Blog

Writing for a better web

We also write! And we share stories about design, the team, our products, and how we do it. We’re open source in all ways, from the technologies we create to the ways we create them.

Kill Your Darlings

As designers, we spend most of our time solving problems for our users by building products. How can we save a user time on a task? How can we make…

Evolution of a theme

On WordPress.com we have a showcase full of beautiful, diverse themes, but it has an ugly side as well, hidden from the public view. Behind the scenes we have Trac…

Creative Campaign for Detroit Small Businesses

WordPress.com has recently launched our very first TV commercials – telling the stories of small businesses in Detroit. The spots document our journey during the Detroit Hackathon we’ve held with…

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…

Consistency isn’t just good for users; it’s good for us, too

As a Theme Wrangler, I’m a member of the team here at Automattic that builds, maintains and reviews the themes on WordPress.com. Right now we have over 380 themes available…

How to Know When to Walk Away from a Project

This week, I published a post about how the Theme Team at Automattic decided to retire one of our recent experiments:

Streamlining the extension management flow

Say goodbye to having to install a plugin to manage your plugins! Over the past few months, we have been working on figuring out how we could simplify our customer’s…

始まりはただのバナーデザイン

私はAutomatticにてプロダクトデザイナーとして、日常WordPress.comの機能やUI、UX等のデザインをしているが以前に少し違う物をデザインする機会があり、それを経験した上で感じたことを話したいと思います。続きを読む

Blueprint of a Block

For the past 6 months or so, I’ve dreamt of blocks. Jan 1st I started work on designing the WordPress core editor focus for 2017. That is, with the ultimate…

Designing products for efficiency

Understanding users is of paramount importance, that is clear to any product designer. But sometimes creating an accurate persona to test against can be tricky. Sometimes it might even be…