I help build great digital experiences and software through usability research, IA concepts, and prototypes. Outside the office, you’ll find me spread across regional meetups and conferences—evangelizing IA/UX, accessibility, and a variety of open source dev projects. When I’m not doing responsible adult things, I grow the world’s hottest chili peppers and bottle my own hot sauce. I’d divulge something funny from my past, but these days the Internet does a better job of surfacing our embarrassing moments; find me anywhere by Googling “anthonydpaul”.
Anthony will be giving a talk entitled “Intro to User Journey Maps for Building Better Websites“.
What’s been your best experience with WordPress?
This is non-specific, but in general my favorite thing about WordPress has always been the community. I’ve used WordPress since 1.0 and have made some of my best friends and mentors here in meetups, WordCamps, and on social media.
Tell us a bit about your WordCamp Ottawa talk.
I’ll be speaking about how to better understand your website users with user journey maps—what they’re for, what types of maps exist, how to use them in your project, and more. This will be a good talk for UX folks, but will also be applicable to designer, developers, and product owners who have a hand in feature planning, sprints, or asking questions for context. It’ll be structured to be good for solo practitioners as well as a user representative on a larger team.
What’s your favourite thing about attending WordCamps?
I prefer WordCamps over my other industry conferences primarily because they’re so inclusive. I love seeing everyday users elevated and sharing their humble knowledge—seeing the cool things they’re doing with WordPress and related technologies, the types of problems their solving, and their growth as professionals. The diversity of talks and speakers is unmatched.
What’s exciting you about WordPress in 2016?
Definitely the API project. I’m excited to see this can of worms opened and to see the variety of experiments and unique applications that will come from it.
Recommend one to three people in the WordPress world to follow on social media!
“My friend @aaronjorbin is an easy one, less for his technical talks and more for his talks on community and diversity. The guy is a hero.
Another great person to follow is one of my DC co-organizers, @bethsoderberg who also helps lead the core training team. You’ll meet her at many contributor days, or mentoring in several groups dedicated to supporting underrepresented demographics in the tech industry.
Lastly, I’ll go with @laurenpittenger, one of the co-organizers, volunteers, and speakers at the little WordCamps in Pennsylvania. She assembles excellent talks on UI/UX design best practices, good for any WordPress enthusiast, and is a good representation of how the WordPress community isn’t confined to big cities or engineers like similar open source projects.”
