Case Study
WP Squared
Shipping a successful MVP as the first embedded UX designer on a next-generation WordPress hosting platform — establishing UX as a core discipline and changing how PM and engineering plan work around design.
Role
Lead Product Designer
Timeline
Ongoing
Tools
Figma, Jira, Confluence, Mixpanel, Miro
Overview
WP Squared is a next-generation WordPress hosting experience built on top of the proven cPanel infrastructure. As the first embedded UX designer on the team, I owned the end-to-end design process — from competitive research and user interviews through to a scalable design system and production UX quality assurance. My presence shifted the team from 'we can get by without UX' to recognizing UX as a clear value-add they should plan around.
UX Quality Gate for Angular 20 Migration
I served as the required UX sign-off for a massive front-end upgrade — the migration to Angular v20, touching 200+ files across components, themes, selectors, effects, and tests. Releases were explicitly blocked on 'UX sign-off from Kristy.'
Across multiple follow-up rounds during September 2025, I addressed visual and interaction regressions in status indicators, the security tab, settings layout, tables, terminal, and logs. I caught and filed non-blocking bugs while coordinating how to sign off without delaying the release, balancing pixel-perfect quality with release reality.
Website List & Table UX Overhaul
I drove a long series of improvements that made the main websites list and other tables more readable, consistent, and responsive. This included refactoring the websites list to remove nested tables, introducing vulnerability sorting, and designing intelligent hero image behavior that only shows when 4 or fewer rows are visible.
I opened and resolved several visual polish issues: fixing vulnerability shield icon clipping on smaller screens, correcting off-brand grays and chip/dropdown colors (leading to theme token fixes in _globalMixins.scss), fixing misaligned icons, and ensuring disk usage displays correctly for staging sites with hover breakdowns — all validated down to 1280px.
Vulnerability Protection UX
I shaped how risk is communicated throughout the platform. I clarified the logic for the 'shield / nothing to do' state — showing 'Your website is protected' only when there are zero active vulnerabilities, while ensuring that vulnerabilities on inactive plugins and themes still count as risks until deleted.
I designed honest bulk action behavior: disabling row checkboxes when no update is available, excluding non-actionable rows from 'Select all', and designing the deactivation flow with proper spinner states, chip indicators, and toast timing. Users never click 'Update' and see nothing happen.
Plugins & Recommended Plugins Experience
I led the UX design for the Recommended Plugins experience, including Redis Cache, AccelerateWP, and Extendify. I designed a banner on the Plugins tab that opens the Install dialog pre-filtered to 'Recommended', with multiple iterations on internal spacing, banner radius, and CTA placement.
I identified and reported critical state bugs — Redis showing as installed in the dialog but not in the table, and actions on Redis affecting AccelerateWP simultaneously. Through detailed video captures and environment documentation, I helped dev and QA reproduce and resolve the underlying state issues.
Onboarding & Beta Research
I ran multiple beta onboarding interviews across 7 user segments — from freelance technical admins and non-technical freelancers to agency power users and SMB owners. Each interview captured experience ratings (ranging from 2 to 5, averaging ~3.3), key highlights, takeaways, and verbatim quotes like 'It's a simple, quick way to spin up and manage WordPress sites.'
My research synthesis surfaced a critical insight: many users were canceling because they couldn't figure out how to use WordPress itself, not just the hosting panel. These findings directly informed the post-MVP roadmap: adding help and walk-through prompts, simplifying the WordPress portion of the experience, and reconsidering overlapping menus. I also designed the Extendify integration flow, ensuring that exiting the launcher returns users to the WP Squared decision page rather than dropping them into WP Admin.
Strategic UX Leadership
Beyond pixel-level work, I authored and owned UX specifications for Temporary Domains, ALL themes/plugins management at scale, and Site Quality Monitoring — each grounded in concrete target-audience data with user, domain, and server counts, jobs-to-be-done, and success metrics.
I became the organization's WP Squared UX expert: presenting to the wider UX group, sharing Mixpanel data and user feedback, acting as a cross-timezone liaison, and providing product interface images for the GTM pitch deck. The UX principles and patterns I established are now being reused in adjacent initiatives including the standalone Mail offering and WP Squared Cloud deployments.
Outcome
WP Squared launched its MVP successfully with strong adoption. The retrospective noted that my presence as an embedded designer fundamentally changed how the team approaches UX — earlier in the process, as a core part of the squad, not an external ticket-taker. I was recognized as a Confluence 'All-Star' (138 live docs, 53 comments, 64 collaborators) described as 'a detail-oriented explorer who loves discovering, organizing, and archiving information, while also pushing ideas forward and keeping your team on track.' The UX foundations I established are now the baseline for how WP Squared — and its expanding ecosystem of Cloud, Mail, and partner integrations — is designed, documented, and sold.