It starts out simple enough. You’re building a webapp, and you want people with a certain role (read: Administrator) to have access to a separate “back-end” part of the system. They have to do different stuff, so it makes sense to make a separate administrator interface. A classic example of this is something like WordPress, where you have a totally different area of the website to sign into, and you have a myriad of different tasks you can perform.
At first, it seems to make sense — administrators have various goals they want to accomplish, like mass-approving comments or creating a draft of an article. The part of a blog that faces the reader is usually geared towards reading content, not making changes to it.
Lately, I’ve been thinking about something that I remember hearing a while back from Edward Tufte. The phrase is “administrative debris,” and Ryan Tomayko wrote about it a year ago.
Anyway, I’ve had the itch to finally write my own blogging app for personal use, and I’m following some of the ideas that Ryan writes about — things like using in-place editing, and making content look identical between reading/editing.
The nice thing about having your content be your interface is that it’s a lot quicker to make changes. Because it’s less painful, I’ll be more likely to write.
- I don’t have to remember the secret admin URL.
- When I’m logged in, I don’t have to parse a cluttered admin interface.
I’ll post more thoughts about design of the project when I get closer to actually having it live.
Is it that much difficult to remember an admin url?
As web apps mature, they are going to try to map more closely to an individuals mental model. Squarespace is a great example of a web application that let’s a user customize site objects without having to leave the page. I agree. Why leave the page when I can make changes right then and there.
It’s an interesting concept, and for the most part I agree with it — it works well within a certain scope. However, it falls apart on larger sites where admins have access to more information than a user does. Even something as simple as a list of registered users that an admin can see and a user can’t requires additional UI work.