Stories help shape reality. It helps paint the past, present, and future. Through stories we can prompt emotions, experiences, and vision. Stories are human. A great example of how stories can influence, and shape perception can be found in the animated movie “The Croods”. During two scenes in the movie, we get a glimpse at…

One of the first themes I launched on WordPress.com was Toujours. It was designed as a wedding theme, and included features like a Guestbook template, a slideshow, and special styles to highlight the three most recent posts. Like with all of our themes, the demo was built to look realistic, and match the kind of…

From Albert Einstein to Steve Jobs, countless thinkers, artists, and inventors have acknowledged that intuition played a large role in their success. Intuition, for the purpose of this conversation, is defined as a thing that one knows or considers likely from instinctive feeling rather than from conscious reasoning. For a long time I have fought…

If I were to tell you that people couldn’t wait to stop using your product, how would you react? We may assume that there is something fundamentally broken with the product, a problem which must be fixed, because a well-designed product is one that people want to use. A good designer would work through that…

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…