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…

I’ve been on the periphery of the open source WordPress community for years now. I’ve attended one local WordPress meetup, one WordCamp, and I even helped design and produce a book about WordPress. Here at Automattic, the open source community is always close by. But up until a couple weeks ago, I’d never contributed directly…

Don’t forget – no one else sees the world the way you do, so no one else can tell the stories that you have to tell. —Charles de Lint Ever since I first joined Woo, nearly 6 years ago, I always felt a sense of satisfaction working in support, knowing that I was helping enable…

In the early days of my career, I was quite fascinated with Flash. I wanted to be a cartoonist growing up so naturally, I was drawn to this tool that allowed me to create some pretty powerful animations. Over time, I learned it extensively, until it eventually became my expertise. I’ve built several full-Flash websites,…

Over the years I’ve worked with a lot of people who use websites for all kinds of different things — fashion blogs, online portfolios, e-commerce stores, etc. Regardless of the type or purpose, there’s one common thing amongst all successful websites —TRUST. In business, trust can take many different forms and the more efficient you…

Search for and tell stories about people, not just data. Two months ago, I was invited by one of Jetpack’s engineering teams to join their week-long team meetup in Madrid, Spain. Most of our days involved the usual talks and workshops around the work we do day-to-day, but we dedicated one of our meetup days…