Twenty minutes with your customers

WooCommerce is the most popular way to run a store on WordPress. Because of the nature of WordPress, we don't have a way to see how people are using WooCommerce like we could if we were hosting the software, but that's the beauty of open source. We've found the best way to learn more about …

Getting your hands dirty

I've always been driven by the desire to make things. As a child, I spent a lot of my time writing and illustrating terrible books (mostly about princesses named Sarah who rode around on pet elephants) and building my little sister's LEGO sets (she'd let me to build them for her if I'd play with …

Designing Your Remote “Office”

Photo credit: Matteo Vistocco “So, where do your designers sit?” I was at a lunch table during a design leadership conference late last year, chatting with other leaders in the industry. This question left me...confused. I finally realized what we were talking about and laughed. I’ve spent the vast majority of my career working remotely. Figuring …

Running an effective remote design team

Around this time last year, I got an interesting call on Slack. Automattic had recently organized its mobile teams into a new division called Hogwarts, and our new division lead Cate Huston had embraced her new identity. I was coming off of several weeks of time off after surgery to repair a nerve in my …

The Perception of Presence in Remote Teams

I often get many kinds of questions regarding remote work, often from an organizational and structural perspective. Recently however I've been asked a different one: "I'm a freelance about to start working remotely for a remote company, do you have any advice for me?". On the surface it looks like a simple question, with the …

The New Block Blueprint

WordPress is set to receive a new block-based editor in the future, and I've spent the better part of this year working on the design. The driving force is that instead of looking at the document as the unit to edit, we are now looking at piecing together this document from a sequence of blocks, …

How to fake calligraphy

The art of brush script calligraphy is hard! In this article, I'll describe how to mimic it when you don't have access to the right tools (e.g. a brush pen). You may also not master the pressure/push/pull technique yet. This cheating method will lead to a better understanding of the letterform while helping to smooth …

Thoughts on working fully distributed for the first time

When I first tell people that I’ve joined a fully distributed company and now work from home I get one of two reactions: curiosity and delight or the more common look of horror and confusion. For anyone who isn’t familiar with fully distributed organizations, the distinguishing factor from other companies that have remote employees or …

Seeing humans

This post was meant to be a different one and then yesterday I saw these Tweets by the amazing Mel Choyce : https://twitter.com/melchoyce/status/923249321503576071 I without thinking clicked the ❤️ and liked. It hit me deeper though, it moved me to write this post. In a world of insta-opinions and easy critique, it's pretty hard to …

常に新しいお客様の体験を見直し続けることの大事さ

数日前、私はJohn Maeda氏からScott BelskyのCrafting The First Mile Of Productを紹介された。この記事は昨年に書かれたもので、内容をご存知な方が多いかもしれない。実は私も昨年に読んだのだが、その頃私はプロダクトデザイナーではなく、そしてすぐに活用できる機会を見出せられなかったせいか、多くのブックマークの一つにしかなかった。しかし、今回読み直した際、この記事は私にとても共鳴したので、まだ読まれてない方のために、私にとってのいくつかのハイライトをシェアしたい。