Staying Positive When Your Product Causes Pain

I make and think about WordPress themes all day with the WordPress.com Theme Team. They control the appearance of a WordPress website, and it's a heck of a fun job. Most of the time. What I often hear from customers who use our products: "I just want to get it to look how I see …

Lessons Learned Teaching Usability Testing with Gutenberg

As you might have read in previous flow posts, last week ended Automattic's 8th annual Grand Meetup, where 600+ of us made our way up to Whistler, Canada for a week packed full of conversations, meetings, food, drinks, and an endless amount of opportunities to never stop learning. Automatticians have the option to chose to …

The benefits of establishing a feedback ritual

For the past few months, my day has started with going through the reviews and support forums for Gutenberg (the new editing experience for WordPress). When I started, I wasn't aware of what benefits this would bring to me. I began out of a need, there were reviews and requests not being answered. The project was …

Crossing the digital divide

Taxiing home after my first Automattic Grand Meetup in Whistler, I was happy to get to know my driver Mohamed. He has been running his family business for over 20 years and also drives a taxi to help make ends meet. Like me, he has three kids and we spoke about them at length. We …

Recruiting participants for remote user tests

I recently attended my first remote design sprint at Automattic. It ran over a two week period and  was attended by fellow designers, developers, data scientists, happiness engineers, and marketers. Together we created two prototypes and tested them out with real customers. I found the experience to be both rewarding and inspiring. We came up …

How we build empathy for our customers

In my last post, I wrote how we use interviews to learn about our customers. They allow us to ask them questions and in their responses we find insights and get inspired. In this post, I’d like to share some other ways we build empathy for the people using our products. Support Rotation 💬 It starts …

Winning hearts and minds: using customer interviews to learn about your customers

At Automattic we use customer research to help improve our offering. We employ a variety of different methods to study and learn from our customers so we can build better products for them. Some of the approaches we use include conducting customer interviews, running surveys and polls, doing user tests, and offering customer support. In …

Tools for Remote User Research

Working at Automattic, a company at the time of writing this post has 565 employees working from 56 different countries, it's imperative to learn how to work remotely. Luckily, in this day and age we have plenty of tools to help us do our jobs from virtually anywhere we'd like. Slack for daily conversation, internal …