[wp-ui] First steps

Tue Jan 19 17:51:13 UTC 2010

Hi Jane,

My name is Mark Kellie

I'm an interface designer and work for a financial spread betting company. I design user interfaces for websites, dealing platforms, online banners, microsites etc.

My main skill is design and secondly solving user journey problems.

Would be happy to help develop these parts of wordpress that haven't had much attention. I don't have a million hours to dedicate but would definitely be keen to be part of the team and I'm sure I'll be able to contribute.

Based in London UK.

Thanks

Mark

-----Original Message-----
From: wp-ui-bounces at lists.automattic.com [mailto:wp-ui-bounces at lists.automattic.com] On Behalf Of Jane Wells
Sent: 19 January 2010 17:10
To: wp-ui at lists.automattic.com
Subject: [wp-ui] First steps

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.

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.

I'm in the process of setting up a site for this group to use a la wpdevel.wordpress.com, 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 wordpress.org 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.

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.

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.

Who's next?
Jane

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