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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…
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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
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…
A fully distributed team making the web a better place.
A fully distributed team making the web a better place.
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