If you are not new to this blog, you already know that I used to be a UI/UX Designer focused mostly on designing and developing front-end interfaces for apps and all things the web. After four years of front-end work, I found myself in a position where I had kinda run out of room to grow. Or maybe it was because I became a power command line user and decided DevOps is so cool.
Long story short, I am a Full Stack Developer now. But as someone who came here from a UI/UX background, more often than not, I find an array of user experience (UX) problems with a lot of WordPress plugins. That’s exactly why about seven months ago; I started this research.
⚡️ Research Oriented Series About User Experience#
This research was about user experience. I wanted to find out about how I can improve the downloads and installs of a new WordPress product by firmly believing and working towards improving the user experience. It was like laws of physics.
If you believe in them, you can take a calculated risk by betting on if I can provide users with enough value, with at least good enough user experience; I can expect a good level of engagement (i.e. Downloads and active installs). This engagement is what we call conversion when talking about marketing of you WordPress product.
So, yes! It did work!
My plugin CF7 Customizer was the scope of this series. I ran several experiments, test more than a 100 WP plugins and sat with three user focus groups to find out about how I can improve the user experience. Once I had the data about what I can do, I started working on it. Releasing the next version of this plugin by addressing such pain points yielded quite a good amount of conversion for this product.
? And I Wrote About it…#
Throughout this series, I have shared my strategies of how I got about 15,000 downloads, 5,000 active site installs, 4,300 Newsletter subscribers, and got featured in the trending products at ProductHunt with roughly 200 up-votes, all that in less than six months.
Hold on tight and prepare yourself to be a part of my 100-hour researched workflow.
Towards the end of the series, you would have learned about some of the best practices which must be considered while planning the UX (User Experience) of a WordPress product. I will also build an share a GPL licensed WP Welcome Page Boilerplate (start it at GitHub) in this series.
? Articles#
I hope you enjoy reading this series and provide me with feedback.
That’s all for today. I’d love to hear your thoughts about this series and my experiments in the comments below. BTW I will appreciate if you can Tweet about it. Reach out to me at Twitter @MrAhmadAwais.
As usual, don’t hesitate to leave any questions or comments below, and I’ll aim to respond to each of them.
Ahmad Awais
