 So thank you so much to the organizers for having you here today and to this incredible community that I've gotten to know a bit more over the past couple of days. This is my first WordCamp. It's really exciting to see all the amazing work that's being built with WordPress as well as the creativity going into extending WordPress's capabilities. And when we talk about WordPress, we often talk about it as a tool for publishing. And today I want to take a bit of a deep dive into the act of digital publishing and how it's evolved over the lifespan of WordPress as a product. And as we do so, I want to specifically look at how those changes have had an impact on who the WordPress user is over time. So who is it that wants to create their own destination on the Internet in the world of 2018 and beyond? And what are their motivations for doing so? So hopefully we can start to understand the present moment in context and then be able to anticipate the future of publishing in order to keep pace with both our user's needs and also emerging technologies. But before we do that, hi. That was an awesome intro. I just wanted to give you a really quick background about me and why I'm standing here talking about any of this. So as you've heard, I'm currently the head of design innovation at Automatic. I joined about five months ago, so I'm still pretty new. But prior to that, where I come from is that I've spent a lot of years working on the design of media experiences and publishing systems. So over the past decade or so, I've done that primarily in the context of news and media. Most recently, heading up Design at Axios, which is a news startup. So that was a lot of like building reader-facing products and also our own custom CMS. And then also, before that, at the New York Times R&D Lab, we were doing much more kind of experimental future-facing prototyping. So a lot of my work has been focused on tracking the kinds of changes I'm going to talk about today. Understanding how technological shifts change the constraints and possibilities for publishing and then how we work with those new opportunities so that we can create great experiences for people to create and distribute and consume information. So that's what I hope to do today. Take a little trip through the lifespan of WordPress and how changes in both technology and kind of the way people behave have impacted the trajectory of digital publishing during that time and to understand what that means in terms of who the WordPress users are and then talk a little bit about where we might be headed next. So first let's take a trip back to 2003, about the beginning of the WordPress timeline. And back then, if you think about digital publishing, publishing and making a website were one and the same thing. There was no other way to say something on the Internet. Blogging was like the big innovation of the moment because it had introduced a slightly different mode of publishing, one which was more dynamic, more conversational, and less static than web publishing had been up to that point. And it was kind of such a big deal that it prompted all kinds of think pieces. Blogs were going to kill everything from marketing to the art of writing itself. We weren't sure if bloggers were journalists or if blogs were now newspapers. It was all very confusing, it was all very fraught. And it's kind of funny to look back at because as we know from our vantage point right now, this was just the tip of the iceberg in terms of what was to come and the upheavals that were to come for digital publishing in the years after this. Because right now, at this point, whether you had a blog or a traditional site, the mechanism and the platform were the same. You still needed to build a website to publish anything online. So as a designer, one of my first questions is always who is it for? Who's our user? And in this case, back in 2003, if you're designing publishing systems like WordPress, your user is basically everyone who wants to say something on the internet. Because making a website is the only way to do that at the time, which is great in a way because, hey, you have a huge potential audience. But one of the first things that I learned in user experience design is that if everyone is the answer to who is it for, it's a really challenging proposition. Because you have to meet so many different needs and try to be all things to all people. And the digital publishing ecosystem really began to evolve in response to that challenge as companies recognize that they could, instead of this singular thing, create better, more focused products for different kinds of users, different kinds of contexts, and different kinds of needs, especially as new technologies and affordances emerged. So first, early on we saw platforms that were created to serve people who wanted to share particular kinds of media, specifically photos and videos. So Flickr and YouTube were launched in 2004 or 2005 respectively. And they were kind of the poster children for what everyone took to calling Web 2.0. Raise your hand if you remember that term. Of course, there were some people who were skeptical. This is a quote from Tim Berners-Lee. Web 2.0 is, of course, a piece of jargon, nobody even knows what it means. But those platforms specifically evolved in response to some new realities that had been emerging. So for example, in the few years prior, digital cameras had become widely accessible and photography and video creation, which was once really the province of specialists, became radically democratized. We were suddenly creating all of this visual content at alarming rates and didn't know what to do with it. So Flickr and YouTube not only offered a way to share photos with others in a way that leveraged the network of all the users that were on the platform. But since the content formats were so standardized, they leveraged that standardization to make the publishing process radically simpler. So to put your content online, there's all the stuff you no longer had to do. You didn't have to think about web pages or layout or code or design. You just uploaded your pictures and they were displayed on a standardized template that you didn't have to code or maintain. And that was kind of the first seed of the power of platforms in publishing. So a platform could do both of these things really well. It could connect people with each other, and it could also reduce the amount of work needed to publish. And those two affordances combined to massive impact in the subsequent rise of social platforms. So in 2003, we were here. And now in 2006-ish, making websites isn't the only thing. Now you have these media platforms like Flickr and YouTube, which were good for specific kinds of publishing. So the use case for making a website is a little bit smaller, but it's still pretty dominant. But that changed pretty dramatically with the explosion of social media platforms. So there had been experiments before this like Friendster and MySpace, but a really, really big shift happened with the nearly simultaneous launch of Twitter and the opening of public access to Facebook in 2007. Now part of that is because of the power of platforms to connect people that we had just talked about. So suddenly, a subset of people who had been building websites to share information with the world suddenly had a much easier way to share information, and they could choose whether it was something that they really wanted to broadcast to everybody and share with the world or to share more privately with the people that they knew. Part of their success was also about the greater efficiency of publishing. So this is a wired piece from 2008, saying, thinking about launching your own blog, don't, and if you've already got one, pull the plug, and social multimedia sites like YouTube, Flickr and Facebook have since made publishing picks and video as easy as typing text. So there is this ease, this efficiency of publishing, plus the network effect was created a really, really big change. And on top of all of this, around the same time, as social media was becoming ascendant, the teeny, tiny little iPhone 1 in Steve Jobs' hand launched. And we all know about the impact that that had on just about everything. So in the years that followed with the rise of mobile app ecosystems in concert with the kinds of platforms we were just talking about, collectively, what happened is that publishing, this thing that we talk about as publishing, started to take on a really different character. So instead of this more formal and labor-intensive process where I'm going to sit down and I'm going to write something and I'm going to construct this thing and I'm going to put it out there, and this kind of big intentional act, publishing became ever more casual and personal and easy. And it was no longer a dedicated activity for people, but an interstitial act that happened opportunistically between other moments in your life. It was a random thought shared between meetings or a snapshot taken on the street. And we started to see products that doubled down on that sort of constrained and casual and interstitial nature. So experiences like Snapchat and Instagram and Facebook stories brought the concept of ephemerality to the act of publishing, catering to those who didn't want to make a statement forever but who simply wanted to communicate in the moment. And the more publishing became casual and conversational, in some cases it literally became a conversation. So as users spent more and more time in chat-based interfaces like Facebook Messenger and Slack and WeChat and others, those platforms began creating tools for publishers and business owners to publish into these kind of chat spaces. So over the past few years we've seen tools for creating chat bots and finding ways to shift some aspects of publishing into more of a conversational paradigm. I don't necessarily think that's always a good idea, but I'll talk more about that in a minute. So what we've seen is that the world of the earlier web, where creating a website was the only way to share information, digital publishing started out as more of this long form, serious, dedicated act. And all the platforms and tools that we've discussed so far have mostly capitalized on the ways that people might want to communicate in ways that are more casual and brief and interstitial. But if you wanted to do some serious, like long form writing, you still basically had two choices. You could either go get it published by a traditional media or news organization, which very few people have the inclination or knowledge or connections to do, or you could make a website. Which is where a platform like Medium is really interesting. So Medium comes along and takes that simplicity and that ease of use that social platforms afforded and applies it to that longer form writing. So they successfully decoupled, like I wanna say something serious on the internet from I have to build and maintain a website, which is a really big deal for platforms like WordPress. Okay, so we once had the single format of publishing. We had a webpage that contained text and media and these like page layouts and it was consumed on one kind of device on a desktop or laptop computer. And now we're in this world where we have a massive variety of formats that can be published through lots of different platforms and then consumed on lots of different devices and lots of different contexts. And it leads to just a lot of complexity. So in my years working with publishers and brands, people who are trying to like navigate this complex world and figure out what they needed would often ask me the question like, what's gonna win? Like tell me secretly, what's gonna win? And there was this idea that you had print and print was the stable thing for news and media forever. And then the web won over print, but then mobile came along and mobile won over the web and so on and so on. And so the goal in asking that kind of question for a media company at least was to be able to kind of make a bet and double down on creating a business model that would work in whatever that winning ecosystem or platform was gonna be. So they're like, can we just like do everything on Facebook now? Is that what we should be doing? Is it VR? Everyone is trying to figure that out. And so my answer to that was always everything wins. There's no, nothing goes away. None of this disappears. The future is a creative. And each of these formats and platforms is just another piece in this increasingly complex puzzle that is digital publishing. And for a long time in those conversations, my advice was that you kind of have to play everywhere, that you have to have this kind of fluid experience of your company or your brand or your news or whatever it is that you're creating where people can experience it in all kinds of different contexts, at different moments in different formats. But a few years ago, we got to a point where like that clearly wasn't a sustainable answer anymore because it's just so big and so complex. And playing in all of these places well is nearly impossible without an enormous budget and staff. Like each one of these takes dedicated effort. It's not just like a right ones publish everywhere that like the format and the thought that goes into an Instagram story is different from something that's long form that you publish on the site, which is different from your Facebook page, et cetera, et cetera. So even working at places like The Times which do have enormous budgets and staff, it's still really hard for them to think about playing everywhere. So what I do now is I tell people to really like take a close look at their business or their brand and understand two things. What are your core values? Who's your audience? So then you need to be selective and you need to choose the kinds of publishing or the kinds of platforms that allow you to best express those values and reach the audiences that are important to you because not everyone's hanging out everywhere. And so that secret sauce, that particular combination is gonna look a little different for different people and companies. So coming back to this question. Now that publishing looks really different than it did when we were talking about 2003. Now that making a website is no longer the default option but it's simply one choice amongst many. Let's ask this question again. Who is WordPress for now? As we can see, the audience for a product like WordPress is no longer everybody who wants to say something on the internet but it's rather a subset of those people. And the great news about that is that we can start to get a more specific picture of who our users are which means that we can build tools with greater focus that more effectively serve their needs. Okay, so I'm gonna take a little detour here for a minute. We're gonna take a pause and do a bit of a guided meditation. This is an exercise that my colleague Rick Bannister made and gave me permission to adapt for this talk because when he went through it, it really helped me to visualize like what the WordPress community is, who our users are. So I thought I would share it with you. So first, if you're comfortable doing so, close your eyes. Take a moment to notice the sensations of your body. Straighten your back. Take a deep breath, relax your arms. Feel your breath moving in and out. Now imagine that you are standing in a field. The grass around you is green. There's a light breeze. The air is warm. Now with each breath in, imagine that you're getting lighter and lighter. Eventually, you get so light that you start to lift off the ground a little bit. With a little help from the breeze, you begin to float upwards. You fly around a bit, you get the hang of it and then you take off for the clouds. As you rise higher and higher, going faster and faster, you see something down below you. You start to drift down and as you get closer, the air gets smoggier and you realize it's a vast metropolis. It's surrounded by foreboding concrete walls that are high and topped with barbed wire. It doesn't look very inviting from the outside. Inside it's bustling. There's lots of honking traffic. There are people everywhere. The sound is deafening. You see people arguing in bars and fighting on street corners. There are billboards and advertisements everywhere touting every kind of good and service. It's noisy and dense and hard to navigate. The inhabitants don't seem particularly happy but they can't leave. This is Facebook. You fly over the city out of the smog and into clear air. As you fly, you encounter a sprawling suburbia. It has walls and hedges too, but they're shinier and newer. The residents are still bustling and chatting but there's less fighting, less noise. Everyone's kind of focused on appearances. The streets and houses are more pleasant. The people pay a lot of attention to how they dress. But all the houses kind of look the same and they're all square and boxy and identical. And they're all on identical streets in a perfect grid. Even though the residents have done a lot of work to paint them different colors and give them personality. When you look closer at some of the houses you realize they're actually just billboards made to look like someone lives there. This is Instagram. You float back up and wanna see what else is out there in the world. As the suburbs fade into the distance the rest of the world comes into focus on the horizon. 32% of it anyway. You see farmsteads in remote corners of the countryside. You see riverside factories. You see backpackers on mountain sides. You see small settlements and emerging new cities. You see apartment buildings and straw huts, sprawling homesteads and local churches. You even see a few people attempting to climb over the walls of the big city from before. This diverse group of people value their freedom but they dream of some of the comforts of city and suburban life. Utilities and services, same day mail, cable TV, corner stores with all the amenities. They want ways to make their houses bigger and stronger. They want tools to make their businesses more valuable for customers and roads to connect them to other people. This is WordPress. Eventually you fly past the last settlement and you find yourself back in an open field and as your breathing slows each exhale you get heavier and heavier until eventually you settle back down to earth. Slowly you open your eyes. Thanks for coming on that little journey with me. So in 2018 in a world where I can start writing or sharing information about my business in minutes on one of the multitudes of platforms I just discussed, in this context why would I build my own website or blog? Why would I put in the effort that it takes to design and build and maintain my own destination on the internet? Because no matter how elegant we make the product, doing that is always gonna require more effort and money and dedication than the alternatives. And also, a thing to understand is that a lot of people who are owning and making websites, they don't care about making a website, they care about what it helps them achieve or the problems it can help them solve. It's a means to an end. So let's talk about what a website might afford for a user that the alternatives can't. The first thing that seems clear is that creating your own website affords an exponentially higher degree of control than participating in a platform. So while Facebook offers features for businesses they might not be the right feature for your business. While Medium offers tools for writers they might not be the ones, the right ones for how you wanna write. So the freedom to control what tools and features you use to achieve your goals is a huge advantage that may very well be worth dedicating that extra time and effort to. Furthermore, if your goal is to be a destination like if you're a publisher or you aspire to be a major brand, then you want, in fact, to be a destination. You want the storefront. You don't want real estate and someone else's strip mall. And again, this comes back to control. You get to control the context in which your readers or customers encounter you. Secondly, we're currently in a moment of a lot of disillusionment with the massive monopoly on our content and personal data that is in the hands of a few platforms. And those platforms are almost universally run on advertising driven models where your data primarily exists to serve the needs of those advertisers rather than you. So I can't predict how much that skepticism will grow or how big a backlash there'll be or what the impact of that is. But I would argue that there's increasingly a value of freedom in owning your data and owning your content and not being subject to the business decisions of massive platforms that may or may not have your best interests at heart. And finally, while I just said that a lot of users don't care about the website, they only care what it gets for them, I don't want to forget the segment of people who still view the web itself as a medium for expression and creativity. So what I hope that we can retain and revive from the days of the early web is that Cambrian explosion of creativity that used the tools of the medium itself. So the older web was more rudimentary, but it was clay. It was the thing we worked with. It was material for creating. And some of what was created was gaudy or ridiculous. We all remember geosities, but it was craft. It was our own creation. It wasn't some shiny cookie cutter assemblage that we made from a kit. So while we can appreciate the elegance and the gloss and the ease of use of the tools and platforms that we have available to us today, they still feel kind of prescriptive and limiting and kind of dull. So why not have the ability to reclaim the tools of our digital space and put our hands in that clay and see what we can make? And so there's this element of unique personal expression and craft that's only possible when you make your own thing. So control, freedom and craft. This isn't an exhaustive list, I'm sure, but these are the kind of values that I keep coming back to that are reasons that drive WordPress users when they come to WordPress to make their own thing rather than spinning up yet another Facebook page. So how do we design for that? I'm gonna talk a little bit about what's happening now that I think ties into these needs and then pose some ideas about how we might further innovate looking a bit into the future. So one of the reasons that I'm excited about Gutenberg is because I think it does speak to these values and needs. The core design principle of Gutenberg is that of direct control. So rather than kind of handling your content in one place and then having to manage how it's presented indirectly and navigate a bunch of menus, it brings those actions together to allow you to directly manipulate the content and presentation of your site in place and see those changes as we make them. And so what direct manipulation does is it gives the user better control and more flexibility to determine how they want their site to work. They control the layout and features of a page directly by adding and customizing blocks rather than having to rely on the complexity of widgets and short codes and embeds and things that feel pretty arcane to a lot of people who are just starting out especially. And while Gutenberg is in its infancy now, I imagine a fully grown-up version being something that really makes the open web fully editable in a direct way in a way that really allows for that deep kind of craft and virtuosity. But I wanna think beyond what we can do right now. So how do we not just catch up with current practices but move forward and leapfrog them? So at the R&D lab at the times, we often talked about working in the realm of the newly possible. So tools or technologies that had recently emerged but hadn't kind of reached full utilization or their full expression yet. So what kinds of newly possible technologies might change the way that we think about publishing? So I'm gonna do a really quick run-through of just some of the most immediate possibilities that come to mind. These are more questions I'm posing and not full product concepts, but hopefully they will get conversations started. So one of the things that, and Gary mentioned a bunch of these in his talk yesterday too, so let's think about voice-wise. So this is something that has obviously come to a lot more maturity and viability over the past few years. So we've seen not only technology that's embedded in existing devices like Siri and Google Assistant on our phones, but also new devices that extend voice control to our homes and our physical spaces. So are there ways in which WordPress users might be served by the integration of voice technology into the publishing process? In what circumstances might voice inputs be a better option than text inputs? Maybe there are particular kinds of content that you might wanna publish via voice. Or perhaps there are actions like getting your daily site statistics or fulfilling an incoming e-commerce order that you might be able to easily automate via voice commands. And maybe this kind of interaction provides new affordances for specific groups of users and gives us the opportunity to make WordPress more inclusive and more accessible. Or we can look at things like augmented reality, especially when we see things like iOS 12 integrating AR into the browser with AR QuickLook. So what does an AR website afford? You can imagine ways that technology, that might be a technology that users like e-commerce site owners might wanna take advantage of. So what does the authoring experience in WordPress look like for an AR website? How do you make that easy? How do you make that accessible? There are all these really meaty interesting questions there. Or we can think about AI and machine learning, which is a really big topic. But the way I like to approach this is that when people talk about AI, they think about how you can replace human labor with computation. But I really like to think about AI more like this exoskeleton here. So something that can collaborate with people rather than replace them. A way of creating superpowers for ourselves. And so when we think about that, we have to think about like, well, what are the things that machines can do that humans can't do really well? So they can do things like, they can process information really quickly. They can do complex calculations. They can remember things perfectly and store that information at scale. So how do we use those affordances to do something that I can't rather than mimic something that I already can? So how does machine intelligence give WordPress users superpowers? How does it augment their abilities or allow them to do something that's currently really lemur intensive for them? If we look at something like Gmail's new smart compose feature, which I know people probably have very mixed feelings about. But you can imagine machine learning and predictive text being able to assist users in creating content. And we know that content creation stuff can be really intimidating for people, especially if you're not a writer by trade if this is something new to you. So are there ways that machines can help provide assistance there? Or we can apply machine learning to extrapolate patterns from traffic and engagement data to give site owners kind of a more meaningful narrative and understanding about how people are engaging with their website and how what they do impacts that. But as we think about all of these new technologies, it's really important in my mind not just to use them because we can, like, hey, a new toy we can play with, but again to think about this idea of affordances. So what does this particular technology do especially well? And then how does that intersect with the goals and needs of our users? So an example of how that can go poorly is if we look at chatbots and conversational UI in the past couple of years. People started making everything a chatbot for not necessarily particularly good reasons. And the fact is that people weren't designing with a critical eye to what the key affordances of chatbots are and that led to a lot of bad experiences. So you had bots that felt like a regular UI was shoved awkwardly into a conversational interface or bots that tried to inject these really fake chatty personalities when the user is just trying to get something done or just plain old failed interactions like this one. Yeah, that's not good. So that brings us back to this. Humans are really good at conversations. We understand sarcasm. We can read between the lines, hopefully, and we're constantly leveraging contextual information in order to interpret what's happening in the conversation. So computers aren't great at that. So let's not make them try to do that. Chatbots aren't interesting for their own sake. It's not that we love to talk to computers and we're all dying to have a conversation with a bot. They're compelling when they can create efficiency for a user, when they can better integrate into the context that you're in, or they can reduce the number of steps that you need to take to achieve a goal. So as we look at all of these emerging technologies, whether it's voice or AI or AI or anything else that comes down the path, it's not just a question of what can they do, but what can they do uniquely well? And more importantly, what can they do that speak to these values? So as I think about innovation in the context of WordPress, it's with these values and these user needs in mind. And it's this opportunity we have to really make a product that serves a focused set of needs rather than trying to be all things to all people, because publishing isn't just one thing anymore. We can't be everything to everyone. Some of those people are just gonna want an Instagram account and that's okay. But how do we serve the people who do want that website, who want a home for their ideas or their business? How can we provide tools that enable not just productivity, but virtuosity? How do we provide compelling tools for making and for craft in a world of platforms that push standardization and convenience? And how do we leverage the new contexts and technologies of 2018 and in the future to create the best expression of WordPress? And as we explore these possible answers, innovation should mean doubling down those values of craft, control, and freedom, and really letting them shine at the heart of the WordPress experience. Thank you very much, and take some questions, okay? See right here. Before she goes, I wanna make a little presentation as a first-time speaker, right? At work, yeah. At work. Give her a great round of applause, please. Thank you. Very good. Now, just briefly, in my family, what we do is when we meet first-time speakers, we welcome them, but we also get them a wapoo to remember their experience and encourage them to continue to speak, so congratulations. Thank you very much. All right, you're welcome. Two years is time for human error, too. You wanna do it? Okay, we have some time for a couple of questions. You know, not a dissertation or anything, but just some brief questions. Thank you. Okay. Was interested in how you see the Gutenberg editor specifically playing into major publishers. I know like the New York Post, for example, like what is their take on where Gutenberg is headed and do you see this as a serious publishing editor? Absolutely, I think it can be. I mean, like I said, this is the beginning of Gutenberg and I think it's only gonna get richer and more expansive, especially even just the kinds of block libraries we're already starting to see emerge and I think we'll see more and more specialized ones that will allow for this really powerful experience, not just for an individual publisher, but for someone who's operating at a scale like the New York Post or The Times or Washington Post or any of them. Hello, I'm from Knoxville, actually from Knox Makers, so we're Makerspace, five of us in three nonprofit. So you're speaking right to the heart of some stuff that I've been really, really thinking about and passionate about. We're looking at like 3D modeling for 3D printing, Arduino, Raspberry Pi's, a lot of this stuff, laser cutting, even fabric arts, things like that. And I'm talking about crafters and makers trying to get their name out there, but without compromising the integrity of, I don't wanna look like every other website, like how do we do that? Are you all looking at tapping into the resources of the maker movement, Makerspaces, Hackerspaces and trying to see how we can bridge the gap between that and WordPress? I haven't explicitly, but I think that's a fantastic idea, yeah. Thank you very much for this. All right, well I will be around if anybody wants to grab me and ask any further questions. Thank you so much and I hope you have a great rest of the day.