Aloha
A new way of building websites: a set of 50+ pre-designed content blocks for Wordpress' Gutenberg page builder, empowering users to effortlessly create websites that embrace our company design etho.
Role
- Product Management
- UX Design
- Front End Development
Our massive communications department struggled to control the narrative due to internal challenges like lengthy legal reviews and poor team communication, resulting in fragmented messaging. Externally, they faced difficulty competing with search traffic, as building and maintaining websites proved costly and outdated with modern SEO practices.
The solution is a multi-site communication platform designed to effortlessly connect with diverse audiences, empowering our company to shape their brand story. Utilizing the Gutenberg page builder from WordPress, we enabled our team to create visually appealing and user-friendly sites that adhere to our established design framework, making them accessible for anyone to build.
The Design Process
A key part of this project involved our content organization and information architecture strategy. In my inaugural project with the company, I coordinated feedback across numerous teams and segments to deploy a content strategy seamlessly aligned with our operational framework. This strategy educated our communication teams on content categorization, audience targeting, and visual signaling, ensuring clarity for users. These efforts influenced not only product requirements and technology delivery but also shaped our overall content strategy and site integration plan.
In shaping the site's theme and UI components, dubbed Aloha, my primary task involved defining its visual aesthetics and functionality. At the project's onset, our design system, Hyperion, was nascent and inconsistently implemented across products, mainly tailored for mobile apps rather than websites. To address this, I designed over 50 pre-designed UI components, referred to as blocks in Wordpress' Gutenberg, aligning them with Hyperion's defining visual elements for easy drag-and-drop page creation.
The Site Building Experience
Our blocks offer customized visual options to offer site builders maximum freedom, while adhering to design standards, accessibility, and SEO best practices. We manage four child themes deployed across various website types, each with its own visual options and custom-built WordPress functions. This unified approach ensures that all of our sites maintain consistent visual styles while optimizing visual options according to the site's type.
The excitement surrounding the launch of the platform has been immense, occasionally overwhelming. Aloha currently fuels eight external Disney websites, with more onboarded daily. Our team is also customizing it for internal cast-created websites, adding over 60 sites upon launch.