By Private Profile 60f01f57 on 2017-02-13 23:02 in User Experience Team

This report is a summary of JUX Team activity for the past two weeks.

Application Reviews and New Contributor Onboarding

We received more than 40 applications from our call in Mid-January. We have followed up with them to let them know we received their applications and we still in the process of interviewing applicants. We have followed up and conducted personal interviews with a number of them individually over the past week. We have an impressive group of candidates and we are excited to get them involved with our team and our community.

Our goal is to help them get involved quickly to assist with an ever growing number of short term and long term tasks. It is often difficult for new contributors to find their place and understand how our community works, so we have spent considerable time over the past few weeks fine tuning our team structure and improving our onboarding documents. We believe a clearly defined process, along with support from Team Members, will help new contributors get involved and stay involved. The lastest versions of our onboarding documents can be found at the links below and we will be continually refining them as necessary.

• JUX New Contributor Guide
• New Contributor Onboarding Chart

We are currently onboarding new contributors and we will announce our new team members and contributors in early March 2017.

Team Structure

Work done during the London Sprint and feedback regarding our team structure proposal over the past few months have helped us clarify how our team best fits into the production department. 

Our primary areas of focus are Research & Testing and Production Design. Given the scale of our work and the administrative work it generates, we plan to create several new Sub Teams to handle both projects and our internal workload.

Our technical sub team will handle configuration and maintenance of our research and testing platforms and online environments, while our Resource Management Sub Team will handle applications, volunteer onboarding, research participants, budgeting, and other administrative duties.

The team structure is still open to discussion, but we plan to have our structure finalized well before the end March deadline set forth by the Production Department.

Our current team Structure documents can be found here

Accessibility Team

The Accessibility team was designated a Sub Team of UX during the Transition process. We feel it would best for the community if the Accessibility Team was designated as an official team, however the discussion is closed until the Transition is complete.

For now, we have found several contributors to fill immediate needs, many of our new applicants have accessibility experience, and we are actively seeking more contributors with accessibility experience. We will continue to oversee the accessibility team, but we will hold off on making any critical decisions regarding the Accessibility team leadership pending a post-transition discussion of where this team best fits into the new organizational structure.

Research & Testing Team

Joomla 3.8 and Joomla 4 research campaigns are currently being developed and will be released in the very near future. We are also finalizing our process and budget requirements as well as a strategy for the first half of the year.

• Research Process Overview
• 2017 Research Outline
• View the raw results of Research collected by the JUX in 2016
• A full 2016 Research Report is in progress by the JUX Research & Testing team

Design Team

We have many new Team Member candidates on deck to fill out our design department. We are in the process of onboarding them now. We are very excited about the talent and time commitment many of these individuals are offering to bring to our team. We will be getting them started this week. 

Joomla 3.7

J3.7 is approaching quickly. Starting this week, our focus is testing and polishing J3.7 features as much as possible before the release, as well preparing a post-release research campaign. 

We are onboarding a number of new UX Team contributors this week to assist with a variety of tasks related to the J3.7 release. We plan to generate a last minute push to address as many existing issues and PR’s as possible, add improvements where possible and provide as much material as possible to assist users in understanding what is new in Joomla 3.7 and how to best use it.

The scope of what we can do before the release is limited, and we have been limited in terms of resources and contributors, however we have been testing and contributing to the release where possible. Our efforts thus far will at the least provide support materials for documentation, marketing and future development efforts. 

We feel many of the new features in Joomla 3.7 can be improved significantly in future versions, how they can be improved will be determined by our users. The planned 3.7 post-release research campaign will provide a clearer direction for J3.8 as well as J4. If nothing else, we can help our users understand how the new features work and plan for the future through our analysis, workflow and testing documents. 

Various 3.7 Items in progress based on user feedback

Improve Update Email Text

PR: https://github.com/joomla/joomla-cms/pull/13942

We feel the language used in the current update email notification is too harsh and this is supported by user feedback. We hope to improve this language sooner than later. We welcome all feedback and assistance with moving this forward.

Limiting the Anonymous System Data Prompt to the Dashboard

PR: https://github.com/joomla/joomla-cms/pull/13948

We feel strongly the implementation of a persistent system message across every screen is extremely detrimental to UX and platform onboarding. We hope attention is given to this item sooner than later. We welcome all feedback and assistance with moving this forward.

• J3.5 Update Email Feature Raw Survey Feedback
• J3.5 Anonymous System Data Raw Survey Feedback
• See All J3.5 Raw Survey Feedback

Joomla 3.8 Media Manager

JUX Team Leaders Dawn Russell and Britta Stender are providing their full support to the new Media Manager effort. The Media Manager progress can be seen in their team reports.

• Media Manager Meeting 2-2-2017
• Media Manager Meeting 26-1-2017

Joomla 4

J4 & JUX Meetings will resume this week.

The feedback and research our team will generate over the next few months will paint a clearer picture of the improvements which will benefit our users the most. 

We are in the process of onboarding new contributors specifically for J4 production effort. By the time 3.7 is released, we will have a much stronger and larger team of contributors to assist in the effort as well.

Next Steps

Our major challenge last year was been team resources and our primary focus so far this year has been finding solutions to this challenge, and we are finding them.

We are confident the great work of our current team members and contributors, along with the amazing group of new contributors we are onboarding will help us serve the community more effectively and efficiently in 2017.

We are working on many projects and we will continue to share our progress as we move forward.