As folks who design and build website creation tools, we tend to be very focused on just that: Creation. The birthing of the shiny new website that we know will help our customers achieve all their business goals and dreams. But sometimes, when we are wrapped up in perfecting this birthing process, we neglect to…

When I was in my early teens, I started using a tool called ResEdit to customize the splash screens of applications on my computer. I opened the original splash screen image files in GraphicConverter, added some new photos or text, and spliced my new graphic back into the application. Later, whenever I’d launch my web browser,…

Innovation done right is about understanding the soul of a thing — an object, a process, a piece of software. Furthermore, it is about using new technologies, contexts, or approaches to more effectively express that soul.

“You are young and life is long and there is time to kill today.” Pink Floyd When I was in school and later studying part-time at college, I founded several small online businesses. There was a freelance WordPress design service, multiple blogs, design showcases, commercial WordPress themes and even an audacious attempt to emulate the…

Recently, our product team conducted a research on small business owners who happen to be a significant part of the WordPress.com customer base. In the report, there was one thing that stuck with me so clearly I kept thinking about it: A “website first” approach may turn potential small business customers off. A perfect website isn’t our…

The WordPress.com design team recently completed a customer research study with small business owners. Reading through the report, this line stood out to me: All business owners expressed some element of feeling like an imposter and concerns they were doing key things wrong I’ve always admired and looked up to small business owners. The idea…

Earlier this year, I was one of the many designers at our company that participated in a an in-depth study about small business owners to determine how we might build our products to serve them better. We kicked things off with a segmentation study that helped us break down and prioritize the vast landscape of…