Earlier this summer, the Dotcom Design team performed a quantitative segmentation study on a collection of small business to gain a better understanding of their needs and expectations as it relates to having a web presence. Before joining a8c, I ran a small business offering contract web design and development services. The majority of my…

This past May, the WordPress.com design team set out to undertake the largest research study that the company had ever done. We spoke to 34 small business owners across the United States over the course of two weeks. Now that a few months have passed, the one thing that has stuck with me is the…

I once worked on a project for rebranding a small Japanese baby stroller brand. Considering how difficult and cumbersome it still is to travel with a stroller in Japanese cities, this said stroller brand’s designs were unusually large, and equipped with heavy wheels. There are still many train stations in Japan without elevators and the…

Automattic recently conducted extensive research on small business owners (SBOs), looking into their behaviors, preferences, and motivations around both building websites and business in general. The design team was tasked with reading through this research to find something that challenged our previous notions about SBOs. My initial read proved fairly uncontroversial as most of my…

For so long, WordPress.com (and, in some ways, WordPress itself) has been very focused on blogging. But we’ve known for a while (perhaps since the introduction of Pages all those years back) that WordPress can do more than blogs. WordPress is being used by businesses all over the world to help them sell their products…

Alright, yes, as a general rule, you should avoid using jargon as much as possible. However, there are some situations when speaking the jargon can be very helpful. 

Michael D. Watkins wrote about the seven seismic shifts of perspective and responsibility required for how managers become leaders in his piece for Harvard Business Review by the same name. In this article, he shares that “all of the shifts a function head must make when first becoming an enterprise leader involve learning new skills…

There’s nothing quite like finding out you’re wrong. I’ve shared previously about the research I was able to take part in as a designer at Automattic. Meeting Small Business Owners from across the United States on video calls, learning about their lives, their fears, their challenges, and the kind of work they do. I pored…

This quote from a WordPress.com customer caught my eye recently: It just really helped me to solidify what I really want my business to be. I don’t need this big huge gigantic “American dream” of the million-dollar business. It made me really realize what I want for my business — which is I always want…