A slightly belated recap due to general pre-WCEU excitement, this is what the Design Team has been focussing on in May 2018:
Weekly meetings
Our weekly meetings occur on SlackSlack Slack is a Collaborative Group Chat Platform https://slack.com/. The WordPress community has its own Slack Channel at https://make.wordpress.org/chat/. at these times:
- Ticket triage Monday’s from 16.30-17.00 UTC
- Weekly Meeting on Wednesday’s from 17.00-18.00 UTC
The weekly meeting agenda and meeting notes are published on our team page for more detailed insights into our activity.
We want to emphasise that all design work for WordPress is done by volunteers and that everyone is welcome to join us for contributing.
Onboarding
We really want to get more people to contribute to WordPress design. However, we notice people are struggling with this. Therefore, we created a document to collect thoughts and insights into what the experience of contributing to design is like. Please feel free to add your thoughts to it, as this will help us improve our onboarding process.
Handbook
We’re currently reviewing our handbook and will hopefully gain new insights on how to improve both structure and content. This includes a better, more complete resources-and-assets section, less distributed information. If you have created templates, designs, or other things that the WordPress community could benefit from by adding it to the handbook, please contact one of our team reps.
Invision
People contributing to the design team, can get an enterprise license for Invision. We now have 34 people with access, and the first prototypes and collaborations are there. If you want to contribute to the design team and get Invision access, you can request this via the Invision access form.
Calls for design
We’re actively reaching out to the other teams for calls for design, which resulted in:
- Creating copy for creating a blog. @cathibosco has been working on a page for the Growth Council to give information on how to create a blog. Still work in progress, but it’s coming together nicely. The page is a huge challenge keeping it accessible and usable because it contains lots of content and lists.
- The core-php team request design feedback on #43986
We discussed the screenshots and found there’s a lot of information in a small window. Summarized, we have a few suggestions that we will add as feedback to the ticket, together with a screenshot by @melchoyce, who originally designed the pluginPlugin A plugin is a piece of software containing a group of functions that can be added to a WordPress website. They can extend functionality or add new features to your WordPress websites. WordPress plugins are written in the PHP programming language and integrate seamlessly with WordPress. These can be free in the WordPress.org Plugin Directory https://wordpress.org/plugins/ or can be cost-based plugin from a third-party cards. - The training team asked for an infographic for Github
This ticket was adopted by @khleomix and new contributor@estelaris, props for that! Together with @juliekuehl, they will work on this. - Help for redesign lear.wordpress.orgWordPress.org The community site where WordPress code is created and shared by the users. This is where you can download the source code for WordPress core, plugins and themes as well as the central location for community conversations and organization. https://wordpress.org/
This website has not been used since 2013 and needs some TLC. The training team reached out to the design team to redo the website. As this is a fairly large project, there’s no set expectation for finishing this soon. It will either be a project of months. We discussed breaking this project into smaller chunks, starting with research. Props for new contributor Andi who picked up this call to do initial research.
If you have a call for design, please post it as a comment to our latest meeting agenda, or post a call in our Slack channel
Ticket triage
On a weekly basis, we go over the oldest core 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: #14215, #32942, #23361, #21934, #18264, #15981, #33573, #39436, #15971, #37799, #17360, #41349, #17698, #16853.
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.-tickets that need design or UX- or UI-feedback
In a recent meeting, there was a question if we ever triage meta-tickets. We haven’t done for a while since the list of coreCore Core is the set of software required to run WordPress. The Core Development Team builds WordPress. tickets got out of control. @karmatosed suggests bringing this in once a month and asks if anyone is interested in leading this, but no decision on this has followed. 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. Same goes for core tickets that have the label ‘needs design’. These tickets usually take too much time to discuss during triage, but would be ideal to work on async or during contributor dayContributor Day Contributor Days are standalone days, frequently held before or after WordCamps but they can also happen at any time. They are events where people get together to work on various areas of https://make.wordpress.org/ There are many teams that people can participate in, each with a different focus. https://2017.us.wordcamp.org/contributor-day/ https://make.wordpress.org/support/handbook/getting-started/getting-started-at-a-contributor-day/. at WordCamps.
Overall improvement of communication and structure
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.
Defining design
We’re recognizing a trend in a lot of the tickets that we’re trying to support on and tackle. We often run across problems that have been called out but aren’t easily explained. As a design team, we can start to work on some of these tickets by clearly articulating (and encouraging others outside of the design team to do the same) the problem in a visual way. The idea is that as someone new to the ticket (or coming back for the 10th time in as many years) can get the basic gist of the ticket in a 10 second glance. Sketches, videos, screenshots, very simple bulleted lists, these are some of the ways to tackle this.
Thank you to everyone who has been actively involved with WordPress design, both online, offline, visible or not. You matter.