Elementor

The leading website building platform for WordPress

Established at 2016, and aimed for professional Web Creators, Elementor is today the #1 website platform for WordPress. Elementor is used by over 13M websites (8.5% of all websites) and by millions of users worldwide.

I joined Elementor as the Director of User Experience, when there were only 2 Product Designers around. In the following year I grew the group to 8 Product Designers and formed a mid-level management team to support all our needs.

In addition to developing work processes and supervising all UX and design work across multiple cross-functional teams, my goal was to lead strategic UX changes to support the company goals. I chose to lead an agenda to make Elementor simple and easy to use also for non-professional web creators who has no previous experience in the WordPress eco-system.

I promoted and led a wide product restructure and the creation of a new design system, followed by a major design facelift.

Editor Restructure

Case study

A project I led as the Director of UX

Challenge

For almost 7 years, Elementor editor kept the same UX structure, with a single static left panel holding all of its features. When joining the company, I realized three things:

1. The interface is indeed unique, yet fails to meet up-to-date industry standards of newer website builders and design tools;

2. Major actions and workflows are hidden from the user;

3. This structure is about to reach a point where our design could potentially limit our growth.

To solve these three issues, I suggested we do an interface restructure and started working on a prototype to present to the executive team.

Solution

I chose to add a new top bar to the editor for better discoverability of all main actions a user needs for creating a website - some of which were at least two clicks away before. The new bar gives users the control over all site pages without having to navigate to the Wordpress admin dashboard. This allows users for the first time to fully build a website without leaving the editor.

In addition, I decided to move to a contextual floating panel for editing all site parts and widgets.

With this new approach, Elementor would potentially lower the learning curve for new inexperienced users and open up for a new market share.