HI All,<div><br></div><div>I'm Joel Goodman. Currently I'm a designer/front end developer/web marketer in Higher Education, located about 45 miles East of St. Louis, MO (Central Time). I also freelance and build out most of my projects in WordPress (both .org and MU). WPMU gets rolled out a lot at the college I work at as do .org installs and I am the main designer/support/developer for all of them.</div>
<div><br></div><div>I do a lot of training for people who don't know much about using the web and thus focus a lot of my time on explaining backend UX and [trying, most of the time] getting non-technical people to understand workflows or even simple WYSIWYG editors. So I keep my eye on UI issues and come up with solutions where I can.</div>
<div><br></div><div>I do more interface and layout design than I do icons/logo/branding, so I think I'll be especially adept to contributing here.</div><div><br></div><div>Happy to help design, tweak, suggest layout. WP has done a ton for me and I'd like to offer any assistance I can muster in this. Glad to meet you all!</div>
<div><br></div><div>--<br>Joel G Goodman<br>@joelgoodman<br><a href="http://joel.thegoodmanblog.com">http://joel.thegoodmanblog.com</a><br>
<br><br><div class="gmail_quote">On Tue, Jan 19, 2010 at 11:10 AM, Jane Wells <span dir="ltr"><<a href="mailto:jane@automattic.com">jane@automattic.com</a>></span> wrote:<br><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex;">
Hi everyone. Almost 300 people have signed up for this list, which was way more than I expected. I'm not sure how many of you are people who actually want to get involved and contribute to the UI/UX work that goes into making WordPress, vs. how many are developers or users who just want to keep up with what's going on or offer feedback on other people's design work, so I think the first thing this list should do is help everyone get to know who's here. Lurkers need not do this, but if you're planning to contribute to the UI work ahead, please email this list and tell us a little bit about you: Your work background/current job, specific design/usability/accessibility skills/talents that we should know about/make use of, what you hope to contribute to WP UI, your location/time zone, and maybe the one UI thing you would like to address in WP if given the chance. My main goal here is to find out how many people of all the subscribers are actually people who can wireframe, make comps, run usability testing, etc, vs. simply wanting to weigh in with opinions on the work of others (which can happen on Trac tickets). This list is meant to be a working group.<br>
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After people have had a day or two to introduce themselves, we'll have a better idea of how many people are actually planning to participate in this list for now, and can plan accordingly. I've got a list as long as my arm of potential design projects we can divvy up into groups, so knowing people's backgrounds and interests will help determine which projects we hit first. We can also then decide on a day/time for a weekly UI chat in IRC.<br>
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I'm in the process of setting up a site for this group to use a la <a href="http://wpdevel.wordpress.com" target="_blank">wpdevel.wordpress.com</a>, and will start adding people as authors once we have created teams and begun working on projects and there are things to report. I'll need to know your <a href="http://wordpress.org" target="_blank">wordpress.org</a> login name to add you to the site. Usability people are welcome and encouraged to speak up also, not just designers. Getting the plan up and running for distributed testing is on the goals list, too.<br>
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I guess I'll start. I'm Jane, and am the main UX person for WordPress. I led the admin redesign of 2.7, and work closely with the core team on UI changes. We never have time to get to everything, so there's still a ton left to do. I work for Automattic, which donates a big chunk of my time to the open source project. Before this job, I'd worked at agencies, companies and research groups in almost every front-end web job there is over the last 10 years. Though mostly UX stuff, I've also done project management, content development, HTML, visual design, testing, etc. Right now I'm a bottleneck for UI changes in WordPress, and anyone who works in this industry knows that it takes a lot longer to create a wireframe deck than it does to sketch an idea, so I'm hoping to grow this group into a healthy contributor community so that I can step back into more of a advisory/curatorial role rather than slowing things down while I draft wireframes or conduct individual testing sessions. I'm on the east coast, and would love it if the weekly chat could be during the day sometime before 3pm, but if the majority needs to have an evening meeting instead, I can work with that. I traditionally do wireframes in Omnigraffle, but would like to find a good open source tool (the ones I've tried haven't been great) that we can all use for this if possible. I generally go for Photoshop for comps, and have not found GIMP to be an adequate substitute, though I'd love to move visual design to open source tools as well. Suggestions are welcome.<br>
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I'll be happy to answer questions, point to resources etc for those who want to get involved. However, this is not the right place (yet, anyway) to come if you are just getting started and want to learn the design/UX trade as a new career move or something. I'd like to start off with more experienced UI/UX people just to get some processes nailed down. I hope that in the future the WP UI group will be an awesome place to come to learn new skills.<br>
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Who's next?<br>
Jane<br>
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