Welcome! This all-volunteer team needs designers of various kinds. See our handbook and drop into #design for volunteer opportunities.
Our vision is to be the go-to resource for design for other teams across the WordPress open source project.
Transcript of the whole meeting can be found in our Slack-channel.
Special topic: we spent a good portion of the meeting discussing how to bring together a few amazing Sketch resources that have been developed. The hope if that having one source of truth will make it easier to accelerate design for anyone working in the WordPress community. See Slack for the whole discussion but some highlight are noted here.
The resources and creators are:
Where will this live?
How can we all contribute to this and help?
Nothing this week
@cathibosco requests to discuss the ‘Make a blog post‘ page design
Infographic of Training Team workflow
And that was all the time we had today.
The weekly design meeting is Wednesdays at 17.00 UTC. If you have anything else to add, please comment below or mention it on our Slack channel.
See Inbox column on Trello board.
See Calls for Design column on Trello board. Anything to be archived? Follow up on in-progress cards, etc.
Filter Trello board for ‘needs discussion’ label. If none, triage any Trello cards that are not yet owned.
The weekly design meeting is Wednesdays at 17.00 UTC (see it in your time). We’ll be discussing the topics below. If you have anything else to add, please comment below or mention it on our Slack channel.
A brief introduction round: who is who? So new and old contributors get to know each other and each other’s background
What has been the experience of leading and attending the design table at contributor days at local WordCamps recently?
See Inbox column on Trello board.
See Calls for Design column on Trello board. Anything to be archived? Follow up on in-progress cards, etc. If time allows, see #needs-design tickets from Trac.
Filter Trello board for ‘needs discussion’ label. If none, triage any Trello cards that are not yet owned.
Today’s meeting agenda was a bit light, so we opened did open hours to allow for folks to chat about anything specific items. You can also read the Slack chat log.
@cathibosco asked for feedback on the latest page designs for “Create a Blog”, great job Cathi! We discussed the pages that have been created so far and had some ideas for improving readability and breaking up the long (but important) copy on the pages. If you’re interested in giving feedback feel free to jump in!
We discussed several of the Trello cards briefly, but didn’t have a major update.
@EstelaRueda asked for some ideas as she is planning for Contributor Day at WC Nijmegen next week. We discussed some great analog ways to get folks prototyping and sketching as they contribute to current design needs in WordPress. You can checkout the Slack chat to jump to that section. Specifically speaking for this event it was recommended to focus on improving the handbook for design.
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And that’s it for today. If you want to get involved feel free to jump into Slack and weigh in. We’d love to have you!
Design meeting agenda for Wednesday July 25 at 17.00. We’re trying a more basic and open agenda, so if there’s anything you want to discuss, please add it to the comments below, or mention it on our Slack channel.
See Inbox column on Trello board. New requests for design made via the Make blog, Slack, etc. will be transferred to Inbox each week, along with any new cards that need to be acknowledged.
During the weekly meeting a week ago, there was interest in having a video learning session using Zoom for design triage. This would be how to contribute using both Trac and also GitHub for Gutenberg. It is aimed at being for designers who want to learn more about what triage is and how to use Trac and GitHub, but anyone is welcome.
Some points suggested to cover are:
The session with be on August 6th at 16:30 – 17:30 UTC. This will run instead of the usual triage session and be an hour long. Zoom will be used for the session over Slack, the idea being to ‘see’ and screen share.
A link will be given as a comment here and in chat.wordpress.org #design before the start of the meeting. You will need to have the Zoom software installed to join.
In order to make this a session that everyone attending gains the most from I would love to know what you would like to see covered in this session. The session itself will have a format but questions along the way are most welcome.
At WordCamp Europe Contributor day we had some time (thanks to #no-wifi) to think through some unique problems facing WordPress.
One issue we discussed,, and which we want to share here to get others weighing in (don’t want this to be a situation where the folks at WordCamp come up with an idea and it ends there), is the sidebar in the WordPress admin. This discussion was initially shared in the Slack design channel, you can read the full conversation there.
Our initial assumption (and to be clear, this is an assumption at this point), is that the sidebar could be improved.
Some of the thoughts that came up so far:
At Contributor day we came up with some initial suggestions for simplifying grouping in the sidebar. One question that was raised: what if there was a way to edit the sidebar experience as a user or admin of your WordPress website. Joy Reynolds shared an existing plugins that do just that.
If we pursue this further we need to identify the best way to do proper research to validate or invalidate any assumptions for what could be changed. In addition we could do analysis on other good sidebar interfaces, as well as introducing new folks to the current sidebar.
One of the challenges we’d face with this (which is perhaps just an opportunity) is that we don’t have great data on how the sidebar is being used currently. However, a lot can be done with just 5 users testing something out, so long as the tasks you’re giving them are very clear. Based on research from the Nielsen Norman Group, you only need 5 participants in a user test to uncover 85% of your usability problems.
At this point I’d love to hear any thoughts on next steps and if there’s further exploration that could be done here.
On Thursday, June 14th, WordCamp Europe 2018 kicked off with contributor day in Belexpo Centar in Belgrade, Serbia. It was the first time @joshuawold and myself co-lead the design table on this scale. With over 30 people signing up for contributing to WordPress design, we were pretty excited to start the day!
So how do you prepare for contributor day as table leads? As Monique had some experience from leading a design table at smaller WordCamps and Joshua had none, we were looking to find a way to prepare and make contributor day for design succeed. We had a few pre-contributor day chats with @karmatosed, an experienced design table lead. She really helped us to get started, thanks again for this. Besides Tammie, Milana who was involved in organising WordCamp Europe reached out to us and provided us with answers to questions we had. Besides this, we reached out to other table leads to see if they would benefit from having a designer at their table during contributor day to work on specific questions.
Two questions often asked are:
As a new contributor (I’ve only been active for less than a year), these were questions I had as well. Working on WordPress design isn’t often as tangible as resolving tickets and fixing bugs. It’s often more about discussing stuff and giving feedback on issues from a designers eye perspective. Sometimes, issues are years and years old and may never be implemented at all. This can be discouraging and frustrating, so one thing we worked on was setting expectations.
With design not being one of the first choices of people attending contributor day, we were still pleased with the 20+ people who took the effort to join the design table.
So a big thank you to Volker, Michiel, Marius, Tim, Estela, Davide, Ivan, Jayman, Tsotne, Roberto, Vincenzo, Rich, Daijel, Giuseppe, Jasper, Vasilis, Ana and all the others whose names we didn’t get. We loved working with you and hope to see you around online or at other contributor days.
Contributors to the design table at WordCamp Europe Contributor Day discussing some ideas
To have a quick start for attendees who contributed before, we decided to split the group in two: while Joshua onboarded new people, Monique discussed some existing tickets with contributors with more experience. To save some time and make people more familiar with Slack, we asked the contributors to introduce themselves in our Slack channel. Unfortunately, the wifi broke, which sort of sabotaged our ideas. However, Joshua started a sketching excersise to get the new group going. In the meantime, Monique remembered a ticket that was discussed with the accessibility team online. Together with the accessibility experts present in Belgrade, Tim, Jayman, Vasilis, and new contributors Rich and Jasper worked on some suggestions for a new way to display update notifications in a more accessible way. Together with Davide and David Needham from the training team, Estela gained some new insights on the infographic she had already been working on online.
So instead, we went for a different approach: we broke the group into two smaller groups and asked them the following questions:
What’s your biggest WordPress frustration?
This resulted in some overlap, from where we got smaller groups of people started discussions and working on some ideas to improve parts of the WordPress user experience and user interface:
Why do you love WordPress?
What do you need to contribute?
After lunch, wifi still wasn’t back online, which was a bit of a problem, since we wanted to introduce people to giving feedback on WordPress tickets from a design perspective, as this is a big part of the work we do. However, we still got the group to work on 4 tickets and moved the following forward: #35554, #40218, #29875, #42649.
We gained some valuable insights during our first time as design table leads we’d like to share here.
Again, thanks to everyone who attended. If you have anything you’d like to add to this post, please feel free to add a comment.
The weekly design meeting is Wednesdays at 17.00 UTC (see it in your time). We’ll be discussing the topics below. If you have anything else to add, please comment below or mention it on our Slack channel.
See Inbox column on Trello board. New requests for design made via the Make blog, Slack, etc. should be transferred to Inbox each week, along with any new cards that need to be acknowledged.
See Calls for Design column on Trello board. Anything to be archived? Follow up on in-progress cards, etc. Also see #needs-design tickets from Trac.
Filter Trello board for ‘meeting’ label which means that some work has gone into the card, and we have enough detail to make a decision on it.
Design team related
Filter Trello board for ‘needs discussion’ label. If none, triage any Trello cards that are not yet owned.
The full transcript of this meeting is can be found on Slack.
Since last week, we slightly changed our meeting structure, starting with incoming calls for design. This way the actual design requests get more focus. When there’s time left, we discuss other topics or projects we’re already working on.
Final question comes from @joyously who asks if we ever triage UI/UX feedback for meta tickets.
@karmatosed says we haven’t done for a while, since the list of core tickets got out of control. She suggests bringing this in once a month and asks if anyone is interested in leading this, but no decision on this follows. The list has been added to the feedback section of the design handbook, so if you want to work on one of the tickets async, feel free to take a look.
Thanks everyone for attending and making this an interactive and constructive meeting again.
