January 2018 has been pretty good for the Design Team, with new team reps. This is what we’ve been focussing on:
Weekly meetings
Our weekly meetings occur on two days:
- Ticket triage Monday’s from 17.30-18.00 UTC
- Weekly Meeting from 18.00-19.00 UTC
The weekly meeting agenda and meeting notes are published on our team page for more detailed insights on our activity.
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/
Designers continue to be involved in this project, with two design leading and many more contributing.
Calls for design
We’re actively reaching out to the other teams for calls for design, which resulted in:
- Marketing team reaching out for a design for featured images on Why use WordPress and Looking for way to contribute and for a WP Jargon Glossary PDF design
- AccessibilityAccessibility Accessibility (commonly shortened to a11y) refers to the design of products, devices, services, or environments for people with disabilities. The concept of accessible design ensures both “direct access” (i.e. unassisted) and “indirect access” meaning compatibility with a person’s assistive technology (for example, computer screen readers). (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accessibility) team asked for design feedback on tracTrac Trac is the place where contributors create issues for bugs or feature requests much like GitHub.https://core.trac.wordpress.org/. tickets #40985, #42778
- @mapk called for designs on illustrations
- CoreCore Core is the set of software required to run WordPress. The Core Development Team builds WordPress. requested a design for Servehappy
- MetaMeta Meta is a term that refers to the inside workings of a group. For us, this is the team that works on internal WordPress sites like WordCamp Central and Make WordPress. asked for an icon for code standards
- A design for a Gutenberg compatibility testpage for plugins
Ticket triage
On a weekly basis, we go over the oldest tickets that need 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./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. feedback to catch up. The goal of these is to look at each one and see if we can progress the issue in some way. Tickets that were discussed this month are: #22579, #28232, #34281, #39624, #19912, #40432, #33148, #40123, #33627. #18402, #38869, #25219
We’re now pretty much caught up and the oldest tickets are less than 9 months old.
Overall improvement of communication and structure
To make it easier for new contributors to find out what’s going on, we’ve started improving our overall structure and communication.
- We’ve improved the welcome text on the Design Team page
- We’ve set up a skeleton agenda for our weekly meetings
- We’ve improved the Design Team Trello Board in addition to the handbook
- We’ve created a Google Doc of contributing designers and their expertise
Team reps
We have three new team reps on the design team. Besides sitting team reps @Karmatosed and @Melchoyce, we now have @Joshuawold, @Boemedia and @Mizejewski added as new team reps.