WordCamp Europe Contribution Day

This is an update on what the design team did at WordCampWordCamp WordCamps are casual, locally-organized conferences covering everything related to WordPress. They're one of the places where the WordPress community comes together to teach one another what they’ve learned throughout the year and share the joy. Learn more. Europe contribution day. This time we tried a few things, we did both group work and workshops. The idea in doing this was we gave people a range of options to help them contribute. A huge thanks to everyone that attended.

GutenbergGutenberg The Gutenberg project is the new Editor Interface for WordPress. The editor improves the process and experience of creating new content, making writing rich content much simpler. It uses ‘blocks’ to add richness rather than shortcodes, custom HTML etc. https://wordpress.org/gutenberg/ session

The first session of the day in the coreCore Core is the set of software required to run WordPress. The Core Development Team builds WordPress. room was about getting to know Gutenberg, we encouraged as many to go to that. It is important that designers get to also know and be involved.

Workshops

The first workshop was lead by @michaelarestad and myself. We began by adding our thoughts around functionality of WordPress. We added these post-it notes to a wall and then did some organising them. From that we moved into looking at the problem areas, what experience had a positive or negative impact – we used a happy/sad scale. We also looked at what the experience was like away from desktop. Here is a gallery containing photos from that workshop session:

After that session, @johnmaeda took us through some explorations. We got to know everyone who was there and also amongst other things explore what our fears were about WordPress. Here is a gallery of that workshop:

The groups

After lunch, we moved into group work. This was where we roughly split into the following groups:

  • Gutenberg: focusing on usability testing and getting everyone focused on finding the issues with Gutenberg and enabling others with the usability tests.
  • CustomizerCustomizer Tool built into WordPress core that hooks into most modern themes. You can use it to preview and modify many of your site’s appearance settings. and UIUI UI is an acronym for User Interface - the layout of the page the user interacts with. Think ‘how are they doing that’ and less about what they are doing./UXUX UX is an acronym for User Experience - the way the user uses the UI. Think ‘what they are doing’ and less about how they do it. triage: we combined those areas and ended up focusing more on ticket triage.
  • Dashicons: this team sped through tickets and really got a lot done.