Introduction

Thrive Themes is a company which offers a varied conversion focused WordPress tools. One of the the tools they offer is called Thrive Architect, which is a drag & drop based visual page builder.

However, over the years, the tool has increased its features list at a rapid pace, determining a bigger learning curve which became harder to apprehend for the users.

Problems With Thrive Architect

Hard to Find Options

Although the newly added features are pretty awesome and help users create even more impressive pages, the fast expanding features list, and the limited space for incorporating them, make the new additions become obscure. Because of this, the users become unaware of the tools which are actually one click away or within their reach.

Readability

In order to give unlimited editing possibilities, Thrive Architect uses a huge number of settings for the users to change, making the overall UI hard to read. Because of the limited space, and the desire of having all the settings one click away, the design became overcrowded and hard to understand for the users.

Expandability

Another issue was the fact that a small area of the tool’s structure was used to incorporate both global settings, single page settings and element settings. Because of the usage of only one space for everything, newly added features (like A/B Testing) were hard to incorporate in order to make them both less intrusive and easy to reach. Also new features meant that the users were forced to keep interrupting initial flows and had to use multiple clicks in order to reach a desired setting, increasing the overall time of building a page.

Solutions

Increased Options Reachability

In order to solve the discoverability of the options, we splitted the main sidebar in two main components: the element’s options sidebar and the global/non-element related sidebar. This way, the user can focus on the element’s editing options while also having access to more general settings which ar rather global or page related, allowing the user to perform additional actions in the same time.

Settings Grid

Another UX challenge to solve, was the settings readability. In order to solve this, a grid like arrangement was created in order to make it easier to improve the way the users see the available settings and also reduce the overseeing possibility of some settings.

Faster Building Pages

Giving the users rapid access to multiple element, page and global settings, was one of the main UX challenges we faced when we decided to improve the product. In order to solve this challenge, we first established a set of rules for how a new feature is categorized and in which place it should be placed.

The newly established rules meant splitting of the interface into four areas:

• Main Sidebar: used only the element related options;
• Breadcrumbs: used to easily navigate through nested elements;
• Secondary Sidebar: used only for page settings and global settings;
• Responsive Bar: easy to find, used for switching between different screen editing types.

Conclusion

After user testing the new concept with an alpha squad, we launched the newly redesigned Thrive Architect on 15th of August 2018, to a beta squad (early access customers). After receiving an impressively positive feedback, demonstrating that the new design didn't negatively affect the key-metrics, we released the new design publicly in September.

Introduction

Thrive Apprentice is a WordPress plugin developed by Thrive Themes which allows users to create simple or complex online courses from scratch, having the possibility to customize the appearance of the content using a page builder offered by the same company.

The plugin offers a variety of content management option in order to display the courses to custom audiences.

Back-End Interface

Courses Dashboard

Color coded cards are used to categorise courses by topics in order to create an easier way of categorising the courses.

Course Details

Define the general options of the course (like title, cover image, description) and also the content restriction rules (public content, paid content).

Course Structure

Membership Integration

Thrive Apprentice allows different membership integrations, one of them being SendOwl, which offers quick way to protect the courses and to monetize them.