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Joen A.
Demoing WordPress
Recently a few of us set out to record demo videos for some of the new features set to arrive in the upcoming version of WordPress, version 5.9. In case it’s helpful to your team, here’s what we learned for this latest round of videos.
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Joen A.
Advancing the Block Interface
Automattic contributes to a number of non-profit and open source projects, including WordPress, which powers more than 30% of websites, including WordPress.com. As part of WordPress’ five for the future program, Automattic has a number of sponsored contributors who work alongside community members to further the project. In this post, Joen shares his perspective as…
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Joen A.
How To: Good UI Demo Videos
Whether it’s for demoing an existing feature, recording a “how-to”, or for a product launch, the quality of the demo video you record matters.
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Joen A.
Figma for Sketch users
You may have heard of Figma recently. It’s a web-app (with a hybrid-native version) that aims to solve the same problem Sketch solves: make it easy and fast to design and prototype software. When two apps solve the same problem, why would you want to learn to use the new thing when you know how…
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Joen A.
Improvements4All™
In recent months, we’ve done a fair amount of research on small business owners, and how a website can help them find their presence on the web. As I paged through some of the results recently, an interesting pattern began to emerge: many of the aspects of a service that are appreciated by small business,…
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Joen A.
Invisible
The best design is invisible. It is functional to the point that you forget how it works, you just use it. You might even forget it took effort to invent once upon a time. For any designer creating work for others, this can be a difficult realization to come to terms with. Perhaps what drove…
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Joen A.
Gutenberg April Empathy Challenge
“Gutenberg” is the codename for a project to bring a brand new editor to WordPress; an editor that makes it easy to create rich layouts without having to know code. Because usage is like oxygen for fixing bugs and improving interfaces, we run “empathy challenges”. These challenge you to empathize with the people using your interface…
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Joen A.
What comes first? The audience, or the views?
The goal of WordPress, from the very start, has been to democratize publishing: to give anyone the freedom to have their voice on the web. But what is a voice without an audience? If a tree falls in a forest, does it make a sound? The design team at Automattic often run empathy challenges. They…
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Joen A.
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,…
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Joen A.
Passing the Baton
On or around the 21st of August, my family and I will welcome a baby boy, officially making me the luckiest man in the world. That also means I’ll be taking off from work for a bit, as I tend to my new highest priority. Until that time, and for the past several weeks, I’ve…
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