Design Development Accessibility and Open Source

David Artiss

Hi, I’m David Artiss with WordPress VIP, the content platform for large enterprise businesses. When you’re developing a plugin for WordPress, it’s easy to fall into the trap of doing something that frustrates or just puts off users. This is particularly the case when you’re building a business with it and need to promote your commercial products.

For example, when someone deactivates your plugin, it’s quick and easy to add a survey that pops up when they do so prompting them for their reason. But from my own research, it’s really not appreciated. People will often deactivate a plugin when debugging an issue, or even if they’re doing it before fully uninstalling it, it’s not a great idea to bug the person who’s already maybe not happy with the product.

Is that really a bear that you want to prod at that point? To quote a user, it’s just an intrusion on my time. I’m trying to get something done, but instead now I have to be distracted by this list of options and choose the one that gets rid of it without sharing any of my details. During my WordCamp talk, I’ll be discussing a number of things which like this, frustrate users and developers alike, and simply put, developers should try and avoid.

And as a spoiler for those listening now, there’ll not be 10, but 17 subjects discussed. From banner ads to loading unnecessary content. I hope you’ll join me at my session, 10 Things all WordPress Plugin Developers Should Avoid, which is aimed at all abilities and from users to professional developers. I’ll hopefully see you in Athens.

Giula Laco

Hi, I’m Giulia Laco, a web designer and developer from Italy. Excited to attend WorldCamp Europe for the first time in person in Athens this year. A few words about me. I’m from the old school. I’ve been working on websites since the mid-nineties. So I think I saw quite an evolution in the web medium. I experienced the design for different screen resolutions, proportions, and later on, with smartphones, also orientations. But one thing always struck my attention, and that was how to set the text on website to be easily readable. As web designers and marketers as well, we soon realized that the user’s attention on the web was hard to obtain and even more difficult to hold. On the other end screen devices and browser rendering technology were less precise and performant than nowadays and surely very far from what you could do on paper with desktop publishing applications.

But as devices are getting better now, so we are getting able to build better websites, making use of new demographic possibilities supported by the technology. Setting types on the web is key to obtain readability and engagement on your sites.

But first, you’ll have to make the site accessible. That’s why during the workshop we will start with the web content accessibility guideline, the WCAGs, in particular, where they deal with the text. Then we go through the analysis of different font characteristics with respect to legibility, and then we’ll see the several factors affecting reading, and through some examples with CSS and Figma, and even with static or variable fonts, the emergent technology, we will see how those factors and properties are correlated. So if you care about readability on websites, I hope you join me at my session that’s called Typographic readability in theme design and development.

It’ll be quite interactive. And intended for either designers or developers. In fact, you’d be able to attend the workshop in three different modalities. If you are more on the development side, you will dig into the CSS code, or if you feel more like a designer, you’ll be able to attend using Figma. And even if you are a no coder with no notebook with you, you’d be able to use only a browser on your phone, move some sliders to adjust text and still experiment the concepts.

So I hope to see you there. It’ll be fun.

Ant Miller

Hello, I’m Ant Miller from Crowd Favorite. We’re an enterprise focused agency developing WordPress and open source technologies. I will be out in Athens for WordCamp Europe 2023 with a few of my colleagues and I will be on stage on Saturday. I’m in track two and my talk is at 3:00 PM. It’s actually the last slot on the Saturday Track two.

My talk is called, The Fidelity Gap, How to Embrace the Unknown and Succeed in Development Projects. Now, the fidelity gap is a concept that I’ve come up with over 20 plus years of working at the interface of agencies and clients. And I’ve been on both sides of that relationship. It’s quite broad ranging.

I’m not gonna give you an overview of the whole thing right now. Bob suggested we focuses on one particular aspect, so I’m gonna share this. At the core of many of these relationships are interpersonal relationships, and there’s a technique I’m very interested in, which is called practical empathy. It’s been promoted by someone called Indie Young, an American designer, and initially it was developed in the realm of developing and designing user interfaces.

But actually there’s another really good application and that’s in building up really good, powerful, sustainable, resilient relationships between key stakeholders in projects. So on the client and the agency side, my talk includes a little bit of audience participation. Please don’t let that put you off.

It’s gonna be a lot of fun. I’ve learned a lot from practical empathy. I think you might be able to learn something too, and certainly I expect to learn something from the audience. The best talks at WordCamp Europe and I’m not saying mine’s gonna be the best, hopeful, it’s gonna be a good one. The best talks the speaker gets to learn a lot as well.

So I’m really looking forward to learning from the conversation we get into from exploring all these sorts of relationships, these models that I’m sharing for how to think about them. And yeah, I’m gonna learn so much cuz there’s so much other great talks going on as well all over the few days we’re out there in Athens.

I look forward to seeing you there. And yeah, drop me a line beforehand if you want to catch up and know more, but maybe just come along to my talk. See you there. Buffing out.

Cathi Bosco

Hi, I’m Cathi Bosco, Senior UX Research Manager with Pantheon, an open source web platform for teams. Now, we all know if it’s not secure, performant, and accessible, it’s not usable. Great UX makes complex things easy to use.

How do we get there? Through research, we all do it. Maybe not as skillfully as possible, but essentially research is critical thinking. UX design and research is more than visual design, and when it’s done right, we can dramatically improve all business success metrics as well. According to a study done by Forrester, Companies that invest in UX see a lower cost of customer acquisition.

Lower support cost increased customer retention and increased market share. When compared with their peers the top 10 companies leading in customer experience outperformed the S&P index with close to triple the returns. Forrester Research shows us that on average, every dollar invested in UX brings a hundred dollars in return.

That’s a return on investment of 9900%. To improve customer experience, start by observing users as they interact with your product. In my talk at WordCamp Europe 2023, 15 ways user experience impacts business success, we will review examples of common business goals that great UX teams can positively impact.

I hope to unlock an opportunity for all of us to be intellectually and emotionally honest with ourselves about the value and quality of the solutions we deliver to our customers and to their end users as well. We can measure the success and quality of experience through the lens of pleasure, flow, and meaning.

Teams that expose their work through research communicate better with customers. They increase revenue, reduce churn, lighten the load on support, improve cross team performance, and easily report outcomes to impress stakeholders and investors and more. Solving problems with evidence-based techniques will ensure that your products are desirable and clearly usable.

This is why we solve all critical customer problems in a user-centric and evidence-based manner. Hope you can join the conversation. Naturally, as a design researcher I’ll have a four question WordPress survey for everyone to participate in as well. Thank you.

Thomas Roberts and Neils Lange

Hi, I’m Thomas. And I’m Neils, and we build WooCommerce blocks. Imagine you’ve ordered something online and you know you might not be at home when the shipment arrives. Wouldn’t it be great to give the delivery company alternative options such as, please leave the package with my neighbor? By default, WooCommerce Blocks doesn’t provide such an option, but wouldn’t it be great to have that. As part of the team that maintains the card and checkout blocks, we know how to extend these blocks. During our workshop, we love to share our knowledge with you and create such an extension. In case you are wondering, our workshop is called Build a Not At Home Shipping extension in the WooCommerce Checkout block. We can’t wait to see you at our workshop in Athens. Thank you and see you soon.

Patricia Brun Torre

Hello everyone. I’m Patricia from Geneva in Switzerland. I’m honored to be a guest on the panel contributing to WordPress without knowing how to code at WordCamp Europe 2023. It’ll be a very valuable panel as there is sometimes this misconception for people new to the WordPress world that you need to be a developer or to code in order to contribute.

But there are so many ways to contribute to the project without coding. You could for example, do translation, documentation user testing, marketing, et cetera. I chose to contribute to the community team by organizing events. On the panel, I hope to share how valuable it has been for me to organize WordPress events, what I learned in the process, some blockages we face, and how we solved them.

And of course, the feeling to give back to WordPress and to the project as I thank for all WordPress allows me to do with my personal website or my business site called interaction.site. I hope you will come to hear what we all have to say in this panel and we are very much looking forward to see you there. Bye.

Tor-Bjorn Fjellne

Hello there. I’m Tor-Bjorn Fjellner or simply Tobi, one of the global mentors for the Polyglots team, which translates WordPress into some 70 different language versions. I am a polyglot myself. I’m Swedish, fluent in English and Russian, and know some Spanish. I actually live in Spain right now. If you’re a plugin or theme developer, then I strongly recommend that you open it for community translations so that the usage of your code can contribute with good translations to languages you barely know. 

Without translations repository enabled, you get access to basic quality assurance, updated language, packs are automatically distributed to sites that need them, and you don’t need to do any commits or releases for this to work. If you get stuck in setting this up, don’t hesitate to ask for help in our Slack channel polyglots. Since we are a truly global team, there are almost always experienced people around that can give you a helping hand.

In my talk, Enable truly global use of your code, avoid the typical internationalization pitfalls, I’m going to walk through the most common linguistic peculiarities developers should keep in mind. Track two, saturday, June 10th at 11 local time corresponding to 8:00 AM U T C. Welcome, in person or to the internet livestream.

See you there.

Chris Lubkert

Hi, this is Chris Lubkert with Extendify and I’m really excited to see you all at WordCamp EU. I will be speaking about raising capital for your WordPress business, and the tip I would have about raising capital is to think about it not just about the funding and what you can do with the additional capital, whether it’s investing in growth or investing in product to help support your business, but also if you bring on board the right group of investors, it can also be a great group of advisors and supporters for your business as well.

So in our case with Extendify, we are a solution for hosting providers to help them activate, retain, and grow their WordPress customers. And the investors that we have supporting our business are those that both have deep WordPress expertise, but also we have those that have a long history and experience in the hosting industry. And our ability to draw on both of those experience sets in order to identify opportunities for our business, get its support on, in terms of go to market and how we sell and promote our product, has been invaluable to our success so far.

And I expect we’ll continue to draw on those experiences as well. So we’ll be talking about raising capital. We’ll first talk about whether or not it’s the right decision for your business or not, and if so, share some tips and guidance for how to make sure that is successful. See you there.

Petya Petkova

Hello everyone. Get ready to embark on an extraordinary journey at WordCamp Europe 2023, where we unlock the true potential of WordPress together. I’m Petya and I cannot wait to share a sneak peek of what’s in store for my session, WordPress Extended, Building Unique Websites on Top of WordPress. So in today’s fast paced digital world, it’s not enough to settle for the ordinary.

We want to create exceptional experience that captivate our users, leaving them in craving more. That’s why my talk is all about pushing the boundaries of WordPress and tapping into the limitless possibilities of modern programming languages and front end frameworks. Well now imagine having the power to weave a spell binding user experience seamlessly blending creativity, interactivity, and responsiveness.

Now picture your WordPress website, transforming into a mesmerizing work of art, showcasing your brand’s unique personality and captivating your audience from the very first interaction. Now during our time together, I’ll guide you through the exciting world of modern programming languages, such like JavaScript and TypeScript, as well as popular front end frameworks such as React View, js, and Angler.

Together we’ll uncover the secrets of crafting websites that are not just functional, but truly unforgettable. But let’s not just talk about the technical details. I want you to walk away from my session feeling inspired and empowered. That’s why I’ll be sharing invaluable insights on optimizing website’s performance, enhancing speed, and creating seamless user journey.

You discover how to leave a lasting impression on your visitors, ensuring they’ll come back for more and spread the world about your incredible online presence. So get ready to unleash your creativity and elevate your WordPress websites to new heights. Join me at WorldCamp Europe 2023, where like-minded individuals gather to share their passion and embrace the art of digital innovation.

It’s an event filled with excitement, inspiration, and the opportunity to connect with fellow WordPress enthusiasts who share the hunger for extraordinary experiences. Remember, you hold the power to create websites that defy expectations, leaving a lasting impact on your audience. Together, let’s embark this accelerating journey at WorldCamp Europe 2023.

Reserve your spot today and get ready to witness the magic that happens when WordPress meets boundless creativity. I cannot wait to sit there ready to embrace the possibilities and craft a unforgettable experience. Join us at WorldCamp Europe 2023, and let’s rewrite the rules of WordPress together. See you soon.

James Giroux

Did you know that a positive team culture can boost performance, foster innovation, and even lead to better financial performance? The question is, how do we measure and improve our team’s experience? Hi, I’m James Giroux and I’m the founder of TeamWP. At TeamWP, we are on a mission to transform the WordPress ecosystem by fostering open people first workplaces.

We believe that the future of work, the future of WordPress, and really the future of our entire ecosystem is not just about our ability to create great products, but our ability to build and sustain great teams and great companies. To help us on this mission, we’ve developed the Team Experience Index.

This is a tool designed to help teams measure and improve their overall experience based around the eight principles of the Open Team framework. In my talk, the future of work is open at this year’s WordCamp Europe. I’ll be diving into the results of the first Ever Team Experience index. We’ll be exploring how the WordPress ecosystem is doing in these eight principles and what that means for our teams and our work.

We’ll be sharing some surprising insights about the state of team experiences in the WordPress ecosystem. You might be surprised to learn where we are excelling and where we have room to grow. But remember, knowledge without action is useless. So we’ll also be discussing how we can turn these insights into actions.

So join me as we explore how we can proactively invest in our teams and culture. Let’s ensure that the future of work, the future of WordPress, and the future of our ecosystem and community is not just successful, but also open, inclusive, and people first. I look forward to seeing you there.