Rearchitecting Squarespace's Block Editors

Squarespace is a popular web hosting and website building platform that allows individuals, small businesses, and organizations to create professional-looking websites without requiring extensive technical skills.

Redesign all 47 block editors, how users add content to a website, to improve finding settings. We hypothesized by building a consistent editing experience across blocks that creators could more successfully finish their websites, reducing the number of abandoned sites.

Prioritized the most used blocks, redesigning in phases of five blocks per phase

Information Architecture, hierarchy, and settings name overhaul

Alignment of designs across many cross functional partners and teams

Working closely with Content Strategy and UX Research, I catalogued every setting in the block editors and developed a new structure.

Consolidating all settings into a few tabs, Content and Design

2 taxonomy versions: old vs. new image, button, summary, newsletter

45 participants per version (90 total)

Success: did the user select the correct answer? Y/N Directness: did they get to the correct answer directly or indirectly?

Results The new IA showed drastic improvements over the old version, which shows the consolidated approach is mitigating confusion

Released 18 blocks as of 2020

Did no harm: neutral trial/sub, block usage, and page saves

Very positive feedback across all channels (socials, forum, support)