WordPress

Guiding people to build their dream website

During my time at WordPress I worked on multiple projects focused around user onboarding. This included things like website editor education and an improved sign up experience.

A balanced approach

The biggest challenge to building a site on WordPress is to launch your website. This requires finding the right look and feel, writing or entering all the content, then finally launching your site.

There was a constant challenge in how much and what information you gather in the initial signup to set them up for success. Gather too little and the users are left with a big job. Gather too much and users won’t feel motivated to go through it at all.

I ended up prototyping and developing a bunch of concepts to push the idea of what our onboarding experience could look like. Above you can see a video of one of the many prototypes.

Easing the complexity of the Editor

For new users the WordPress Editor can be a bit scary. During testing it became clear how overwhelming it was to be presented with tools and an empty canvas.

To ease this and help users overcome their first hurdle, I helped design an onboarding system that would teach you the basics of the editor in a engaging and succinct way. The goal was to build something that could be easily customized and changed as we had different users with different level of experience.

Finding the right steps to include at the right time required a look into our support tickets and talking to users, both experienced and new. It was also important to create something that a support person could help extend without much help from a designer.

Various other projects

During my time at WordPress I also worked on other various projects like improving the way styles are set, a scraper to collect reviews for research, improving micro-interactions, and future look and feel for the admin panel. Most of these never made it to production.