We’re excited to announce a big step forward for user experience in Drupal Core: the creation of the new UX Manager role within the core leads team. This is a foundational move toward UX-driven development, where user experience is embedded from the start, not added at the end.
Historically, UX responsibilities in Drupal Core were shared across different roles, often falling under product management. But in practice, UX input has often arrived late, focusing on small usability tweaks rather than shaping the overall experience.
By creating a dedicated UX Manager role, we’re making sure UX has a clear voice — from early feature discussions to final design decisions. This will help us build more intuitive, cohesive, and accessible experiences for everyone using Drupal. We’re also laying the groundwork for the future: supporting more UX practitioners to contribute to Drupal and from there, grow into decision-making roles, strengthening our design contributor community, establishing a stable UX testing process, and making onboarding easier for designers and researchers.
For now, this role will be co-led by Emma Horrell and myself, Cristina Chumillas.
Emma is the UX Research Lead for Drupal CMS and has shaped many aspects of the project through her work researching target audiences, testing features, and helping reduce “Drupalisms.” Her research expertise will continue to help us align Drupal with real user needs. Many thanks to the University of Edinburgh for supporting her continued contributions.
I’ve been the usability topic maintainer for years and currently serve as Product Design Lead for Drupal CMS and Drupal core Front-end Framework Manager. I’m looking forward to helping embed UX more deeply into how Drupal Core is defined, designed, and built.
This is just the beginning. If you’re interested in improving Drupal’s experience, join us in the #ux-working-group on Drupal Slack — and help us put UX at the heart of Drupal’s future.