I'm the Head of Design for WooCommerce at Automattic. I write about managing a remote design team and other things on my mind.
I love old signs. I also love road trips. On every long drive, I’m bound to pass at least one old sign. I think, “I should stop, that would be cool picture.” But I don’t, I keep on driving. And then I feel a tiny bit of regret.
Today, while driving across Wyoming, I decided to listen to myself. I stopped at every cool sign I passed along the way. No regrets!
These were my favorites:
I was having a conversation with someone about the book I was reading. I had mentioned that before I had borrowed the book from the library and started reading it on my Kindle, I had no idea it was over 900 pages! They proceeded to start talking about why they preferred to read actual books. I was about to convince them of why Kindles were actually better, but stopped.
I was reminded of something that happens in my work bubble. As a designer, there’s a lot of software and tools out there. Every day, something new comes out and someone is convincing you to switch. Sketch is better than Photoshop! Figma is better than Sketch! I think that we forget that everyone has different needs. And other people aren’t you, even ones that share the same profession.
When my needs aren’t being met by a certain tool, software, or thing, then I look for something else. For example, before going on a trip, I didn’t get my act together in time to find a book. Kindle allowed me to borrow books from the library as I was packing, without going anywhere. This works for me and while I may share my story with someone, I don’t feel the need to convince, especially if something else is already working great for them.
We’ve been meaning to hike St. Mary’s Glacier and we finally made it happen this weekend! It’s a really popular spot so we left pretty early and were on the trail by 9am. The hike up to the lake was super rocky. Once we got to the lake, we could see the glacier. It was cool to see that much up close in July. A few people were skiing and snowboarding down it, which I definitely want to come back and do. (Running/skidding down the snow in hiking boots was pretty fun tho.)
Most of these photo credits go to Anne, who has a really nice camera.
Trailhead directions: Google Maps
Parking fee: $5 cash
When to go: Weekdays or early mornings on weekends to beat the crowd.
Difficulty: Easy. (Kids, dogs, people in sandals)
Length: 1+ miles. (We did 4.6) Its an out-and-back so you can make it as long or as short as you want. You can just hike up to the lake for a short trip, but if you want to make it longer, there’s a ton of options including submitting a 13er (James Peak).
When Grandmother was dying, I had so many thoughts and memories swirling through my head that I had to write them down. I sit here now thinking about Grandfather, who was a man of such few words. I spent almost as much time with him as grandmother but he was more of a presence than someone I interacted with a lot.
Whenever I went over their house he would always be in his recliner in the corner of the den. He’d either be napping or reading. On the table that sat between their two chairs there was always a National Geographic and a folded up newspaper with the crossword partially filled out. As a kid, I wondered how someone could take so many naps. When he saw you come in, he would un-recline his chair to say hello. I remember loving to sit on the dimpled leather chair in that room at his desk. I’d rotate around back and forth and it had a little squeak.
If he wasn’t in the den, he’d be at the kitchen table, which was right when you walked in. Always in the same chair. He’d have a small bowl of nuts, a nut cracker, and a small pile of walnut remains. We’d say hello and then run down to the bath house with the green translucent roof, put on our bathing suit, and jump in the pool. We could only come back inside if we were completely dried off and dressed. I remember going into the bathroom and seeing his thin metal comb on the sink. Sometimes I’d comb my hair with it because I thought it was cool.
I knew him and Grandmother as world travelers. After trips we’d go over their house and he’d be the one sitting behind the whirring projector, flipping through each slide. He’d describe some photos, and flip through a couple in a row without saying anything and we’d just stare at the photos. My favorite would be when he’d chuckle recalling some funny incident. There’s over 50 boxes of slides and we still look through them from time to time.
He was generous enough to fund half of our college tuition. Every semester when I added up the cost of school and books, I’d nervously drive over there. Asking him for money felt so awkward and uncomfortable, I dreaded doing it. He never showed any emotion when I’d give him the total and he’d sit at his desk, pull out the binder of checks and write it out. My teenage brain was a mess: “Am I too greedy? Is this too much money? I shouldn’t have included books in that.”
Part of it was that I knew he never seemed to spend any money on himself. I don’t remember seeing him in new clothes, he kept his truck till it was rotted through, and just didn’t seem to like stuff in general. This made gift giving especially hard. I remember when we tried giving him a cell phone for Christmas, it ended up getting returned.
Instead, he chose to treat himself with travel. Him and Grandmother went to places I never heard of and they would even meet us on a couple trips around the country. We went to Garden of the Gods and into the Rockies, Outer Banks in North Carolina and one time they took my sister Jen and I to Oregon.
At Christmas or when his entire family was together, he’d sometimes stand up, pull a small price of paper from his pocket and give a little speech. He’d recite a poem, either one he found or wrote, interesting family stats, or a quote. Four years ago, on his 90th birthday he stood up and recited three poems by memory and a few stats, which included how many days he’d been alive up to that point. One of the poems he recited was one he read back when he was a senior in high school:
Strength for each day, that is all that I ask,
Food for my hunger, Zest for my past.
Health for my body and a roof o’er my head.
When I am weary, a rest and warm bed.
Give me a job and a place in life’s scheme.
Give me a moment in which I can dream.
Give me a glimpse of some beautiful things;
Flower and sunshine and birds on the wing.
Not to have riches, position, or fame;
But to be useful, let that be our aim.
Look not ahead to the future;
But pray just for the things we need day by day.
He said it was his philosophy of life and that it was a good way to live; one day at a time because the days really do fly by. He died on December 4, 2017 having lived 34,309 days.
WooCommerce is the most popular way to run a store on WordPress. Because of the nature of WordPress, we don’t have a way to see how people are using WooCommerce like we could if we were hosting the software, but that’s the beauty of open source. We’ve found the best way to learn more about our customers and the way they use WooCommerce is to actually have a conversation with them.
Last week we held WooConf, our annual conference dedicated to everything WooCommerce. People from all over the world came to Seattle to learn, present, and discuss all things WooCommerce. Being the WooCommerce design team at Automattic, we decided to run a Product Research Lab, lead by our user research wrangler, Maria. Six of us broke up into three groups; in my group, I was the interviewer and Justin was the notetaker.
Conference attendees had the opportunity to sign up for a twenty minute session with us during the conference. Our group met with fourteen people over two days.
We structured our twenty minute session into three parts and for the most part, kept this format the same for each and every session.
When the customer walked in, we introduced ourselves and asked them to take a seat in front of the computer. We then gave them a heads up of how the session would be structured, and said, “Today we’d like to learn more about your experience with WooCommerce. We’ll then ask you to walk through the onboarding wizard, which is the first thing you encounter when activating WooCommerce on your WordPress site. We’ll then wrap up with a few last questions. Sound good?”
Justin would then start the timer so we would stay on track. We then asked each of the participants the following questions:
At this point we are about five minutes in and are ready to move on to the user testing portion of the session. We transition to the computer, which is still in front of the interviewee and guide them to the next steps by saying, “Okay great! We’re going to switch gears a bit now, we’d like to learn more about your experience with setting up WooCommerce for the first time on a new site.”
Once the interviewee has completed the onboarding flow we’d ask:
At this point we are anywhere from ten to fifteen minutes in. We’d lead into the end of the session by saying, “Looks like we have about a few minutes left, I want to be mindful of time so we can be sure to end on time so you can get back to the conference. We just have a few more questions for you.”
“Thank you very much for taking time to talk to us today, We really appreciate it. If you’re interested we will be sending a follow up email where you can sign up for additional research opportunities with us, so be sure to keep an eye out for that.”
We would then stop the recording, shake the interviewee’s hand, and wait until they left before resetting the site in preparation for the next session!
I went into this not knowing quite what to expect. Was twenty minutes enough time? Was it too much time? What if the interviewees came into the sessions with a litany of complaints about WooCommerce? Will we learn anything?
Yes! Of course we learned something. We learned so much. Personally, I loved every minute of it and cannot wait to do it again. When we got home, we analyzed our notes for patterns and tracked each issue to be prioritized for a future project cycle. These problems felt real, because they were; we had witnessed it first hand.
There’s something about meeting with customers in real life that is incredibility enlightening. There was this one particular step that tripped almost everyone up. Okay, there was more than one, but the first time I recognized a pattern I remember just cringing after the next person was about to get to it. I just wanted to fix it right then and there! And that’s really the best part of this entire experience. We learned in twenty minute what we’d never learn sitting in our desks at home with our heads down in the code.
This was originally posted on automattic.blog.
“You loved September Issue? I didn’t know you were into fashion.”
I’m not. I just love hearing stories and learning about things I don’t know much about. A documentary about the making of the September issue of Vogue was fascinating to me. I’ve watched it a half dozen times.
I’ve always worked at tech companies and been surrounded by people who think that getting ahead means you have to follow all the cool thought leaders on Twitter, read all the books on how to increase productivity and be a better manager, meditate every day, share all the articles with coworkers, listen to the advice of the Tim Ferris’ of the world, and try all the apps. Keeping up with all that is too much and trying to do so won’t make you better at your job. I think that staying in our own tech little bubble is harmful and it stifles creativity.
Instead, take a look around outside the industry for inspiration. Get a glimpse into a little corner of the world you haven’t ever visited, learn about new sub cultures, or anything new or niche. This can be in the form of physical travel, a non work-related book, or my favorite source: Netflix documentaries. I have a collection of the latter below with a brief summary and how I related to each.
Balance the thought leader blog posts with something outside the tech realm. Get out and find a new little corner of the world and you just might be surprised.
The WooCommerce design team is five people strong. At any given time, we have at least that many projects in development. As you may guess, this means that all designers aren’t working together on a single area of WooCommerce. Instead, we each lead a product or project and meet frequently as a team to discuss, share, and give feedback. This ensures we are all aware of each other’s work and that our overall customer experience is cohesive.
There’s a team outside of the WooCommerce division at Automattic working with the greater WordPress community to make a new post and page building experience called Gutenburg. The goal with Gutenburg is to make writing rich posts effortless so you don’t have to know any code at all. Progress on the new editor is moving along really fast. It’s full featured and intuitive, but there hadn’t been any work done into how this will integrate with WooCommerce.
How do you handle adding a high priority item to everyone’s already full schedule without burning your team out or lowering morale? There’s probably many ways, but here’s what we did:
Instead of discussing it separately with each member of the team, I brought it up in one of our team’s twice weekly video calls. This allowed us to discuss it openly as a team. We all ended up agreeing it was part of our responsibility, was of importance, and was worth putting our time into. Time-boxing was brought up as a great way to approach something like this. Since it was summer and there were a few vacations coming up, we decided to have the due date be in one month.
I put up a sticky post on our team’s internal blog and tagged each person on the team so they were all notified. A day before the due date, we each commented on the post with our ideas. That was yesterday 🙂 Today we all met on a video chat. We all started by sharing our experiences we had testing out Gutenburg. For many of us, it was our first time using it.
Then we took turns presenting our ideas. To do this, we simply “went around the room” and took turns sharing our screens so we could walk though our thought process behind our sketches and flows. We didn’t specify a deliverable so we saw pen and paper sketches, Mural boards, high fidelity screenshots, and clickable prototypes. We then gave feedback to each person before we moved on to the next.
At the end of the call, we remarked on how this was such a treat that we all got to work on the same thing together. It was really fun to see how my teammates approached the same problem and it made me excited to go back and iterate. My goal is make these group time-boxed design problems a more regular occurrence on our team.
This post was originally published on automattic.design.
There’s plenty of discussions on the internet about whether or not designers should code, but what about API’s? Hear me out. I’m going to tell you about a project I’m working on and how I went from knowing almost nothing about API’s to knowing a little more than nothing and along the way, discovered how we could use the data in our design sketches.
This post was originally a talk given at AIGA West Michigan’s Design Week. Continue reading “Should designers API?”
Every year our entire company gets together and one of the things we all have to do is give a four minute talk on any subject. In the past, this has always made me super nervous, and this was the first year that I wasn’t shaking in my boots. Progress!
The slides aren’t exactly synced up, but if you have ever wanted to learn more about cyclocross or have no idea what it is, your wait is over!
Two things I want to work on for next time:
One year turning into the next is exciting. I feel filled with hope and reenergized. It’s not about resolutions; I don’t really make goals. If I want to do something, I’ll just do it. It’s more about the feeling of knowing there’ll be new places to explore, relationships to grow, things to make, ideas to form, and lessons to learn.
Cheers 🎊
