Kioken Blocks
Type:
Product Design, Development, WordPress
About the Project
Kioken Blocks is a pet project of mine turned into a product that is used by thousands of users in the WordPress community. It’s a website building tool enhancing the capabilities of the new editor, Gutenberg.
Role: Product Owner
Type: Product Design, Development, WordPress
Date: 2019
Backstory
WordPress’ new block based editor Gutenberg is great. But when it comes to creating high fidelity designs and pages, it lacked features that many users needed. I wanted to design and build a tool that enhances the WordPress editing.
Prior to kicking it off, I’ve contributed to the Gutenberg community with UI and UX solutions to improve the editor experience.
Gutenberg Gradient Component UX:
Progress
I’ve taken months to analyze what best improves the editor experience to be able to better build rich websites and started out with premade layouts which can be imported into the editor.
I’ve created importable custom layouts:
Result
The final product is a WordPress plugin that is being used by thousands of users and pro customers in the community. I am also using it as my primary tool to build websites that is running the latest WordPress versions.
Kioken Blocks editor interface in WordPress:
Promo Website
Once the product was out, I also designed and built the website of Kioken Blocks, again using the builder I’ve created. The logo, colors and the layout are chosen to be warm and welcoming, explaining the ease of use, while being complex under the hood.
Verdict:
Kioken Blocks has become a tool that is one of the first choices of page building tools in Gutenberg editor. Having been featured in respected WordPress news platforms like WPTavern and WPJohnny, the plugin attracted community with warm welcome.
Kioken Blocks is now still an active project for when I find a moment of free time.