About

Context:
This was self-directed work on my own WordPress sites—LCD Lab & LCD Academy, and my personal website—using AI to extend the platform’s functionality past its native limitations, so I could ship better UX without the cost of a developer.

My Role:
Designer, researcher, and problem-solver, with AI as a coding collaborator.

Tech Stack:
WordPress, WooCommerce, WP-Members, Total Theme / WPBakery, Popup Box plugin, Code Snippets plugin

Key Outcomes

WordPress limited the experience—I used AI to push past it

WordPress’s default tools weren’t enough to deliver the experience these products needed—a generic profile page, a silent subscription cut-off, and no way to see what marketing actually worked. Each gap needed a real fix, not a workaround.

For each one, I described the problem to ChatGPT—what I wanted, what I was seeing in the dashboard, in plugin settings, in debug logs — then worked through a solution together, testing, failing, and iterating until it worked.

The process is the same one I use for any design problem—describing the problem, reasoning through constraints, iterating, testing. The output just happens to be code.

Problem

A reference tool that forces a full page load for every content category breaks the flow it was designed to support.

The Sustainable UX Buddy gives designers quick access to planet-friendly design strategies across 16 design categories, from content and styling to interactive components and AI. To be useful, it needs to work the way designers actually work: open alongside a design tool, on a second screen or mobile, with fast switching between categories.

The default WordPress/WPBakery approach would have sent users to a new page for each category—a full page load every time, breaking the flow of the tool entirely. For a reference tool used mid-task, that was a dealbreaker.

What I built

A dedicated “My Power Ups” page that surfaces each user’s purchased courses and tools as visual cards, easy to find and clearly labelled.

Using a custom code snippet and WordPress shortcodes, I created a dedicated “My Power Ups” page that pulls in each user’s purchased courses and digital tools, displayed as visual cards, clearly labelled, with direct access links. This new page feels more intentional, and answers the first question any new member asks: “So, where do I find my stuff?”

Process

1. Described the problem to ChatGPT, along with what plugins I was using and what data they exposed
2. Worked through which hooks and shortcodes could surface the right content, wrote a snippet, dropped it into the Code Snippets plugin, and tested it
3. Iterated a few times on layout and conditional logic for different product types
4. Cross-browser checks

Time

Under 1 hour, including testing across browsers

Problem

No expiry warning for subscriptions, and no reassuring renewal journey.

Courses and tools on the platform use time-limited access, typically 12 months. When access expired, there was no warning. Users would simply lose access and have to find their way back to the store to repurchase as if they were a new customer—no acknowledgement they’d already done the course, no reassurance their progress was saved, no path back that felt considered.

What I built

A “Renew Access” badge on expiring course cards, plus a dedicated renewal journey that reassures returning users their progress is saved, so re-enrolment feels like a continuation.

A two-part build:

1. An expiry badge — a “Renew Access” label appears on any course or tool card approaching or past its expiry date, so users see it on their dashboard before they lose access, not after
2. A dedicated renewal journey — rather than the standard product page, the flow includes clear messaging that this is a renewal, that course progress is saved, and what they’re getting for another 12 months

Process

The hardest of the three. The solution needed data from three plugins — Sensei LMS (courses), WooCommerce (purchases and expiry), and WP-Members (user access) — plus the theme’s page builder, none of which were built to talk to each other this way.

I dug through cPanel file structures and debug logs to find the right data and work out which plugin owned what. ChatGPT helped interpret errors and write the code, but the design decisions were mine. Testing meant manually simulating different expiry states across browsers and devices.

Time

1 week to build, 1 week of testing. As a first real coding and debugging project, a lot of that time was learning the environment—I’d estimate 1 week now (alowing time for overnight testing).

Problem

No way to track which emails actually drove sign-ups or sales, without adding analytics bloat.

The analytics plugin I use on the platform is deliberately lightweight — a low-data, low-energy choice that aligns with my low-carbon design principles. The trade-off is it doesn’t track granular events. I had no way of knowing whether a promotional email had led to a registration or a sale, which made it hard to know what was actually working.

What I built

Lightweight button-tracking that tags users into the right email segments on click, no third-party scripts, just the specific conversion data I actually needed.

A small piece of tracking code added to specific call-to-action buttons—the ones leading to a registration or purchase. When a user clicks one, they’re tagged and added to the appropriate segment in Sendy (my email platform), so I can see which segment they came from and whether that action completed. No third-party scripts, no heavy analytics layer.

Process

1. Described the journey to ChatGPT — which buttons, which plugin handled the email lists, what the segment structure looked like in Sendy
2. Wrote a lightweight tracking script together
3. Tested by manually clicking through the journeys and checking the Sendy dashboard to confirm the right tags were applied

Time

2 hours, including testing

Across the three projects, real gaps in the member experience were solved with a combined build time of roughly two weeks, with two of the three projects done in under a day each.

The bigger result was a new way of working: a senior designer moving from “this is broken” to “here’s a working fix” independently, which matters more in a small team than the size of any single fix.