Acquia · 2024–2025
Drupal Canvas
Acquia's content management solution, Drupal, is powerful but historically complex: heavily reliant on developers and frustrating for non-technical users. With 1.3M+ registered Drupal users (developers, site builders, designers, and content editors), Drupal Canvas (originally launched as Experience Builder) reimagines how people create, manage, and update sites, making site-building feel like second nature regardless of technical expertise.
- Role
- Lead Senior Product Designer
- Tools
- Figma, FigJam, Drupal, Dovetail
- Duration
- March 2024 – 2025
- Prototype
- End-to-end MVP
The problem
What we were up against.
Drupal's reliance on developers created significant barriers for beginners and anyone who simply wanted to build a website. The lack of inclusivity slowed project timelines and excluded a large segment of users without technical expertise. How might we make Acquia's CMS more intuitive and accessible, empowering non-technical users to build and manage sites independently?
By the numbers
The shape of the work.
1.6M+
Websites built
1,200+
Beta signups in launch month
3
DrupalCon sessions in 2025
The solution
What we built toward.
A content management experience that empowers anyone (regardless of technical expertise) to confidently build, customize, and manage websites. By simplifying complex tasks and breaking down barriers, Drupal Canvas unlocks creativity and makes the web a more inclusive place.
Effortless site creation & management
Users can create, manage, and preview sites with no technical expertise, starting from out-of-the-box templates or from scratch.
Intuitive design & customization
A drag-and-drop interface, Brand Kits, and Global Regions simplify creating consistent, on-brand experiences, with deeper customization available through the Code Editor.
Seamless content & publishing
A visual-first interface empowers content creators to produce and publish structured and unstructured content confidently, supporting both coupled and headless CMS workflows.
The hard call
Choosing the bolder direction
User testing showed our divergent prototype better matched what newcomers expected, while the constrained one mirrored how existing Drupal users had built sites for years. Going constrained would have felt safer to the community and faster to ship. We chose divergent and made terminology its own workstream, accepting that we'd have to retrain expectations to win the next million users. That bet shaped everything downstream: the IA, the naming, what we cut, and what we doubled down on.
Video placeholder
Solution overview (1:35)
Video placeholder
Round 1: Constrained user flow prototype (0:19)
Video placeholder
Round 1: Divergent user flow prototype (0:17)
What I did
The role I owned.
I directed design across the project, partnering with a 400+ engineering organization, the Drupal community, and stakeholders across the business. I owned multiple design systems to keep affordances consistent at scale, integrated GenAI with chatUX into five solutions to reduce time-to-value, and led a unified global navigation across 12 products. I also mentored junior designers and international team members along the way.
Research
How research shaped the work.
Research wasn't about hitting a methodology checklist. It was about answering a single question: do we lean into Drupal's classic strengths, or chart a bolder, more modern direction? We tested both, then let the evidence redraw the roadmap.
Round 1: Mental models in conflict
Ten technical and non-technical participants tested two concept directions. The divergent prototype aligned with how modern users expected a page builder to work; the constrained one matched how existing Drupal users had built sites for years. The constrained flow exposed pain points around terminology and feature recognition that turned out to be deeper than UI: they were vocabulary mismatches that needed their own workstream to fix.
Rounds 2 & 3: From discovery to direction
Subsequent rounds focused on navigation, customization, and design consistency across sites. Insights shifted the roadmap toward automation, better previews, live collaboration, and scalable SEO. Brand consistency moved from 'nice to have' to a core requirement, which led us to invest in reusable design elements and AI-assisted templates rather than ad-hoc per-site styling.
How we converged
From wide exploration to one direction.
We converged through competitive benchmarking, an IA validated by a category tree test, a terminology audit against modern CMS standards, and cross-functional workshops that aligned eng, PM, and design on the bets we were making. From there the work laddered up into Brand Kits, role-based collaboration, and integrated SEO and preview improvements.
Design refinement
Sharpening to MVP.
After several iterations, we refined designs against the MVP roadmap to ensure users could complete their jobs to be done. We leaned on the Radix design system to streamline production, improve consistency, and focus the team's energy on higher-level design decisions. Its accessibility and flexibility let us ship scalable, inclusive solutions that met both design and technical standards.
Outcome
Where the work landed.
Now known as Drupal Canvas in Drupal core, the product shipped and is used to design 1.6M+ websites, with 1,200+ sign-ups in the first beta launch (under its original name, Experience Builder). At DrupalCon Atlanta 2025 I co-presented the project with Jillian Chueka and contributed to the Drupal CMS Spotlights keynote as a separate session. Later that year I was a featured speaker for the Drupal CMS track at DrupalCon Europe Vienna 2025.
Learnings
What I took with me.
As the lead designer on my first end-to-end project, I drove design from discovery through MVP release. The experience reinforced the importance of strategic thinking, adaptability, and effective collaboration with stakeholders, the Drupal community, and multiple sprint teams in a fast-paced, cross-functional environment. The work shipped, the beta launched, and the project carried forward into Drupal core as Drupal Canvas after I transitioned to Bitwarden.