And no, we weren’t on the yellow brick road! Last week my son broke his arm and this prompted our first visit to the local hospital in a new country (we moved countries about 6 months ago) – something we were already apprehensive about as the medical system seemed to work differently here to what…

Start from curiosity. Welcome and seek out difference. I’ve written previously about our focus on accessibility with the WordPress mobile apps. Both iOS and Android provide an array of options focused at making their platforms fully accessible to everyone who might want to use them. Mobile apps get to benefit from these accessibility tools for…

One of the most common traps of product design is ending up designing for yourself. It’s sometimes easy to forget that there’s an entire planet full of people outside of your office and so starting project planning with user stories is an incredibly valuable way to stay grounded and is one of the core design…

Search for and tell stories about people, not just data. The lifespan of an open-source product is a funny thing. It starts with an idea that is shared with the world and from there, if the product gains a bit of traction, there is no way of knowing what will become of it. The rise…

For the past couple months a team of designers has been neck deep in user research and exercises designed to help us absorb and synthesize everything we’ve learned. We started from curiosity: how can we better solve the problems small business owners are facing? We got the chance to talk with over 30 small business…

Prior to my time at Automattic, I worked at a direct marketing firm. We were taught to mind the data. You make a change, you test it, you check the data and make a decision from it. At the time, this seemed fool proof. Numbers and statistics are absolute after all, right? However, continually we’d…

Start from curiosity. Welcome and seek out difference. – Automattic Design Principle Whether we intend to have one or not, we all have our bubbles. It’s the place we naturally gravitate to because we know it’s comfortable and safe. Stepping outside of that bubble requires curiosity and a willingness to get uncomfortable. Running user interviews…

We have gut feelings, instincts, and intuition for a reason. Often those reasons are sound — even if we can’t articulate them. But sometimes the reasons are rubbish. Inconvenient as it may be, as single notes in the chorus of earth’s 7.6 billion, our intuition is not primordial, perfect, or universal. Intuition is useful to…

Designers at Automattic have one common goal that is clearly stated in our creed: I will never stop learning. It’s something that I refer back to when being challenged with a new idea, work method or model of interacting with people that feels foreign to me. It’s that initial fear of being exposed to a…