This episode of Hallway Chats is a little different from previous episodes. Recently Cate and Topher had the opportunity to go to WordCamp Europe in Porto, Portugal, where we had some literal hallway chats. This one is with Piccia Neri.

Piccia’s Site: https://designforconversions.com/

Twitter | @Piccia

Topher: So I have heard your name pronounced seven different ways today. So first order of business, state your name.

Piccia: Pea-cha. 

Topher: Pea-cha. 

Piccia: Like peach with an A at the end. And it’s quite interesting. Like for you and me, English Italian, is quite innocuous but you know… I was printing out again the pass today because I couldn’t print it yesterday for some reason, and there was one of the guys behind the desk that was just really, really chuckling. And I was like, “You’re from Slovakia?” He’s like, “Yeah.”

And then in Spain, it means the opposite of what it does in Slovakia. And now I now live in Spain. But the way you pronounce this, the way it’s spelled because I’m Italian, it’s not a name in Italy either. I mean, you know, we could go on. But in Spain, they read it Pik-cia. So I tell them Picsy and then… yeah. Anyway, so Pi-cha. Like peach with an A at the end. 

Topher: Piccia.

Piccia: Yeah.

Topher: Cool. I like it. What does it mean? 

Piccia: It doesn’t really mean anything. But if it does mean anything, it’s small, tiny.

Topher: Make sense. Cool. So I was asked to pick some people to interview, and I deliberately picked people I did not know except for you because I only know you a little bit. And I found that interesting. And I would like to know more about you. So what do you do with WordPress?

Piccia: I am a designer. I don’t actually build that many sites anymore, but my mission is to get everyone in WordPress to be design-led and an accessible design-led as well. 

Topher: Sure.

Piccia: That’s become my mission. Because what I find very interesting is that, what do we do with WordPress? We build products, we build experiences, we build websites. There’s very little talk about design and there’s very few designers even in a WordPress environment, if you think about it. So it should be entirely design-led but isn’t it.

And that’s really interesting to me. I think that’s a limitation, I think it should definitely be a design-led because I think ever since I started doing this or I started… because I started using WordPress in… I think my first blog was 2009. It was called One Sketch a Day. I would post a drawing a day.

Topher: I remember those.

Piccia: Because it was pre-Instagram. And then when Instagram happened I just didn’t do it. I don’t know why, but anyway… So that’s when I first started playing with it but I wasn’t very involved in community. 

And then when I really saw the gap, I was like, “No one’s talking about design, this needs to be done.” Because sometimes you would see talks about CSS, and it’s like, Yeah, but that’s not a design, that’s a tool. It doesn’t matter. I mean, something completely different when I talk about design. It’s a mindset. It’s a work process. It’s many things but it’s hardly ever talk about styling. And that’s what people think when they think about design during the speaking.

So I saw this real gap. I saw this hole in the community. I mean, there’s a few people… Tammy Lester talks about design, but just very few other people. So I started with that. And then it’s now sort of slowly, not so slowly anymore, moving into accessibility. Because there’s very little of that as well.

Topher: Accessibility is design in itself.

Piccia: Yes, exactly. And everybody should start from that. But again, it goes back to my concept of design as, first of all, structure. And then when you think about accessibility, you start from structure. It’s a mindset. And to me design is a mindset. So it just works really well with my whole philosophy. It was a big digression from your original question. which was what do you do with WordPress?

Topher: No, I don’t think it was a digression at all. I think that’s perfect. Are you in freelance? Do you work for a company?

Piccia: I am currently freelance. I am looking for collaborations, in fact. Part-time collaborations are perfect for me. I was with Cloudways for a while, for two and a half years, something like that, maybe three, which was great because we did a lot of content creation that meant interviewing people that had something to say that I thought mattered.

And my point always was to promote good design—design that is inclusive. I mean design and marketing as well because they work together. So good user experience, good marketing, good ethics. And actually, yeah, I think ethics is a big issue as well and getting to marketing, and so on. So yes, so I am-

Topher: Freelance but looking. 

Piccia: But, yeah, looking. Very, very, very curious to see what happens next.

Topher: I have been a developer for a long time, five years ago, our process was to have a designer create design and hand that to a front end developer who turned it into HTML and CSS. And then that would go to me as a back end developer and I would turn it into WordPress. And it was very flexible. The designer was free to do anything, and we would just turn it into web.

Now with Gutenberg, I’m finding that most themes and block groups and all that have their own opinions about design. And as long as you stay within those opinions, they’re easy to use. You drag and you have a fade and you slide in you have a curve, and you drag and drop widgets. 

But if you try to go outside of that, if a designer says, “Well, I don’t want this, my block doesn’t do it,” I don’t know how to do it anymore. Are you finding any issues now with really custom design in Gutenberg? Or is it not being a problem for you? 

Piccia: I’m not. And I tell you why. Because my way of conceiving a project is completely different from what you described to me. That would never happen. Because to me, I mean, I’m not saying that everybody should be in the room, that the clients that should necessarily be in the room. But the designer and the developer plan together, they’re in the same room. So that will not happen. 

Like, for instance, right now I’m leading… we’re nearing the end of the rebuild of the websites for an Italian museum, which they are very, very proud of that digital content because they digitalized all their catalog. So they’re not doing printed catalogs anymore. They’re like, “That’s the catalog.” And it’s incredible the wealth of material that they have. But you can imagine how organizing all that content, how hard. 

And also they’re a very interactive museum in terms of what they do, their events, their initiatives, and so on. So there was a lot going on. But the developer, who they said it’s an agency that love Gutenberg. So the team was me doing the UX, lots of art historians, curators doing the content, a UX writer, and a design team, a design agency who don’t really know the web. I mean, they do design for the web, but I’ve noticed that they’re creative more than.

And we were in the same room for a long time, I mean, virtual room. So that never happened. Because first of all, the new UX writer structured the content excessively. So we have all the headings and everything styled the way… not styled but you know, structured the way it should be. Anything that needs to be styled rather than, you know, is given the appropriate tag. Why? Because I had a discussion with a developer and I told the designers, “you have to consider all of this when you design the pages.” 

The developer is doing everything by block so that the museum team is going to be trained so this staff can create their own content within limits because we don’t want for that mess to happen. So that’s exactly what I mean. 

What you just described, I’m sure that it worked fine for you but that’s not been designed-led. Being design-led is… because done like that designers should not be left on their own either. Because these, you know, I had to stop these people. There were things that the designers would do that showed me, proved to me that the interaction design is not their first thing. So I’d have to steer them in the right direction and did the developer.

So I would always ask the developer, “Can we do this? What do you think?” For instance, that we wanted to do accordions? And I said, “I know that there’s a way to make accordions accessible, but otherwise, screen readers have a hard time with accordions. And the developer said, “Yes, don’t worry, I can do that.” 

But there was always this conversation going on. And we worked at the sitemap together, because the sitemap also has accessibility consequences, and so on. So it was never going to happen that the designer would say, “I don’t know how that block works.” 

But it’s interesting that you bring that up, though, because I think that Gutenberg, in certain ways, has made WordPress less easy. It’s loved by developers but not by that many other people. 

Topher: As a developer, I’m not in love with Gutenberg at all because I do feel limited. I don’t know JavaScript. So I don’t know how to make my own blocks, and at the mercy of whatever my theme comes with, or whatever block pattern I borrowed or bought, or whatever, I have, in a number of occasions, used Gutenberg to get close and then open my CSS editor and beat it to death. 

Piccia: Yeah, exactly. And that’s not what it’s… that’s not-

Topher: It’s not the way it’s supposed to work. 

Piccia: No, it’s not tidy. 

Topher: So I have found that to be difficult. 

Piccia: Correct me if I’m wrong, my feeling is that Gutenberg has… because with all the page builders, I think we got to a stage where I mean developers were right. I mean, a lot of sites built with page builders are a mess. You know, mostly they are. 

And I think that we all know it. And we’re like, “Yeah, sorry, I’m in a hurry, I need to do this. I don’t have the budget. I don’t have the knowledge, so I’ll just do it this way. My client doesn’t have the budget, I do it in Beaver Builder.” At least Beaver Builder is one of the sort of the better ones. 

And now we’ve gone back the other way again, and now we really depend on developers. I think that in a way, that’s good but not everybody has the budget. But we still have the Page Builders anyway. So it was still fine. But I have to say that, because with this project, I had the luxury of having an incredibly good developer on the team who also knows about design and who is super knowledgeable about accessibility, who completely understood what I wanted. I could see why Gutenberg is so good. 

And I didn’t go into the project thinking I wanted to use Gutenberg. It wasn’t even a discussion. He told me how he would use it, and I was like, “That’s it.” But then now we’re going back to developers having more power, maybe so we should be. But just as long as we can work together… And I actually think that developers should learn about the UX process and understand it a bit better because it’s a mindset in my view.

Topher: We need more WordCamp training.

Piccia: Yeah. I mean, totally. I’ve got courses, I’ve got… In fact, one of the things that I do and that I love doing and that works super well is coaching for agencies. Because the reality of many… I mean, maybe not the VIP agencies, the big the bigger ones, but I would say the majority of WordPress agencies maybe have designers, but they work in the way they were described or they are completely the last wheel, you know, the cork. And therefore they get handed a brief and they go, “But I can do this. This is not right. This is not going to work. This is not good UX, and whatever.” And they get really frustrated.

So what I do is… You know, maybe there’s a design team, but it’s a small team made of very young designers who don’t know how to make their voices heard. So what I do is I give coaching. The coaching package that I have is six seats on my course. I have a big UX course that includes UI as well and coaching. 

So I’ll meet with the agency team and we either talk about topics or they can tell me that, for instance, they more and more to say, “Can we have a session about accessibility?” And it’s incredible how little… how we go over their site and I go, “Aaah.” I mean, I am getting I guess better and better on accessibility. I’m actually launching an accessible typography course that starts from structuring content, which I think is essential part of the Gutenberg. 

Topher: That’s cool. That’s really cool. 

Piccia: Another digression, but they’re-

Topher: They’re not digressions. This is exactly what I wanted. 

Piccia: Good.