This is what the Design Team has been focussing on in March 2018:

Weekly meetings

Due to daylight saving time, our weekly meetings now 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/. on these times:

• Ticket triage Monday’s from 16.30-17.00 UTC
• Weekly Meeting on Thursday’s from 17.00-18.00 UTC

The weekly meeting agenda and meeting notes are published on our team page for more detailed insights on our activity.

Inspired by the Marketing team, we want to emphasise that all design work for WordPress is done by volunteers.

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.

Invision

The team is exited to have an Invision account for all designers who work on .org

Remote design summit

We want to do an online summit for anyone interested in design for WordPress. John Maeda would like to support bringing this together; Tammie Lister walked through some initial ideas for making this happen. The details are still up for discussion, but the basic idea is a summit where anyone can contribute to a specific design goal that the community has agreed on. Join the conversation on our Trello board.

Calls for design

We’re actively reaching out to the other teams for calls for design, which resulted in:

• Lot’s of progress going on on the design for native WordPress plugin headers and icons. Thanks to @cathibosco for breaking this CFD into smaller portions and clarifying what needs to be done.
• A great example of good team work amongst different WordPress expertises resulted in an illustrated Trac Guide for first timers. Props to @khleomix for picking this up!
• Small win: the grey welcome box now has a toggle instead of a close button, which drastically improves the user experience on the make.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/-pages!

We discovered that not all calls for design are well described or too large to handle. We’ve discussed writing a blog post or page for the handbook to give some guidance on what information a Call for Design could contain. We’re also trying to break up larger projects into smaller chunks to make them more manageable and easier to work on.

A few designers had a negative experience when callers for design never properly got back after designs were delivered. As a team, we feel the need to inform people who call for design how we’d like to proceed. We’re opting on setting up a guide on how the design process takes place and what can be expected from the designers, but also what we expect from the one who calls for the design.

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 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: #41191, #25419, #31634, #33473, #32228.

Overall improvement of communication and structure

To make it easier for new contributors to find out what’s going on, we’ve continued improving our overall structure and communication. This is work in progress. We currently have 3 points of focus: Onboarding, the Handbook and Outreach.

#design, #design-team