Theme designers at Automatic have a very important job — design themes, that will (potentially) be used by millions of people. But more importantly, these themes will represent our customers, or their businesses, to the world. This is a very exciting, and intimidating task. But how do you create a theme for millions, you ask?…

Simplicity builds trust. At Automattic we’ve been working through some overarching design principles to help guide our work. One of these core principles is that “simplicity builds trust.” Basically, the idea that the more straightforward a task is to do, the more confident a user is in their ability (or the product’s ability) to do…

Have you ever had to sit and watch someone struggle to do something on a computer or phone? They keep clicking the wrong thing or looking in the wrong place, pushing the wrong buttons, or using the wrong gestures. It’s a frustrating experience for everyone involved. My patience has grown with experience. Particularly in helping…

Stories are integral to human history and culture. Before we had written language, we had stories imprinted on the walls of caves with pigments made of ochre and soot. Before we had agriculture, we developed rich tapestries of myth, folklore, and legend. We use stories to teach, to entertain, to delight, to think through problems,…

Within a year or two of joining Automattic, I was part of a small team that was tasked to design and build an improved way of writing posts and pages on WordPress.com. The deadline was super fast but as the only designer on the team, I was excited to make this happen! As we were…

Several years ago, I was looking for a new challenge, and I decided it was a good time to stop hacking my HP-49g and start pointing my goals at new horizons. Shortly after, I discovered the awesome world of the Web and WordPress, and decided to work hard and learn everything about it. Still not…

In the last couple of months my work here at Automattic has been focused on designing the first version of a new internal tool to be used by our Happiness Engineers. It’s a tool that will at the very least make our coworkers’ day to day a little bit better, but hopefully will impact on…

No matter what type of work you do, you can easily focus on the details too much. Let’s say you’re learning guitar, and you worry about your strumming technique or type of strings you use before you can even play two chords. If you don’t start at the foundation of playing guitar, the chords that…

Early on in my career as a user experience analyst and researcher, I was part of a challenging project that forever changed the way I thought about product, research, and how we involve customers in our process. One of my clients at the time was a large Vancouver-based agency that specialized in e-commerce solutions. They…