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…

Stories are powerful. For the last few months we have been immersed in the world of small business owners. This began with a series of over 40 interviews with small business owners; we used these to gain an understanding of their goals, needs and pains. Based on these insights, we began imagining an ideal world…

“Your assumptions are your windows on the world. Scrub them off every once in a while, or the light won’t come in.” ― Isaac Asimov The biggest advantage of starting something new is a fresh perspective, whether it be a new job, a new hobby, or traveling to a new country for the first time. You…

“To err is to wander, and wandering is the way we discover the world; and, lost in thought, it is also the way we discover ourselves. Being right might be gratifying, but in the end it is static, a mere statement. Being wrong is hard and humbling, and sometimes even dangerous, but in the end…

Consistency builds trust. Speed builds trust. Simplicity builds trust. —Automattic Design Principle Lately, my focus has been revolving around landing pages and landing page systems. So while I was going through our design principles the other day, it struck me: All our potential customers go through the same micro funnels before they sign up through…

WordPress exists today because people contribute to it. They contribute in their evenings, weekends and lunch times. People choose to take WordCamp vacations, attend contribution days on a Sunday with their family. These volunteer contributors are the heartbeat of WordPress. They are the stories that whilst often unheard need listening to. Let’s be real, contribution…

If you’ve ever had to do anything moderately hard over a long period of time, failed at it, tried again, found some success, failed at it, tried again, and so on, looping on and on, you’ve probably in some way gone back to your first principles. Those foundational building blocks that lie deep beneath any…