Technically this can't be critical, since this isn't new to D8. It is, however, the single biggest barrier to entry to Drupal and the cause of much frustration/abandonment of new users, so think of this as "Major++."
Drupal uses weird words for everything (node, entity, content type) and/or takes existing words and changes their meaning to something "Drupalish" (view, block, module, page, plugin, etc.). These do not match users' existing mental models, which is a constant source of friction in literally every usability test/training/etc. and is our biggest barrier to adoption.
A few quotes/observations from UX testing:
- "I want to see Add Page." When user thinks of a page, they conceptualize the whole page, but Drupal thinks a page is one tiny-tiny thing.
- Compared to Wordpress, "You don't have to figure out how to place your block inside your view inside your region inside your homepage."
- "If all you use is Drupal, you're not going to be able to make any other kind of website."
- Content types seem to be just for content creators, not for accepting information from the general public. "I'm not gonna use content types for making a webform. Why would I do that?"
Long-term, we need to conduct a full-scale terminology review and actually change some of these labels, at least in the user interface, if not also the code. But that's Drupal 9.
#2513398: Conduct a full-scale terminology review of Drupal (Fix Drupal terminology so that it is more accessible to users) →
In the meantime, something we can do for Drupal 8 is add text/video training/tour during installation/on the front page that introduces users to Drupal terminology. (See CGP Grey's videos as a possible inspiration: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eE_IUPInEuc)
We should keep this resource in Help as well and let folks know that's where to find it later.