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Joshua Wold
A widget becomes a block
For the past few months we’ve been converting WooCommerce widgets in WordPress to blocks. Widgets allow you to add a small feature, such as a paragraph of text, onto your website. I recently did a talk at WooSesh where I went over the work we’ve been doing. You can checkout the video, and also read…
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Filippo Di Trapani
Synthesizing usability test results
This week we got another usability study in the books by testing the most recent iteration of our signup and onboarding flow. Thanks to some help from our design operations team I was able to pull it off without a hitch. All I had to do was fill in a request, slightly massage a template…
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Chris O'Sullivan
Offline Principles
Cowritten with Megs Fulton Many of us design and build apps in air-conditioned offices in major cities, using the latest devices with perfect internet connections. We don’t often think about how apps should work without a strong internet connection. It’s no wonder so many apps feel clunky or broken with a flaky internet connection,…
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Jeff Ong
What is a Creative Technologist?
Within Automattic Design, we have two communities of practice: “creative technology” and “product experience”. Every designer falls into one of these two communities. Having this distinction helps us to create balanced teams, as well as sharpen craft and develop mastery among our designers. What is a creative technologist? For our purposes, the basic distinction of…
By Eriko Kawakami -
Kelly Hoffman
🌶 Spicy topics
Recently, the design team I lead was going through a period of low morale. I noticed this through conversations in 1-1s, our team Slack channel, and most notably in our team meetings. The designers were all working on some very big product problems and while the work was really challenging, the rewarding aspect seemed to…
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John Maeda
Design Collaboration Meetup
Last week we held our first “Design Collaboration Meetup” connecting across product, dev, support, marketing, and human resources. And of course … design! At the gathering we were able to distribute our new playbooks and connect IRL in super high-bandwidth form compared with how we normally operate as a fully-distributed company. The gathering was opened…
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Kelly Hoffman
On sharing mistakes
At the end of every week, my boss asks us to write down a lesson we learned. Mine are usually due to a slip up I made. Here’s how it goes: I make a mistake, apologize to the person, and end up saying something along the lines of: “I should have done x, lesson learned…
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L. Jeffrey Zeldman
Accessibility Standards: Defining What Success Means
Announcing the first pass at Special Projects accessibility standards. Spread the love.
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L. Jeffrey Zeldman
You got this.
Through the rosy lens of memory, learning HTML and Photoshop back in the day was a breeze. Now I’m learning new tech, and it’s hard. Maybe you’re in the same boat.
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Joen A.
Figma for Sketch users
You may have heard of Figma recently. It’s a web-app (with a hybrid-native version) that aims to solve the same problem Sketch solves: make it easy and fast to design and prototype software. When two apps solve the same problem, why would you want to learn to use the new thing when you know how…
A fully distributed team making the web a better place.
A fully distributed team making the web a better place.
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