As a sponsored volunteer, I contributed to the UX design of the new WordPress post editor, the Site Health module, and I led the design team during the WordPress 5.7 release, along with many other small user experience and accessibility enhancements.
The problem
WordPress was getting old. New and exciting writing software appeared on the market, such as Medium and Notion, and by comparison, the WordPress writing experience felt stale. If it wanted to remain the biggest CMS in the world, it needed an update. This was a chance to redefine WordPress for years to come.
But that was also the biggest problem; WordPress is used by millions of people, and as open source software, it is also maintained by thousands of people. And a lot of them had opinions about how best to improve the writing experience. So I spent two years in a designers guild, trying to parse all the input, make mockups, and discuss the intended user experience.
The process
Every week I'd be active on the WordPress Slack, discusing design details with dozens of designers, testing new prototypes, making mockups in Sketch and Photoshop, and writing proposals and bug reports on github. To chronicle all the twists and tales of this process is impossible for any one person, but it was a thrilling and sometimes frustrating time, trying to give shape to something this huge.
During the annual WordCamp meetups, the CEO of Automattic would go on stage and demo our efforts, and armed with a ton of feedback we'd go back to the various drawing boards. Every aspect of the editor underwent lots of iterations, and we had to consider a wide target audience, as WordPress is used by large corporations and mom bloggers alike.
The result
the first complete version was shipped in WordPress 5.0, and it has been steadily improved upon in the years since. And based on our efforts in the post editor, work continued towards using this block-based experience to also edit the look of your site, something that would transform the way you build a WordPress website.
I'm proud of the result we achieved through the disorganized chaos of open source development, and I learned a lot about communication, collaboration, accessibility, and working at scale.
Other projects
Site Health
This essential module of WordPress monitors your site's 'health' - a collection of checks for potential performance problems, incorrect server configurations, and possible security risks. All these checks add up to a score that tells you how well your site is doing, and gives you actionable advice to fix problems.
When I came onto the project, it was still a separate plugin maintained by one person. Together we looked at the ideal user experience, specced out our intended improvements, and discussed the best way to show this gamified score that was not part of the project yet at that time. Because I was also working on Gutenberg, I borrowed some of its design language, to set a kind of benchmark of what the wider WordPress backedn could look like in this new style. We had to compromise on this a little bit on that ambition to not make this thing feel too different from the rest of the backend, but it makes it a nice mix between familiar and new. When the project was completed, it was accepted into WordPress core, which means every WordPress install ships with this UI as part of it now.
Notification Center
I took the lead in proposing a centralized notification system for the WordPress backend, to give plugins a unified official location to put all their notifications. This would eliminate the need for each plugin author to create their own messaging system and flood the backend with banners and alerts that could literally appear anywhere they wanted - a big nuisance for many site owners. I created several mockups and held meetings to discuss the UX. When it was time to enter pre-production, I handed it off to other designers to refine the proposal into a workable spec.
Accessibility reviews
With some many users, accessiblity is an important pillar of WordPress design. Together with an Italian a11y expert, I reviewed areas of the backend for accessibility problems and mocked up improvements. This taught me a ton about designing for all kinds of physical impairments, and essential WCAG principles like color contrast, content hierarchy and screen readers; Valuable knowledge that I still use daily.
WordPress Showcase
Part of the WordPress.org website is dedicated to showcasing sites made with WordPress. It needed a new design, so together with a frontend developer and the marketing team I designed a new look for this section of the site.
WordPress 5.7 release
After contributing to Gutenberg, Site Health, and many other areas of WordPress as part of the design team, I was asked to lead a WordPress release. This meant I had to create a plan for which features to ship, prioritize them for team sprints, make sure they got done on time, and work with the other release leads to ship them in the new version. It was an honor to get to do this, and it was nice to be able to approach tasks from a management angle so that I could actuall push things along. In the end we shipped almost everything that we set out to do.