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Ola Bodera
Design-led Product Management
Within the WooCommerce division at Automattic we’ve been taking a design-led approach to building products. What does this (design-led) mean? It means we start with empathy, focus on the experience, and emotions (how a person feels about product/service). We work on understanding the people using our products – their problems, needs, and goals – and…
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Shaun Andrews
Rapid Prototyping
A large group of designers at Automattic use Sketch for their work. It’s a great design tool, and with the addition of symbols it’s become super powerful. We’ve got a few internal symbol libraries, and each designer likely has a version of their own. Here’s a quick screenshot of the symbols from a recent Sketch…
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John Maeda
Let’s Cut To The Chase
Estelle Weyl’s tweet today: Stop asking me for my location. Stop asking me about push notifications. Stop asking for my email. Especially on my 1st visit to your site! is especially compelling to me today because I was earlier managing a customer support issue around embedding MailChimp technology on one their WordPress.com sites. Our current…
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Michael Arestad
Improving the WordPress experience
The experience of creating a WordPress site can vary wildly. Occasionally, I hear how someone set it up without any major roadblocks. I more often witness nightmare-level setup experiences. Together, with help from the community and hosts, we’re working to improve the process of building a WordPress site. The fractured flow of the past and…
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Mark Uraine
Relationships vs. Categories
I read a lot about Western vs. Eastern thought. For clarity of the terms Western and Eastern, they can be identified geographically. A Westerner’s paradigm stems from the ancient Greeks and includes much of Europe, Western Russia, Australia, and the Americas. The Eastern paradigm roughly includes Asia through Israel, and parts of Africa. There’s quite…
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Brie Anne Demkiw
Travel, Design, & Beginner’s Mind
“In the beginner’s mind there are many possibilities, but in the expert’s there are few.” ~Shunryu Suzuki, Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind I’m fortunate to get to travel internationally several times a year, both for work and personal trips. A few weeks ago, I hopped on a flight to Cuba. The country had been on my list for…
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Erin Casali
Can positive feedback be used in place of negative feedback?
Feedback is difficult, especially because we don’t take it as a skill to be learned but we expect everyone to be already good at that. Even more, when we say feedback we often refer to negative feedback only. This is misleading because it doesn’t just ignore positive feedback, but also assumes that it’s the right…
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Joen A.
Learn Something Difficult
Back in the day, I designed Flash websites. I was pretty good at it too, and it netted me a job as a Flash animator and designer at a small Copenhagen based studio. We made really cool things, some of them are probably still around. As time went on, though, the shortcomings of Flash became…
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Tammie
The importance of triage practice
At Automattic we have the concept of ‘trash pickup’. The idea being you see something that is an issue, you fix that issue. It’s a powerful idea, one that over time adds up to seeing a better experience for everyone. Living this idea for me also means focusing on every detail, even the smallest of…
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James Koster
Imagining product authoring with WooCommerce and Gutenberg
Alongside the Customizer and the REST API, the other key focus for WordPress in 2017 is improving the tool we use on a daily basis to craft our content – the editor. Content creators are craving a richer, more powerful and more intuitive authoring experience. In response to this, the “Gutenberg” project was formed. Gutenberg…
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A fully distributed team making the web a better place.
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