Getting more engagement, from a newbie’s perspective

The design teams at Automattic like to do periodic exercises called Empathy Challenges. The goal in these exercises is to get us thinking in our customers' shoes, to understand their contexts and challenges. This exercise in particular is about understanding how our customers might take an existing post and grow the audience with just a …

How my former life as a musician prepared me for design

I have always had a fascination with the cross-section of art and computers. One of my finest memories as a kid – circa the mid-1990s – was watching my dad, a computer programmer, work on an application icon for his company’s software — one pixel at a time (on a 16 point grid if I …

Navigating Impostor Syndrome as a Newbie Designer

Being a designer at Automattic is pretty great. We have some of the best designers in the world building things that help millions of people build and publish on the web. It’s inspiring to work alongside some of my design heroes on a daily basis, but like many other designers, I battle Impostor Syndrome while trying to …

Lessons Learned: Analyzing Data at Scale

I've learned a lot in my first 2-3 months as a product designer at Automattic, but one of the biggest things I've learned is how to better analyze data and other forms of feedback in order to make more informed design decisions. While designing for such a large audience feels daunting at times, I've found …