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Dan Hauk
Sending the right message with form validation
Error messages. Those little things everyone hates to see. As designers, we like to design the best possible experience for getting users through the task at hand. But it’s our job to put as much consideration into error states as we do the success flow. Any error messages we show to users should provide helpful…
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David A. Kennedy
The Next Chapter for Themes
Every few months I read a post about how the WordPress theme business has shrunk. The authors always reach a similar conclusion. Sales have dwindled. Competition has increased. Putting food on the table, finding a niche and standing out is near impossible. It may not be so impossible though. With a new editing interface on…
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sarah semark
Teacakes and tablets
I’m forever trying to learn new things. It’s one of the things I love most about working on the web—there’s something new to learn every single day. This month, I’ve spent a lot of my time learning React. Now, I talk a lot of 💩 about Javascript, and I’m not shy to admit that I…
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Zé Marques
Conquering isolation on a remote design team
Every designer has experienced overlooking something along a project lifecycle. We are so focused on the task at hand that we want to keep going and fail to request feedback. In a context of remote work there’s even more room for this to happen as there’s more isolation, and we need to have mechanisms in place…
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Kjell Reigstad
Hundreds of Tiny Arrows
I recently hand-drew hundreds of tiny arrows for a Longreads illustration. It took about four hours, with a few breaks to check Slack and refill my chai. I knew I could have drawn a few arrows and duplicated them in Photoshop. I would’ve added some brush strokes to differentiate them from each other, and it…
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Michelle
Brix Wine & Charcuterie site design – Detroit Hackathon reflection
This February, I visited Detroit along with a team of fellow Automatticians to participate in the Detroit Hackathon, an initiative of Rebrand Detroit. We did a quick tour of Detroit (we only had a weekend, afterall), and learned about the realities and challenges that small businesses often face. Later, we visited each business to meet…
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Filipe Varela
Fidelity matters
When trying to communicate a design idea in a work environment, it is essential that you do so in the most effective way possible for all parties involved. You want to be as clear and as purposeful as possible, and make sure the delivered message lends itself to meaningful feedback and action. How you communicate…
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Ballio Chan
What’s Your Freedom?
“We don’t make software for free, we make it for freedom.” The idea of freedom rings true to Automattic’s roots. Our CEO, Matt Mullenweg, blogged about the four software freedoms back in 2014. In fact, this concept of freedom is so important you’ve probably spotted it on our homepage. We’ve been exploring how the concept of…
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Gary Murray
Your support team might just be your biggest user research asset in your company
We speak a lot about user research at Automattic within our various product divisions and it’s easy to get your head down in the trenches and feel like you don’t have the time to come out to even see your users, never mind speak to them! At times I feel like this, and in my…
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Filippo Di Trapani
How we build empathy for our customers
In my last post, I wrote how we use interviews to learn about our customers. They allow us to ask them questions and in their responses we find insights and get inspired. In this post, I’d like to share some other ways we build empathy for the people using our products. Support Rotation 💬 It starts…
A fully distributed team making the web a better place.
A fully distributed team making the web a better place.
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