WordPress Flexibility and Simplicity: Building for Users

Katie Keith:
Hey, and welcome to do the Woo. Today we’re talking about how to find the right balance between making your WordPress product customizable and simple for the user at the same time. I’m Katie key, founder and CEO at Barn2, and I’m here with co host James Kemp.

James Kemp:
Hey, yeah, I’m James. I’m the core product manager at WooCommerce and I am excited to introduce Ben, who I’m sure many of you already know. Ben and I worked together for a few years at Stella WP where Ben still resides as the Senior Director of product. Ben, welcome.

Ben Ritner:
Hey, thanks for having me. I’m excited. This is going to be a fun conversation.

James Kemp:
Yeah, for sure. So what’s your role now is quite new, right, in terms of to you? It’s new.

Ben Ritner:
So I’ve actually been in it a year at this point. It is different in that I, you know, when Stellar was formed and Kadence was acquired, I was just mostly leading Kadence. Now senior Director of Product, I have my hand, or at least my eyes on kind of all of what we’re doing across, you know, Give and Learndash and TEC and things like that. So for me it’s really fun because I get to jump in with these teams and just brainstorm how do we solve problems for customers and things like that. At the same time, I’m still very much married to Kadence and that’s where I a lot of my time is spent. Mostly because Kadence, in a lot of ways is a centralizing brand around everything we’re trying to do at Stellar. So if you want to build a site, you need a block based builder and then it’s. And now what features do you want? Do you need a donation form? Do you need a, you know, a calendar? Things like that. So staying in the heart of that makes a lot of sense for my role right now.

James Kemp:
It sounds like you’re very kind of looped into everything. I think it’s probably important to set some context around what Kadence is for anyone that doesn’t know.

Ben Ritner:
Yeah, for sure. So Kadence is a suite of products. It’s got a theme and some plugins, mostly Kadence Blocks as being the most popular. We just passed 500k users last month. So Kadence Blocks allows. It just adds blocks to the Gutenberg Editor allows you to do a lot more custom stuff, especially from a responsive standpoint of like I can design per screen size. That’s that tool. And then with the theme and then with some of our other extensions, mostly focused on the front end of how your site’s executing. So we have things like Kadence Insights which allow you to do a B testing in the Gutenberg Editor and get analytics for like what things performing better. And we have conversions at pop ups and slide ins and things like that. And then with a theme we have a lot of tools to do a lot more dynamic templating inside of WordPress. So you can conditionally add templates to certain post types based on category or metadata, things like that. But everything mostly revolving around the front end. We do have some because we have a lot of bleed in with WooCommerce and stuff. We have WooCommerce extensions that kind of again, focus mostly on the front end of. I want to be able to design custom product pages. You can do that with Shopkit where you can. We have all the blocks to build out a very custom product page that you can then apply dynamically to a category of products or all your products. Things like that.

James Kemp:
Yeah. So super flexible. Would you say now that, Kaden? Because I always picture Kadence as like a theme, but it sounds like maybe the product, the plugin side of Kadence is potentially adopted more than the theme itself. Is that right?

Ben Ritner:
That’s right. Yeah. Our theme has 300,000 active installs. So give you an idea. The part of that is, you know what a theme is very much changed from the Themeforest days of, you know, everything kind of came in with a theme. You know, you would go buy whatever on ThemeForest and it would have its builder and all of the pack. You’d install the theme and 30 different plugins would get installed and you would kind of build that way and you would think of it as building from a theme standpoint. But we’re, you know, obviously as we get more into the future of WordPress and full site editing and things like that, we’re very much trying to focus on like there’s a suite of tools that helps you build in WordPress and the theme is semi optional, not semi. It is optional. We deliberately do testing and all this kind of stuff with A lot of our plugins in other popular themes.

Katie Keith:
Interesting. Yeah, I never thought of it in that way, so that is interesting to know. But all of that is exactly why we thought you were the perfect guest for this topic, because you’re talking all about flexibility, giving people control over their website, every element of it. The average user being able to change layouts and added extra blocks and, and elements and all of that stuff. So let’s. Before we get dive right into the topic, could you explain a bit about why you think product makers, whatever sort of product it is, need to find that balance between customizability and simplicity? And what happens if you go too far to one extreme, which I’m sure a product like Kadence or multiple products like the Kadence product could easily do.

Ben Ritner:
Yeah, I think ultimately you got to understand your market. And if you’re in WordPress, our market is going to lean more towards the customized side of. I wanted, like, if they wanted easy, do it for me. I don’t need anything custom. There’s other solutions out there that are just plain easier if that’s what you want. And so there is always in my mind a bent toward my customer base generally wants more control than what you would say the average website creator is wanting. And part of the reason they’re choosing WordPress is because of that flexibility. And from a platform standpoint of I can tack on any number of plugins to do anything custom. And so I tend to think that way of like, I need to expose controls as we keep. As I keep changing and as I keep thinking about things. To me the balance always becomes how do I make it infinitely customizable but usable for a new person. And that’s where I want to live. Not in thinking so much about how do I cut people off from customization. So I want to think about how you want to customize, how you might want to do that and go, okay, giving you the ability to code in CSS in is the infinite possibility. Right? Like code straight CSS, HTML, JavaScript. Now how do I start going back from that to provide the right tools that help you do that without having to know any of that code, but still have the flexibility and then go back even further to say like, you don’t even need to understand that CSS is behind this thing. You just know you want all the images on your site to have a border radius. You don’t even know what a border radius is. You just want that curve on the outside. Right. I want to kind of continually work from that point of trying to figure out how to make things customizable from the sense of like, you should be able to do what you want, but so like not married to the language of a developer and CSS and HTML and more thinking through the terms of like, stuff. So, you know, as we’re prepping for blocks 4.0 and things like, that’s been a lot of conversation of how do we get people to not think to set things? Because globally setting things is infinitely better for maintainability and even optimization. So we’re trying to think through how do we make it to where you build your site and you never set a pixel size on anything, because you never think about having to set a pixel size on anything. You just think through terms of like, I need this text to be large and I need this text. But that all goes back to a set of settings that you. You can define what large is, whether that’s pixel or clamp or whatever based you want. But thinking through that from a perspective of like, I want to give people those controls. And at the same time, if you want to go down to a pixel size, I don’t want to prevent that. I just don’t want that to be the first experience.

James Kemp:
You see, it sounds like you’re kind of tackling both customizability and simplicity. Like in the same. You’re making the things that are customizable simple to use, while still offering customizability at a deeper level.

Ben Ritner:
Yeah, I mean, to me, that’s the realm that Kadence lives in.

James Kemp:
Yeah.

Ben Ritner:
If you don’t want customizability, then you’re just going to use Core blocks to do a lot of what you want, because then you actually don’t care about how the layout looks on a mobile device because Core doesn’t give you any of those controls. But you’re just like, I just need to set my content. It’s it. And that’s again, like, ultimately it comes down to like, I have to understand my customer base and what their needs are and how do I do that? I think none of this works right. All that custom ability stuff. If you don’t have a lot of examples that are like one click drop in. Like, our design library has 850 different patterns that you can just drop into a page where it’s like, you don’t need to know how to build this, just drop that in and then change the image and the text and things like that. So there’s all that level of like, if you want to be able to build this, you should be able to. But trying to not make that the front and center. And I think where this gets really tricky in my mind is step away from Kadence and start thinking about products like LearnDash, which is a learning management system. There you’ve got course creators that are coming in, they want the flexibility of WordPress, but they’re not, they’re not builders, they don’t want to build and design things. So giving them rigid templates to work in is actually a much going to lead to much more success based on that customer and that customer’s needs. And then for them, you know, behind the scenes, creating ways which you can hook in, which you can do in Kadence to add other elements into their templates makes it to where it can be more customizable. But it’s like finding all that balance based on what your customers need and making sure that it’s exposed to your customers. Another way to put this is like if Kadence was trying to hit the dev heavy side of the WordPress page builder market, which in my mind is like bricks kind of right now, maybe used to be Oxygen before that side of like, I want to be as mere, as close to the raw HTML and CSS as I can, but I want to work in a builder. If we were trying to do that, our designs, our goals, everything would kind of be different and we’d be thinking about things differently. But where we’re trying to be is like, I want to be powerful enough that an agency uses us because it’s so easy to hand that stuff off to a customer. And you know, even with what we’re working on right now with global styles and stuff, I want it to be very flexible for a pro user. But I also know that a big bunch of our audience is just wanting to be able to come in and say, I want to add an image here, make that easy for me. I need to change the column width here, make that easy for me. Without needing to know if it’s grid and stuff.

James Kemp:
You touched on the point about users not really needing to know the technology behind things. And I’ve thought about this a lot with AI where you’ve got all these products coming out and it’s like it’s this product with AI added to it and like AI is the selling point where I think really the selling point is what the AI can do. And I think we’ll probably start to see people lean into that a bit more where it’s not like they’re not selling a product with AI, they’re selling a product that does this thing for you in a clever way and I think that’s a good approach. Like you say, not everyone needs to know the technicalities of how something works or why something works or like what class names something is using. And I think you can take that complexity away whilst giving the same, you know, functionality. Yeah, that’s an interesting point. So when you’re kind of making these decisions, you’re obviously thinking about the type of person who is using the product or who’s going to use the product. Is that a process that you follow to actually determine that or is it something that’s just kind of intuitive to you and the team now?

Ben Ritner:
I think we go through a process. Certainly I work in a more intuitive than some of the other product strategists inside of Stellar. In terms of like, I have experience building websites pre all of this. I still build websites on the side, you know, usually one a year just to be in that space and thinking about it from that perspective. So I’m naturally going to be more intuitive whereas other people on our team are much more like, we’re going to go and do user surveys and we’re going to go and try to solve this and we’re going to do one on one video calls where we ask them to screen share and ask them to walk through something to see where do they stumble, what do they fall on and things like that. It also helps that we’re in a, you know, Stellar is a fairly large group. So it’s pretty fun when you can be like, hey, you do product strategy for give. Come and look at this. You don’t know what’s going on here, but give me your take on a lot of this so you can pool all that knowledge together. So I think we very much have, especially when it comes to other products, we’ve become much more close to like under understanding the customer Persona through feedback reviews. We have a whole customer success team that just focuses on like, why do you want a refund? Let’s get to the bottom of that and understand that truly. Or why are you having trouble at the beginning? Let’s get to the bottom of that and understand that truly. And so the customer success team always has a whole list of things that are like, this is what we’re continually seeing now. They don’t represent the entire customer base because there’s a lot of customers who don’t have problems and they’re perfectly happy. But it does give you framework to start working in of like, okay, here’s kind of the fringe on the outside and obviously we have a bunch of customers successful with this. So let’s try to work through a lot of these issues and see where it fits with our customer base. And so, yeah, I think early on I built a product for myself fundamentally, like, I wanted to. Like, I got started in 2013 with product because I built a theme that I was using for myself and then I just released it and then that got popular. And so to me, that was the entry point at this point now, like, that, you know, I’ve morphed beyond that. And so I need to be more intentional with, like, who do we actually have? And honestly, like, FaceWook is one of the best like ways in which we gather that information, because there it tends to be where a large portion of the WordPress audience that is going to give you feedback exists. And so we really gleam a lot from our FaceWook community.

Katie Keith:
Nice. Yeah, because you don’t always know in advance. A lot of strategists would choose that user Persona first, but you don’t have to do it that way around. I really like what you said about you provide the options that your typical user wants, but often they aren’t front and center. The options get more complex the more you delve into the product. So I really like that idea that you’re not overwhelming the user, but they’re there. From the Barn 2 perspective, we build plugins and we think very carefully about each feature because it adds complexity to our software. It adds significantly more testing from every release, a lot of which we automate. But there’s still complexity. More bugs will happen and need to be fixed. And it almost expands exponentially because every feature has to work with every other feature. So we are very careful about adding new features, and we do it based on strict feature requests from users. How do you cope with what must be a hugely. Much more complexity in Kadence than in any of my products.

Ben Ritner:
Yeah. So I have absolutely created features that I look back now and go, we shouldn’t have done that. That was a reaction to some loud voice.

Katie Keith:
And in public, any examples?

Ben Ritner:
I mean, I’d have to think about it, like, none that I’m losing sleep over, obviously. But certainly we have added features for more niche situations. I have added support for products that had very little user bases that I was like, I. We really didn’t need to go down that road of having to now maintain this compatibility with a product that doesn’t have a large user base. You know, we could have done that, thought about it differently, worked with that product dev to create the compatibility, things like that. There’s things certainly there, but not a Great example is coming to mind.

Katie Keith:
I think integrations is a good example because you do then have to maintain it and you don’t have control over the growth of the other product.

Ben Ritner:
Yes. Honestly, like one of the most. And this will hit you, James. One of the most annoying companies to try to integrate with is WooCommerce. Not core, because that’s all open source, but any of the WooCommerce extensions that live in the WooCommerce because there is no one, you have to go buy them all. Which is hilarious. Like all the devs know that if you’re doing dev work you can get access to a dev account. Except for with WooCommerce, they’ve never let us have access and then you have no insight into anything that’s going on and they do very little to contact you to say, hey, we’re about to push out something that will break all of your existing, existing connections. So I’ve had these issues with subscriptions and with WooCommerce membership and things like that where like I’ve done things that have extended the product. Whether it was like WooCommerce email customizer, which lives on.org has 90,000 active installs. I had to basically say like, I’m not going to Support any more WooCommerce extensions because it’s so difficult to work with the extensions that live in the Extension library on WooCommerce. And that’s picking on you because you’re sitting here, James. So I know you’re in Core, but also like, I could name a lot of other brands. I don’t feel comfortable doing that in terms of like, they’re not here to defend themselves.

James Kemp:
Yeah, we’ve talked about this as recently as today, actually, specifically around like helping third party developers be aware. And this is more around stuff that we doing Core than extensions, but it’s the same sort of thing.

Ben Ritner:
Yeah.

James Kemp:
And just a lot of the time you’ll make, you’ll put the announcement out there that you know stuff is going to change and you might want to check your products and that they’re going to still be compatible and then people don’t and then the thing comes out and then they start looking at it. And I was guilty of that as well with Iconic. So we’ve been thinking a lot about how we can put the message out there that, you know, this is going to change. You’re going to have to, you know, adapt to it in some way and try and be like more opinionated about how that stuff gets out there. So there’s not all these different ways to, you know, add specific types of product data and that kind of stuff. There’s a framework layer behind the scenes that people can utilize, but the Marketplace one is an interesting one. I’ve heard people say that before that you can’t get access to just download and test products. I feel like that may have changed and I will look into that for you.

Ben Ritner:
Nice.

Katie Keith:
Yeah, I talked to both you and Brent about that in November and still haven’t received it.

James Kemp:
You still haven’t got anything?

Katie Keith:
Yeah, yeah, I’ve been tweeting about that this week. Not about WooCommerce specifically, that was one of several examples in my head. But it seems that it’s the big companies that don’t share copies of their products to developers from other product companies. Like I asked If this week and they just, their support just said no. I’m like, well, the integration is broken. Why should I buy it? I am promoting their products. So I think it’s large companies in the WordPress space that don’t have these policies in place, which we would end up buying a lot of extensions when it doesn’t feel fair given that we’re promoting them. It’s not just WooCommerce.

James Kemp:
Yeah. And you’re not using those extensions, you’re just integrating with them. Yeah. With Iconic, we always, you know, handed out licenses to developers. I personally think it’s something that should be done.

Katie Keith:
Yeah. Well, with my tweet, everybody from a small or medium company replied saying yes. I always say yes if they’re integrating and obviously nobody from a big company replied, which are the ones that people are reporting the problems with.

James Kemp:
I mean, the other option is GPL, but then you face bad actors modifying the code before you download it and just, you know, giving presence to these GPL websites where, you know, it would be a lot. It would be a nicer process to be able to communicate directly with the actual author and. Yeah, I think it’s important. For sure.

Katie Keith:
Yeah. We’re kind of off topic though, aren’t we?

James Kemp:
Yeah, we are, yeah.

Katie Keith:
A question for Ben then with regards to themes. Generally, when people set up their own website using a theme or a page builder, it never looks as good as the demo because they don’t have that eye for design. So they might import demo content or something. Then they add their own content, their own images. It just looks awful. The spacing gets messed up. They’re adding text that’s different lines long and all sorts of things. The images are the wrong proportions. All of those are because of the choice that we’re giving to the user. So as a theme person, is there anything that you think is going too far or do you just think, well, that’s the user’s fault and not Kadences if it looks terrible.

Ben Ritner:
So a couple things there. One, I have come to the realization that fault is probably the wrong way to think about it. A lot of users love their site as poorly color choice, picture choice, text choice, as they’ve done. They’re proud of it because we have at various times offered, hey, send in your site for a showcase and been shocked at the stuff that comes in of like, you don’t understand the basics of fundamental web design. But that. So to me, like, I see that as is that the theme’s fault or whatever, and fault is probably not the right thing. Like, they. That’s a site they’re proud of and that’s what they want and it’s working for them. Now in terms of do I want to make websites prettier in general and do I want to see more pretty websites done that are using Kadence? Absolutely. And I think for us, we’re trying to solve that both from an education standpoint. And there is some intentional things we’ve done, especially in our starter templates in our pattern library where we limit the color choices not because that is fundamentally better web design, but it’s actually because if we limit the color choices, there’s less opportunity for the user to end up with something that they don’t like that they don’t even understand how they got there. So Kadence, in terms of like, right out the gate, we launched the Kadence theme with a nine color palette that set up the whole schema for, like, your colors. Now, most pro web designers are going to balk at that they’re going to go, that’s insane. I want 50 colors, I want to have every shade of every tailwind color and yada. Right. Which is fine. And we provide ways for you to add to the color palette. There’s third party tools, there’s also Kadence Blocks has a way in which you can add as many colors as you want to. So but by, by putting that limitation and then putting that limitation into all of our starter templates and into all of our pattern library, by forcing our own designers to work within that limitation, we’ve been able to in some ways help protect some of the integrity of the designs where users can put them in. It immediately matches the color palette that they have set for their site and there’s less opportunity for them to go, wow, this looks so good on your website, but once I put it onto mine, it looks horrible. So certainly, like it’s a problem and it’s one that you know you want to solve and figure out. Especially from the theme of like, I can remember early on being like helping people and support, because I’ve done a ton of support over the years and just being like really disappointed at the websites that I’m seeing in support. Like, how did you take what looked good and make it look so bad? Which is obviously not fair. Like, there is a little bit of a design is based on your own preference for sure. But I think the way in which we solve that is not by saying we’re going to give you a static template. All you can do is add text and we’re going to throw up alerts every time your text gets too long or your image doesn’t have the right contrast ratios and things like that. Like, I don’t think that’s the solve because I don’t think that’s ultimately the experience that we want to give people. We want to give people that freedom, but also the tools to stay within guidelines where they, when they choose to and then help with the education piece of, you know, here’s some really good design examples and improvements on our starter templates and our pattern library is like a big part of that. We want to keep improving those to make them even easier for people to get started with and to not end up just adding in blocks and starting to build like would much. You know, if you stay within the pattern library, you’re going to get some consistency with spacing and things like that.

James Kemp:
You must have a different variety of users though, right? You’ve probably got people that are building sites for themselves who want that design Flexibility. Then you’ve got builders or developers who are building sites for other people, agencies who are building sites for their customer. And I expect they would want to have customizability as well, but then to kind of lock it down and hand it over. Is that something that you’ve tackled like. Or the customer still has that, like freedom? Yeah.

Ben Ritner:
So we experimented with Gutenberg’s locked block mode. So essentially they have like a content editing only mode which just allows you, like, you define in the blocks what is going to be available in content editing mode. And it’s basically everything that’s inline. So you can change an image out, you can change text, but that’s locks down the sidebar. So I don’t know if you played around. This lives in Gutenberg right now and Kadence supports it. So on a row level you can do this, on a user level you can do this, but you can lock down the editor to just be content editing mode. What we have found is almost no one does this. Basically even the people who are saying, I want to lock it down for my end customer, that is so locked down that they don’t even do that to their end customers like their end users or the people that they’re handing their site off to. So what’s interesting is there’s still a very old model in my mind of like a lot of people still want to use something like ACF as the input tool because it’s so rigid and disconnected from the design. The user’s just adding ACF inputs and then that gets output into the design. We support that with dynamic content. And then there’s the people that are like, yeah, I’d like it to be more locked down. I don’t want them just run crazy. But I do want them to be able to change column widths or change which is the image on the left or the right, or add a new section without having to contact me. So what we’re currently experiment experimenting with in 4.0 is a settings mode that will be basically two, two options. One is you can define all the presets that have been set up for the site. So you can change the font size to another preset, but you won’t have the ability to actually set a pixel size. So the default mode is everything’s there, presets and pixels and all that. But you could on a user level or on a site level, things like that, you could change it to our only preset mode showed and then you would see the settings. You still have all the controls of moving blocks and adding blocks. But it would just be severely limited on what they could do in terms of like, they can’t just add any kind of padding, they can only add the kinds of padding that you’ve defined for the website or they can’t add any kind of font size or any type of font, things like that. You could you just limit it all on a settings basis instead of like purely you have no setting options. So. But yeah, it’s a problem that that exists and I think that ultimately the right answer still is elusive because it’s so based on what you as a agency slash, like if you’re a freelancer doing this and what your client wants and what we need is more flexibility into the different stages of what lockdown means and not just this is the path. Because as Core’s done with the, you know, content editing mode, like no one uses that. So that clearly wasn’t the path. That’s not to say that I shouldn’t say no one uses it. Most people don’t use it, it gets used. So it’s a path. But like understanding that there needs to be more than one, it’s interesting that.

Katie Keith:
Most people don’t use it because I believe that WordPress is alienating a certain group of its potential market through being too customizable. And I’ll give you an example. So my dad is in his 70s and he loves computers. He’s pretty computer literate, but he’s not, doesn’t know anything about web design. And I built him a WordPress website many years ago with the salient theme, which has Visual Composer and lots of options and things. And he absolutely hates it. He struggles so much and then a different time, he needed a different website for another group that he volunteers for. So he went to a really rubbish website builder that used to exist on one on one Internet and it was just template based. You choose a template, drag in your text and images and he was phoning me up saying, oh, this is loads better than WordPress. This is exactly what I mean. Well, the WordPress isn’t going anywhere. You know, he was really negative about what I do, which was very annoying. But the point is that what he needed, and I’m sure he’s not unique, was not to have customization. He wanted a website that looks good, that he can’t break and he didn’t care what the layout was, he would adapt his content to fit it. And WordPress isn’t good at that. So I like what you say, Ben, about being able to lock things down But I think maybe one reason it’s not used is that people just aren’t aware of that, agencies aren’t using it and these people, like my dad, just aren’t coming to WordPress which is obviously affecting its user base.

Ben Ritner:
Yeah, yeah, I don’t. So to me that gets into the realm of WordPress needed to be everything for all people. And that I think is not a, it’s not a path that’s going to lead in a direction of continual growth. And like to me WordPress is great because of its flexibility and it has a learning curve, but it’s worth it. Like, right, that’s the pitch. And if you have that, as you’re like, this is the path to go forward with, then you can say like, yeah, there are other tools out there that will do that for you, that will be very easy. And for your dad, like that’s, you know, you could say that’s why GoDaddy’s new AI builder, which if you’ve used is incredibly limiting. It’s frustratingly so if you actually want to do anything on your own outside of what it presents you, it’s obnoxious. But it’s a very simple builder and it’s meant for that type of person. To me, I think those sites, that brochure level website is just not the market for WordPress.

Katie Keith:
Yeah, it’s a valid argument.

Ben Ritner:
And so to me, if we try to build for that and try to build for the users that are like clamoring for better performance and more react based stuff and like heavier on newer technology and maximum flexibility, like we’re going to end up with this soup that doesn’t work for anyone. And it’s a weird progression, right, because WordPress started as a blogging platform that literally the market that, that it started for is not where we’re at now, like for very simple blogs. I mean.com still makes that very simple for people, I’ll give you that for sure. But I do think that there’s got to be, especially to me, as blogging starts to die, there’s got to be a movement toward making some clear vision of like this is what WordPress and the future WordPress is going to be versus like everything to all people.

James Kemp:
Yeah, I think that’s a good point. Like the evolution of WordPress is it’s changed dramatically from what it initially was to, to now. But then the tool set is very similar to what it was like. I think part of the reason that WordPress took off is because of how flexible it is, how customizable it is. And to your point about, you know, Katie’s dad, he just wanted his content online. Like he wasn’t concerned about how it looks visually, like how many columns there are, like all that kind of stuff. He just wanted a place to put his content. And I think, like you say, I think that probably is a different audience because you wouldn’t expect someone unfamiliar with WordPress wanting to put out a simple brochure site to come in, you know, insta, even if they have to do it locally, install WordPress locally, set it all up and then push it live, or go to a website and, you know, configure. Configure their site from a blank WordPress installer. I don’t think you’d even really know where to look for like themes or plugins. You wouldn’t even know what themes and plugins are. So it doesn’t massively cater to that audience unless you go the route of a host has a, has a package that kind of pre. Configures a lot of stuff for you and guides you in the path of setting up a store in a simple way which does cater to that audience. But you’re at that point essentially you’re locking down WordPress as a host or as the service provider.

Katie Keith:
Yeah, it becomes a was or something like that, doesn’t it? It’s like a website as a service.

James Kemp:
Yeah, I think that’s something that exists to a degree. I think a lot of the WordPress providers that, you know, allow people to sign up and set up a site more easily probably don’t lock it down as much as they could do to, you know, that real simple level of this is your theme. This is how your content looks. When it’s in the theme. It’s. It’s still very flexible in what you can do with it, I think.

Katie Keith:
Yeah, yeah. So I have a question about WooCommerce, James, about what is WooCommerce’s policy about complexity versus simplicity? Because obviously commerce is adding a lot of new features and so on to Core. So how are you kind of striking that balance between the two?

James Kemp:
It’s a tricky one to do because you’re not going to please everyone. And I think that’s something that is true with like any product decision that you make. My view on it is that I and I touched on this earlier. I think I kind of want the basic functionality of whatever feature we add. So min max quantities is something that we’re discussing. I would like to see a mechanism for offering minimum maximum quantities per product. And like an official way to do that and then allow plugins to extend upon that, you know, maybe add category level conditions and you know, order level conditions, like value based conditions and things like that. On top of this basic infrastructure of this is how you set minimum or maximum quantities to a product. So that’s my approach really is like what is the primitive of this feature that the majority of merchants like, you know, if we look at like the 80, 20 rule, like what’s the primitive of this feature that 80% of merchants would utilize and the other 20% can build on top of. So that’s how I look at it. But it does depend on what that feature is in terms of like how complex it gets. Like one of the other things we’re looking at is kind of advancing our import export tools and that’s going to be pretty complex, but I think that’s targeting like an audience that would expect, you know, a certain level of customizability that you maybe wouldn’t expect in other things like minimum, maximum quantities.

Katie Keith:
Yeah, that’s true. We consider something like having central settings. I mean you’ve already got this with tax and shipping actually to turn off things like minimum quantities by default. And then you can turn it on. For example, with our WooCommerce wholesale plugin, the product level wholesale pricing isn’t necessarily for everybody. So we allow people to enable that and then that adds feels to the edit product screen so that we’re not cluttering it up for people that might not need it. So that might be a way to balance that simplicity and features as well.

James Kemp:
Yeah, it’s something we actually are discussing quite a lot at the moment. Again, it’s a tricky one to tackle because if we’re adding, if we’re pulling something that already exists as a plugin into Core, then we’re kind of putting our opinion out there that this belongs in Core. And allowing it to be disabled is basically saying, you know, maybe it might as well just be a plugin at that point.

Katie Keith:
Is it because tax and shipping can be disabled?

James Kemp:
Tax and shipping? Yeah, I think it depends on the feature. My approach would be, and this is still something we’re figuring out by the way, but my approach would be that the way that you implement these features is consistent and then maybe the UI that you use to actually modify those settings can be, you know, hidden, not hidden, adapted upon like all that kind of stuff. But I think the premise that we really want to tackle is that you should be able to do this stuff in a consistent way. That kind of solves the interoperability issues that you have with having all these different methods of doing pretty much the same thing and you know, conflicting plugins and just making this stuff like more accessible and easier for merchants to configure. So it’s still, it’s undecided like how flexible we are with allowing these features to be turned on or off. Obviously bloat is a consideration, but anything we’re adding, we’re assuming that the majority of merchants want it. So something is only really bloat if you’re not using it, which wouldn’t be something that we want to add to Core anyway. So yeah, it’s going to be hard to please everyone. And I think because it’s WordPress, it’s built on top of, you know, this kind of action based platform that probably if you really wanted to, there’s always a way to turn anything off or make it work in whatever way you want.

Ben Ritner:
But I don’t know, you guys made it almost impossible to turn off the latest product brands.

James Kemp:
Yeah. And that’s an example really I think of, you know, we should be opinionated about what we’re adding and like if we’re adding something to Core it’s because we believe that’s the way it should be used. But what I don’t want to do is add like massive complex functionality that should be plugin territory.

Katie Keith:
The majority argument’s interesting because I can’t believe that the majority of WooCommerce stores want brand or minimum maximum quantities. Actually those are things which a sizable number need but not a majority potentially.

James Kemp:
Yeah, I guess the majority of our target like merchant would be the category that we’re focusing on because I think with anything there’s so many different types of users that, that are using the platform or any platform. And yeah, it’s definitely like something that is tricky to figure out. And like I said, I think it depends on the feature as well on whether you can turn it on or off visually. And there’s probably elements of like back in stock notifications for example that you will be able to turn off because not everyone, I think offering the feature is useful to everyone, but maybe not everyone wants to actually use it. And I think it’s those kinds of scenarios where we need to think about how do you turn this off and does turning it off just turn off the interface or does it turn off the whole, you know, actual like logic behind the product behind the plugin?

Katie Keith:
Yeah, you could tie that in with turning off stock itself as well, like globally because that would make some assumptions. But it’s interesting that your view of or Woo’s view of user Personas is sort of the opposite of Ben. So Ben launched a product for himself and then analyzed who was using it and use that to fine tune the product. Whereas Woo have millions of users already and have come up with an ideal user Persona which they are now targeting, which doesn’t necessarily include all of the users that already exist or even a big proportion of them. Like I think you’re targeting bigger brands, for example, and things like that. Higher volume stores.

James Kemp:
Yeah, that’s right. And I think the concept there is that whatever we do for what you call the ideal customer is we’ll bubble down into these other brackets of customers or up into these other brackets of customers as well. But yeah, there may be stuff that, you know, not everyone uses and I think that’s the case even now. There’s probably tons of stuff in WordPress or any product that people only want one part of it and don’t necessarily use, you know, the bulk of it. But that is a thing to consider. Like how many people are going to use it? But also what are people expecting from an E Commerce, you know, product in this day and age? And you’ve got competitors to think about, like what are competitors offering out of the box? And I don’t necessarily think like all of this stuff needs to be in core, but I think the pathway to getting to getting these features that people use often should be easier. I think like if you’re a fresh user to WooCommerce, you may not necessarily know where to go to find a specific feature. And I think that’s something that needs solving as well. We are coming up to time on the podcast today, so I think if we wrap things up, I think it would be good to know specifically to Ben and Katie as well. If you could take one practical step related to the topic today away from this conversation, what do you think it would be for other product creators? Go with Ben first.

Ben Ritner:
So to me, I think you do need to understand what your audience is after you have one and not before. So, you know, you build to find an audience and then when you have an audience, you need to understand that audience better, doing user surveys, talking with them, looking at the sites, get really close to the issues that they’re having, things like that. I think that’s really important and should lead a lot of what you’re thinking about from a product strategy perspective of like, how do I make improvements and where do I make improvements? I don’t Think that’s an end all. Like people only know what they know. And so when you’re trying to be innovative, you need to be thinking outside of the realms that they’re familiar with. So we have tons of feature requests for class based global styles. We’re not doing class based global styles because I think, and I’m convinced of this and I think that we have a better solution. Now. I might be wrong, right. We might put this out and people might go, I hate this. But I think we have a better solution, one that’s actually more flexible and more intuitive. So you need to own your bets in that sense, but you need to have it very backed up by, we know for sure that customers want this ability. They want the ability to define things globally, everywhere, and then master change them and then change them on a per section and per page basis. So that kind of feedback of like really understanding is a huge takeaway. Like you just want to get close to your customers and understand what they’re doing, what they’re trying to do.

James Kemp:
Yeah, I feel like that’s advice I hear quite a lot. You know, speak to your customers. It really is one of the best ways to figure out how people are using your product and not just like speak via email, but actually have a call with them and have them walk through how they use your product. And that kind of stuff is massively useful.

Ben Ritner:
Yeah. And on that same point, the loudest customer is not right.

James Kemp:
Yeah.

Ben Ritner:
And like I said, I’ve done things that I regret now because I listened to the loudest customer and understanding that it is okay to get to put some time between when you want to do something and when you’re actually going to start working on it, to gather that feedback, to ask for it, to just even have like that feature request board where you go, what are people voting on? Like, what are they actually spending the time out of their day to go and vote on something? Understanding what those are versus one loud user and whatever on X or FaceWook or whatever, like you’ll get those and you, you have to go like, is that my actual audience or is that just one person wanting something?

James Kemp:
Yeah, I think you touched on it earlier. Like a lot of your users will not be vocal at all. They’ll just use the product and be happy using it.

Ben Ritner:
Correct. Yeah.

James Kemp:
And I think, you know, even outreach at that point is a good thing to do. Like you reach out to them rather than, you know, communicating with them when they need help with something.

Ben Ritner:
I think understanding where you are in the market too is really important. Like, people made a choice to choose you. Why? Like, is it because you got lucky and they found you first and they weren’t in a buying decision is because some influencer told them that you’re the right choice? Or is it because they actually looked at the market and there’s something about what you’re doing that they liked better? And I think all of those things can be true. And understanding where they’re coming from and why they got there is really important too, because then, you know, you want to be able to. If you understand that, you can understand how to make them successful. And ultimately, like, if your product is helping make people successful, then it’s going to be successful.

James Kemp:
Yeah, for sure. Awesome. Well, thank you for coming on and I hope we can have another session at some point as well because I think you’ve got tons of insight into how people use WordPress and how you envision people using WordPress into the future. So I think there’s definitely a lot more we can cover.

Ben Ritner:
I’d love it. Yeah, thanks for having me.

James Kemp:
Thank you.