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David A. Kennedy
Themes are Mission Control
When we think of space flight, we often think of the thing that gets us there: the shuttle, module or rockets that take us out of this world. However, in the early days of space flight programs at NASA, one man realized how important control from the ground would be to quickly evolving missions. Christopher…
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Dan Hauk
Keeping product assumptions in check
Assumptions can be difficult to overcome. Many times we don’t even realize we’re making them. As an experienced product designer, I find it easier to make these assumptions. They more easily creep into my work subconsciously because I have more knowledge and experience of “best practices” and “what worked before”. So how can we keep…
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Brie Anne Demkiw
Running remote design sprints
I lead a team of designers who work on WordPress.com and other products. Last year, my team ran our first design sprint together in-person at a team meetup. It was a great way to kick off a new project and we became instant fans of the format. But Automattic is a remote company. Most of…
Photo by <a href="http://luca.blog" target="_blank">Luca Sartoni</a>. -
Filipe Varela
Be kind, rewind
We’ve all been there—from time to time a site becomes inaccessible, goes blank, or stops working altogether. This can be caused by many factors: the dreaded hacker, an unreliable host, a less-than-legit plugin, or a simple user error. You might have a full database backup to bail you out, but restoring the database requires some…
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Gary Murray
What you learn in the deep end
Nearly 2 years ago, I took over as the team lead of the team I had joined when I started working at what was then WooThemes. That, in and of itself might seem to have little significance for a blog post, on a blog centered around design, but the team I took over being lead…
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Rick Banister
Up the hill Backwards
I wrote in June about my early experience leading a remote team and the experimental tool I borrowed from behavioral economics to help foster the growth of my teammates. The ‘tool’ is a set of four questions I ask every two weeks during one-on-one sessions each designer. How do you think you’re doing the last…
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Matt Miklic
Designing Login for the WordPress apps
Earlier this year, a project squad in our mobile division set out to work on a surprisingly tricky task: creating a simple login flow for our mobile apps that works with any WordPress site. Why would that be hard? Because there isn’t just one flavor of WordPress. Endless hosting configurations, an almost infinite number of…
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James Koster
Time in design
While pondering a topic for this post I habitually glance down at my wristwatch and decide that it might be a suitable inspiration. I rapidly mind-map a potential overlap between horology and software design / development but only find ethereal concepts – nothing concrete. What I do find is an overlap between how my taste…
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Tammie
Receiving the Baton
Not every project you join at the start. I recently was passed the baton to become the new design lead of the WordPress editor focus. The current lead, Joen Asmussen is taking some time off to welcome a new baby boy into his family. He wrote an amazing post about passing the baton, this is…
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Filippo Di Trapani
Recruiting participants for remote user tests
I recently attended my first remote design sprint at Automattic. It ran over a two week period and was attended by fellow designers, developers, data scientists, happiness engineers, and marketers. Together we created two prototypes and tested them out with real customers. I found the experience to be both rewarding and inspiring. We came up…
A fully distributed team making the web a better place.
A fully distributed team making the web a better place.
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