX but I’ve stayed away from them because they don’t seem committed to the plugin and there’s no white label or templating option.
Argh!!!
Now I’m back to the drawing board. I love BB but this is a big setback for me since my users really didn’t get BB at all (since it’s for someone like me). It’s my fault, I should have tested it much earlier on.
It may be that most of the people that end up using it are those with a basic amount of html/CSS skills and that’s ok.
Do you guys have any plans to do more UX testing with your page builder and enhance it so novices can use it? Have you heard any of this before?
My immediate comment on this, is that any product has a learning curve.
For me personally, I don’t see the BB products as being for the end users of the sites I design, but for me to develop.
Sure if they want to tweak content, they need to know the basics, but that is very easy to learn if needed.
Dave
Throwing in my two cents here…Appreciate the feedback, good stuff! I would have to disagree in the fact that BB is only for people that understand coding. Really, our target is what we call ‘web pros’ and above. Essentially, users that are somewhat tech savvy and know a bit about WordPress. We have many users that are just that and don’t know a thing about coding, even just site owners or everyday bloggers.
Regardless, we really do appreciate the feedback and yes, we do have plans on doing some UI enhancements later this year. Our goal in that is to clean it up a bit and make the entire experience much nicer. Whether that will make it easier to use for the end user, we’ll certainly see, but that isn’t the entire goal if that makes sense given our target market.
Unfortunately, not at this time. We’re hard at work on several other things that will take our dev time for the foreseeable future so we have’t been able to put a whole lot of thought into it, just that we do want to do some work in the UI arena.
I can tell you we are working on several new post modules, a menu module and what we are calling linked templates which will allow you to create content in a single spot, reuse anywhere and update in one spot. It’s been highly requested and will be an awesome feature to really help with workflow!
I wanted to chime in here and say thanks for taking the time to provide such detailed feedback. Much appreciated!
I think Billy hit the nail on the head when he said that our target market is “web pros”. We originally built Beaver Builder as a tool we could use to build websites that our clients could later tweak themselves. Once we released it into the wild, the response from designers and developers told us that was our target market. We had no idea what we were doing or who that was going to be
I never expect our clients to actually build entire pages themselves, although I have been very surprised at how many have over the last year. For example, we recently built a site and had the client actually jump in and start building out many of the pages based on the landing page template we provided. We didn’t ask him to, he just figured everything out, loved how easy it was and dove in.
We have another client that’s savvy enough to make edits, but when it comes time to build new pages, we usually handle that.
It has been a while since I played around with Qards, so some things may have changed, but I do remember it being a lot simpler than Beaver Builder. Not that I think Beaver Builder is complicated, just that we offer many more features. So in that regard, I can see how Qards might be easier for a novice user, however, I feel that it’s definitely more limiting in many ways.
As far as our plans go, as Billy mentioned, thats still up in the air and I’m not entirely sure at this point that they will be focused on end users. However, I’m not opposed to learning what the pain points might be in that area and how we could improve. Do you have any specific feedback as to what made Beaver Builder difficult for the users you tested over Qards?
I read this post with interest from the start and have decide to pitch in!
I’ve been using BB for about nine months now and have found that it blows away every other theme and page builder I’ve tried in 6 years of working with WordPress. I was interested in what Thomas I had to say because the thought has occured to me of employing a young designer to build sites for me as i’m sure that with very little training someone with limited experience could do that easily. I haven’t tried Qards but feedback I’ve had from my clients is that for updating their content BB is absolutley user friendly.
The idea of handing it over to a nich market to build websites is a different question, if they’re something like accountants or engineers then you wouldn’t as rule expect them to have the skills to build a site even with BB. On the other hand if they were graphic designers then they may well have the initial skills to be able to build sites albeit with some training and support.
I’m also interested in the business model that Thomas talks about, I’ve seen other mentions of that type of thing on the forum and I’m intrigued to know the business process and how BB would fit into that.
BTW, I love the new enhancements and the future is looking good for BB users, well done and thanks!
Thanks for chiming in! I’m glad to hear that BB is working great for your clients. I agree that handing it over to a niche market to build websites is a different question. I guess that would all depend on the average technical savvy of users in a specific market. That’s not something we’ve really focused on, but like I told Thomas, I’m not opposed to learning what the pain points might be for other types of users.
I am not a coder, yet I find BB to be a great tool.
As I build more, I will get better. The good ol’ learning curve.
As I also build for others, I am happy to give them a tool like BB to use, but I expect most will not want to even be bothered. They will forward me changes and I will do it for them.
The more folks can do on their own, the sooner they will leave you altogether.
Maybe BB isn’t for your situation. That’s fine, too. Simply move on.
Personally, I expect to get better with each site and will soon be very advanced, without knowing much about HTML or CSS. If I learn more about CSS and coding, I could be even better.
I’ve been using BB for about 8 months and Qards for the last three months. Qards is great at putting a landing page together with a full screen image/video and text overlay. I wish I could do that in BB, but the row heights are set with pixels and not by screen height percentage.
As for the rest, BB has FAR more capability for doing everything else that a web site needs. BB’s learning curve is relatively easy in comparison to other page builders and teaching end users the in/outs of BB is not that difficult.
I’ve used both BB and Qards on a site without issue. But I won’t do a site without BB ever again.
I think there are maybe three types of people when it comes to computers and tech. There are those that just get it, without much effort. I happen to fall into that category. I’ve learned countless software without taking a class or picking up a book. It felt intuitive.
Then there are the people who need classes to understand how something works. These people will get it, but it will take a little time. I think the majority of people fall into this category.
The last category are people who may never get it. It doesn’t matter how many times you show them, or how many times they write down the instructions step-by-step, they’ll always call you asking how to play their DVD. These people are like your grandma.
So, with BB, if you gave some sort of tutorial, either written or by video, before administering your tests, you might find that people will pick up on how BB is used and how to accomplish the various tasks. Personally, I haven’t used Qards, but from the page builders I have used, BB by far has been the easiest to use.
If you’re in the business of making money from tweaking details and redoing bits on client websites, do not give them Beaver Builder.
If you’re in the business of giving your clients value for their money, give them Beaver Builder.
Every single one I’ve used it for has taken it and ran. (Then, in a year or so, they should discover about talented, proper design and come back for help still hehehe)
I agree with you all on the feature set of BB. they get it and it blows everything else out of the water in terms of pure functionality.
And yes, the market I’m targeting could probably pull something like squaresapce off but not wordpress (which is why squarespace is killing it right now).
The funny thing is; while I’m targeting novices, I was testing with designers who were novices at coding since most companies i’m working with will probably have their youngest, mostly tech-savvy, staff member working on the pages. These people might work in photoshop but know little to nothing about css. That’s why I tested with designers who don’t code.
And yes, If I gave them instructions on how to work it, (after they tried and failed) then yes, they figured it out eventually (still wasn’t always easy).
That said, in my experience with user testing, you sit them down and give them tests and do your best not to lead them. The idea being that amazing UX is intuitive and shouldn’t need instructions given (or very little) and in this regard, Qards killed it.
For the BB crew, here are the highlights of the testing:
NOTE* I was only testing the blank canvas. All templates were disabled.
Not one person couldn’t figure out how to get anything onto the page. Even when they figured out where the modules were, they just kept clicking on them. They didn’t realize it was drag and drop. Even after I told them (after minutes of watching them flounder in frustration) they kept forgetting and just clicking on the module and expecting it to show up somewhere on the page.
They figured out how to get a two column row on the page but they really had no idea what it was for -which makes sense since they don’t understand CSS or responsive design.
After awhile of them floundering, I told them what rows and columns were. They then spent a good 10 minutes trying to figure out how to add things to the columns. They kept thinking that the settings - with all it’s tabs - would have some sort of “add” function. Not realizing that they could drag and drop into the columns.
Two were frustrated trying to figure out how to resize the columns - they kept wanting to drag the column’s edge to resize the percentage ratio.
No one could figure out how to add a background image and when they did, they were confused on why it wasn’t taking up the full screen and why it was only the showing small portion of the image. They kept trying to drag the edges of the rows and columns to see the whole image. They didn’t get that setting the image to full width, adding content on top and adjusting padding would do this for them.
They were confused on why they couldn’t change the text color or size in the text module. I later explained that it inherits the theme’s settings and it made more sense but wanted to override it.
They kept asking for an undo button. This was a big one. Since they were floundering, they sometimes deleted things that they were trying to work on and rather than repeat the steps to get it back they wanted a button to undo. <- that might be impossible but definitely a request by the testers.
Those are the consistent highlights of the test. Remember, this was only a few people so consider it directional vs quantitive.
Thanks again for replying in such detail. I appreciate the amount of time that you’ve spent on this.
Some of the pain points, specifically 1, 4 and 7, are things that we have discussed and are considering implementing at some point in the future (1 and 4 especially). We’re knee deep in development of a few other things at the moment (check out our latest roadmap post), but I’ve saved a link to this thread in my notes to revisit when we’re done with some of that.
Thanks, Justin. Glad I could help out and glad you guys are so open to the feedback. I think what you’re doing is awesome and I am considering just sticking it out since Qards doesn’t really seem to have it together as well as you do.
I was thinking more about this and am wondering if maybe the sample size of users tested was too small and that maybe they had an easier time with Qards because it was tested after using another builder so they were already familiar with some of the concepts. That’s not to say that BB couldn’t stand some UX testing (this has inspired me to do that eventually).
The reason I bring this up though is because we did originally do a lot of research on builders and not just WordPress, but others like Squarespace and Weebly (and many obscure platforms). Some of the UX we implement is similar to those in terms of drag/drop/settings. In that regard it does feel like we are following some modern conventions for drag and drop builders.
You mentioned that you disabled the templates. Did you also disable the help tour?
Thanks again for bringing this up. It’s a great topic.
Yes, the sample size was definitely too small to be quantitive results. I think they’re more directional than anything. I will say that one of the users uses squarespace currently and was mentioning things like wanting to drag edges of the columns and rows the most.
I was also thinking about this and came to the conclusion that it wasn’t exactly a fair fight. The problem is that qards only uses templates. They don’t really offer raw page building per se. They give you a list of templates to start with and you customize from there. Whereas, I hid the templates with bb and had them start from scratch.
That said, I still think the lack of knowledge of margins, padding etc would have gotten in the way even with starting with a template. I did notice they were dragging the edges of qards to create padding and they liked it.
As you know though, we’re talking about a different set of users than you were originally targeting so take all this with a grain of salt.
Question for you:
I have edited some of the css on the current bb to sex it up a bit (less wordpressy) but will there ever be any way (api?) to create our own UI for the builder?
I have clients who would definitely be able to learn BB with some tutelage, and I have other clients who would never “get it,” no matter what. We are all wired differently!
I am lucky enough to be one of those people who loves software and usually “gets it” without needing much help in the way of manuals or tutorials (although I do enjoy a good tutorial, especially when it teaches me something I wouldn’t have though of myself!).
However, I do tend to click on items in the BB Add Content area and I’m always surprised when the Content Area closes! I often do that first, before remembering that it’s drag-and-drop. One day I’m sure the drag-and-drop muscle memory will finally click in. Meanwhile, my love affair with BB grows… and I’m very excited about the new road map!
