xel

About xel

xel (lowercase x!) is a premium WordPress hosting provider. Their goal is to help and unburden their customers with quality service and easy to use products.

My Role

When I started at xel, I was the only UX designer. By talking to all different stakeholders, I created user flows that helped users make their website safer and easier to maintain. After helping an intern graduate, a UX team was formed with a new designer. Together we worked on a new project, that focused on a different problem their users experienced. First we did research, and then we created low and high fidelity prototypes to get stakeholder buy-in and help developers with implementing the designs.

For this project I also worked a lot with Webflow to not only design, but also create user interfaces. After setting up a handover proces with the backend team, these creations could be used easily.

Last but not least, I took on the very important job of making sure the kitchen was stocked with groceries every week.

Challenges and process

Hosting is something most website owners set up once and look at twice a year. This made convincing and explaining changes in their site's configurations challenging, even though it would make their websites safer and perform better. It often involved technical lingo they never heard about and precautionary actions for problems that they did not understand fully.

By keeping the user in mind, we made sure that the main course of action always was clear. If a choice had to be made, we'd explain it in simple terms and made sure that more information always was available. By interviewing customers, performing user tests, and with the help of their fantastic service desk, we'd quickly learn if and where user flows needed to be changed.

Website

More on xel can be found on their website