This spring I spent time contributing to The WordPress Governance Project. WordPress has grown a lot over the course of my career. I have been working with WordPress and working on the web since 2004. Like many others, I have sacrificed personal time while feeling fortunate to be able to contribute back to the community in various roles. I currently work as a Consultant and UX Architect with some distinguished teams.
Let’s Talk About the “word” Governance
Let’s talk about the “word” Governance. As a consequence of this work I have been talking with a wide range of individuals in the WordPress ecosystem. It seems the actual word “Governance” sometimes causes confusion. Expressions like, “Governance sounds so controlling, dominating, or negatively political in its influence. We are an open source community we are reluctant when we hear the term Governance. So we’ll keep and eye or an ear open about it but that sounds kind of negative.”
Others, (many with previous positive experiences in their professional lives regarding Governance models) voiced support, “Wow, that is much needed, we really need help with useful conflict resolution, getting better at including dissenting opinions, inclusive design practices, accessibility standards, roadmaps, community representation, ethics, decision making, codes of conduct in the project (not just at WordCamps), inclusive, fair participation, .com and .org confusion, and influence on bigger topics about the future of the web – especially since we are now over 1/3 of the web.” I have learned so much and this process has been very enlightening. I think the work we have been doing will benefit the entire ecosystem and the larger web too.
I personally believe the larger web needs WordPress to get this right.
The interviews, mind maps, personas, scenarios, and journey maps we have been contributing are useful for facilitating important conversations. They are also useful for helping us to collectively identify problems and frustrations our community struggles with as we scale and grow.
I do not have all of the solutions. I do find myself in the unique position of being able to facilitate important conversations so we can work together to support the project and our beloved community better. We have started by executing tactics to reveal actual evidence, isolating and identifying problems that are in need of solutions, researching other governance models, and having conversations about what is not working well and how we could make it better. Good governance models can support and empower projects. I think it is important to understand this when we hear the “word” Governance.
If you would like to share an experience that you have had contributing, volunteering within the project or using the program that you think would be useful to visually map. Let us us know in the WP Governance Slack Channels or on the WPGovernance website so we can continue the work together. The upcoming hypothesis work will be important too!
In my opinion we are at the cusp of a new era on the web. These topics for for example: Ruined by Design: How Designers Destroyed the World, and What We Can Do to Fix It by Mike Monteiro. A lot needs to change for the better especially as things scale. Designing a better web takes intention and resources. My teams work hard to remove frustration and confusion across a wide range of business models, platforms and applications. Open source projects like Gatsby, AMP, Drupal, Firefox/Mozilla, and WordPress get some things right. Let’s take the opportunity as we move the web forward to do it better. We are all stakeholders with a lot to be proud of and EVERYONE wins when we succeed. Let’s get this right, together.
Our UX work is/will all be published at WPGovernance website too. Here is a look at some of the UX tactics we are conducting. Props to Morten Rand-Hendriksen and Rachel Cherry for launching this important initiative and to all the teams working in their free time too. There are too many of you to call out individually – you know who you are! Thank you
Journey Maps
We are working on developing the vision of (open source) WordPress Governance. It is a lot of responsibility to imagine what an ideal experience can be, then render the governance documentation to achieve and support that experience.
We have broken this task into smaller components from a series of UX tactics. (interviews, live usability observation, personas, scenarios, & journey maps).
How I lead the team to work through the UX tactics:
- Identify Stakeholders and groups of Stakeholders in WordPress ecosystem
- Observe & interview people as they use current conditions in the WordPress ecosystem to work through tasks
- Note the order of steps use cases takes and measure each step frustrating or delightful
- Create journey maps that shows the experience of each with a horizontal timeline and marker that represent each step
- Measure frustration and delight on the map using a vertical timeline
- Resulting maps shows the current experience for that scenario
- Create different maps for each Stakeholder and look for patterns that emerge
Many contributing members of the WordPress community participated in the work we completed so far. The following documentation and research is for identifying specific evidence (pain points) and experiences useful for facilitating important conversations.
A journey map is a diagram that visualizes the journey of stakeholders as they interact or accomplish tasks within the WordPress project.
How to read this document and journey maps:
- Click through each map graphic to view and interact with the actual journey map at scale
- Each journey map highlights frustrating experiences and delightful experiences along the course of a set of tasks per stakeholder
- The pain points or frustrating experiences are highlighted in the red panels of the journey maps
- Both the delightful and frustrating experiences are noted in the bullet points below each chart
Language, Geographical, and Culturally Diverse – complete 👍
- Using WordPress multisite allows the administration staff to customize their own platform for their specific student base
- Plugin author can make requests within the WordPress channels for volunteer translators to help
- More translation support for plugins is needed
- Need to improve of the processes for adding translations for plugins in core
Individuals & Educators – complete 👍
Additional Migration Experience Map – complete 👍
- WordPress web development can meet WCAG standards with some work
- Fallback on the Classic editor proves very useful
- Great resources are available through the plugin repository
- WordPress web development can be done in compliance with Privacy Laws
- Mapping illustrates the need for WCAG accessibility compliance
- Evidence that some plugins conflict with legislation about privacy tracking
- Illustrates that documentation is not easily available for the Gutenberg editor
- Need for standardized formatting for more successful migration of sites
- Themes and plugins can cause formatting & usability issues
Site Owners for Hobby & Pastime Websites – complete 👍
- Easy to disseminate information from a WordPress blog
- Control and ownership of content
- Low cost to get started
- A lot of beautiful themes and useful plugins to choose from
- Confusion between .com and .org
- Maintenance of a website and managing plugin conflicts is challenging
- Struggles to find clear, non-technical documentation that is easily available in WordPress (maybe on dashboard)
Small Business – complete 👍
- WordPress website can grow and add dynamic functionality to grow business and increase revenue channels for a business over time
- Adding ecommerce to a site can support business growth
- Consumer audiences can transcend local regions for larger reach
- Lacks the time and resources to build and manage the website without help
- Users struggle to find best practices in WordPress, as well as finding help (paid and free) when issues arise
- Support for both initial site setup/creation as well as support for the growth & maintenance of an evolving site as functionality is added and maintenance is required
Consumers or Audiences – complete 👍
- The top search results are from recipe sites built with WordPress
- Taxonomies provide an efficient and immersive browsing experience
- Easy to share sites and site content with friends to engage with
- Poor performance, privacy, and consent concerns on some sites
- Lack of accessibility standards lead to negative impacts on the diverse use cases who browse and engage with WordPress websites (perhaps unknowingly) everyday
- Highlights the importance of considering the end-user and web standards implications the ecosystem creates
Accessibility Required… in progress
https://miro.com/app/board/o9J_kxoZaWw=/
Publishers… in progress
https://miro.com/app/board/o9J_kxoZaNo=
Enterprise – complete 👍
- Large companies invest a lot of resources and make many very important contributions to the WordPress project
- Sponsoring contributors is another support system that they bring
- Sponsoring WordCamps and infrastructure are celebrated
- Influencers of continued increased adoption of WordPress across the world
- Support features aimed at improving the reliability, security and stability of WordPress
- Leadership and team roles need to be clearly defined
- The WordPress Project is served best by being supported by a more diverse and a broad variety of individuals from a variety of large companies
- Communication channels around strategy, vision, and roadmaps need to be opened up
- As WordPress grows so does their role in the governance of the open web and a more collaborative and functional community is deemed necessary and the responsible choice
Freelance Developers & Designers – complete 👍
- WordPress is a strong and extremely welcoming community
- Developers find WordPress has great extensibility – easy to add and create plugins and themes
- Open Source is rewarding as we can contribute and make it do whatever we want
- It is possible to be sponsored to give presentations at WordCamps
- Confusion about paid/sponsored speakers vs unpaid/unsponsored speakers at a WordCamp – how the payment/remuneration affects the direction of their talk
- How a sponsorship can change the message in a presentation or project for WordPress
Makers & Entrepreneurs – complete 👍
- A growing company that grows with WordPress produces job opportunities and financial security for successful teams
- As companies and teams gain traction they often generously contribute back to the WordPress project
- Volunteers within the project are incredibly skilled and dedicated to their work and responsibilities giving extreme care to be thoughtful and sincere in their communications
- The workload on volunteers and team leads (a team of 2) all plugin reviews fall on the shoulders of a small team
- There is no known code of conduct for the WordPress Project (unlike the WordCamps) and the plugin review team often experience a lot of pressure and abuse
- A lack of ongoing UX usability testing
- A lack of productive channels for expression of frustration, concerns, and dissenting opinions
Past, Present, & Future Innovators – complete 👍
- WordPress software engineers, developers, and designers are in demand as the popularity of the platform grows and delivers reliable experiences
- Multiple authors are able to contribute within the platform
- As the community evolves and grows troubleshooting issues becomes less daunting for teams
- Improve communication and decision making to minimize the disruption experienced when a big change to WordPress occurs
- Before a big release is shipped, plugin and theme developers need an adequate amount of time to develop and test their products to ensure readiness
- Need for open communications and timeline decision making for the future
The WordPress Project: Some Paid and Some Volunteer – complete 👍
- The community works hard together and takes on extremely difficult challenges together
- Ambitious work on projects or initiatives often takes months and years of teamwork to achieve set goals and to secure forward momentum for the project
- WordPress teams often take proactive measures towards identifying deficiencies and beginning to work on solutions
- The project provides for backward compatibility through the fluid nature of the technology
- WordPress project leader sets up “Office Hours to Gutenberg and 5.0 Listening Office Hours” to create opportunities to open up the lines of communication and continues to promote transparency and improved communication moving forward
- The is tension between paid and unpaid volunteers
- Prioritization of suggestions & contributions by unpaid team members
- Projects for governments and higher ed (USA) must meet accessibility regulations and WordPress could therefore give equal weight to this priority
- Need for improved communications, transparency and inclusion for road-mapping the future of WordPress
- Improve processes, consensus, and rules as well as a role in the process for standards, inclusivity, and accessibility teams
- Consider how to organize and represent our community across the wider web and how to contribute to improving the state of the web
WordPress Community Supporters – complete 👍
- Community supporters have made some excellent professional relationships as well as some life long friends for themselves and for others
- The WordPress community builds networks of support so that people can help themselves through community events like WordCamps
- Meet others that share the same passion — WordPress
- Budget provided by Central covers the venue, swag, food, and beverages
- The price to attend and learn at a WordCamp is affordable and inclusive
- The “5 For The Future” initiative supports some of Terry’s team for some of their volunteer time working at this camp
- People travel from long distances to contribute to and to learn more about working with WordPress
- Challenges experienced by unpaid volunteers who create & execute a WordCamp in their city or territory
- Improve communication and support needed by these organizers and their unpaid contributions, challenges, and sacrifices
Grouping of Stakeholders WPGovernance MindMap | Stakeholders – complete 👍
Some are in progress – this work is ongoing.
Leave a Reply