The Art of Branding and Design at WooCommerce

Ronald: Hi, it’s Ronald here. Welcome to another episode of Do the Woo. And I’m joined here with my co-host, Marcus. Marcus, who do we have joining us as guests?

Marcus: Yeah. Happy to be here, Ronald. Thanks. Today we have two special guests from the WooCommerce group. We have Andrei Slobtsov, the brand design director at WooCommerce, and Fernando Perez, branded marketing designer, which I’m sure I said in the most American way possible. I’m sorry.

Andrei: No worries. Hello. Very happy to be here. This is Andrei. And a lot of people have challenge pronouncing my last name, it’s of the Russian descent.

Ronald: So how do you pronounce it? So let’s get out of the way.

Andrei: In Russia, there is this letter we have that’s letter tse, but in English I use T-S, but I’ve noticed that a lot of people much easier to pronounce S-T. So every single company I’ve joined, within three days they have to change my login and email from Slobstov to Slobtsov.

Ronald: I think Perez is pretty universal now these days, isn’t it?

Fernando: Yeah, I think mine is more easy. Yeah. I’m Fernando Perez and I live in Madrid, Spain.

Working at Woo, design and branding

Marcus: Awesome. Why don’t we get started by letting people know a little bit about yourselves and what you do, day to day your roles at WooCommerce. Why don’t you start Andrei?

Andrei: I joined WooCommerce four years ago, Automattic rather and I’ve been on the WooCommerce divisions ever since. I came to Automattic and WooCommerce world after spending a decade in advertising industry, worked in a lot of different Chicago advertising agencies on the creative side, art direction, creative direction. And yeah, so Automattic and WooCommerce is my first foray into the world of in-house tech, marketing and brand design. The work Fernando and I do spins across the whole spectrum of any visual design, touch everything from as small as designing an icon for extensions and how they show up in the email confirmation letter to working on big brand initiatives for defining the WooCommerce brand.

Marcus: Awesome. Is your work on the brand on the design side, does that span into the product or is it more on the marketing side for WooCommerce as a brand or a little bit of both?

Andrei: I wouldn’t say a little bit. It’s both. Yeah a lot of both.

Marcus: A lot of both.

Andrei: When I joined we didn’t have a dedicated marketing design team on WooCommerce. So I was embedded within the product design team, working with product designers and the thinking there was, and now we have Fernando on the team as well, that we can bring some of our marketing thinking when it comes to, for example, any cross promotional ideas that it’s not just pure UX and I’m minimizing it a little bit, but also bringing some ideas that can enhance the product perception from user point of view, whether it’s from a visual or just the brand and that brand proposition and values.

Marcus: Awesome. How about you Fernando, and tell us a little bit about your day to day, your role there?

Fernando: Yeah, so I started only one year ago in Automattic. I joined it directly to the WooCommerce team with Andrei working in the marketing and branding side of WooCommerce. And my background is really similar to Andrei. I come from the marketing agency site, the past 10 years working in branding consultancies. I was working as a design director there so I was launching a lot of brands in Spain, but also in Middle East, in South America, Asia, Africa. So I had this experience of working with lot of brands, but the thing is that I wanted to do a change and try working in the client side, in house, because I think you have a more long term vision. You care about the brand, you care about your product and your brand and make it grow and everything.

So that was the main thing. The main change that I try to address with this change to Automattic. And I’m here in the WooCommerce team as Andrei was saying, we have this approach of taking care of 360 degrees view of the brand, reviewing all the touch points where the brand is expressing. And I think an important thing also that the job we do is we don’t focus only in design. We also focus how the brand express, the things we do are aligned with our brand values, with our personality. So it’s this duality of working the business side of the brand but also thinking about deeper around the brand.

Dreaming in purple and the history of branding WooCommerce

Ronald: Do either of you, or both of you dream in purple colors all the time? Because there is a very strong theme of purple.

Andrei: Yes. And this is something what historically WooCommerce before it was acquired by Automattic was called WooThemes. And there were several brand variations. I believe that the WooThemes logo was the same speech level, instead of commerce, it was themes in the same topography setting. The color was blue. Then it became a blue gradient and slightly washed out purple. Then we iterated it from a slightly brighter and more accessible variation of a purple you see today. But also like one historical reference that early on WooThemes had a design mascot. It was this character ninja named Hiro. However, in recent years, we realized that it was not very culturally sensitive an Asian ninja is a mascot. So we decided to retire him.

And with that, I would say maybe that part of the marketing design system for the brand left there and then probably over the years, we leaned heavily on the expression of brand as a purple where right now we’re trying to pull back and be a lot more intentional about using the color where we don’t default to purple everything but more assessing is this call to action button, or is this background, is this something where we are communicating to our users about the WooCommerce brand, then it should be? And is it reinforcing the values we want to speak about? Or is this just we default into it because we just got used to default into it.

Analyzing your brand and sticking to the design rules

Ronald: That’s a really interesting process that you described there as a designer, how you have to analyze each element of a design but across the whole brand. How do you tackle that? Where do you start with, if you’re looking after brand in general, where do you start with working out what matters and then sticking to those design rules?

Andrei: Well, I’ll give you a real practical example. I think for now we can cover some of more high level theory on that. Recently we were looking at some email reply, the satisfaction with like, did this solution answer your question? No, it didn’t. Yes, it did. Neutral. And the design defaulted on again using the buttons in purple. And practically thinking there was like if the user was not satisfied with an answer and he clicks no, that did not solve my problem. That’s a UX action there, but the button was purple and it was a brand purple. So do we want to build this subconscious connection between the WooCommerce brand purple with them saying no, we did not answer my question. So analyzing it on that level.

Fernando: Yeah. I think that’s why we are trying to introduce now other colors, the secondary color palette, other graphic elements. So we can have more resources in the brand use. So we are not just purple centric as we can say that just is in the purple color.

Ronald: Yeah. I was just envisaging if you’re not happy, you have a little green shopping bag there, but yeah. An unfair joke. It’s the same as when you’re flying with easyJet so if you’re not happy then complain to Ryanair or something like that.

Emotional design

Fernando, so the design, and I know you used a term emotional design, can you elaborate a little bit more on maybe some rules that you apply in across the board from, you mentioned email, but websites, call to action and so on.

Fernando: Yeah. That’s something that we try to apply to. At the end it’s how the brand expresses. We want to be closer with our customers, with the people that use WooCommerce. So we try to connect emotionally with them. And that’s one of the part that we try and it’s not only made through design. It’s also made through tone of voice, through using more user friendly interfaces. We try to connect with the user in all the senses that we can. Not only this only but of course with illustrations, when we are trying to design these type of elements, we always thinking in this type of little connections.

Andrei: I can also to give another practical example of a bit of our experiment with an emotional design. I was tasked with helping a product designer to design a screen, an empty screen inside the WooCommerce mobile app. So it was one of the screens where once you have completed your whole list of whatever actions you need to do, fulfill an order, cancel or issue a refund. And once you check off all the boxes and you complete all the actions, it’s an empty screen. And the product designer asked me, “Currently we have an emoji there, can we just have something a bit more custom?” So when I initially tackled the project, I started looking for like, “Okay, what’s an alternative or other variations of this celebratory moment?” And design exploration in my mind veered a little bit into understanding like, “Well, who are we serving this screen to?”

And one thing which was then later confirmed with data, that screen is served to two types of different customers. There’s a type one, people who are successful in selling their product to services. And when they see the empty screen for them, that is a celebration moment. It’s like, “Okay, my to-do list. It’s done.” So they’re feeling happy, they’re feeling fulfilled or satisfied with whatever task. But then there is another whole group of people, people who haven’t made a single sale. And for them, that is not quite a celebration moment. It’s more like, “Oh crap. Something is not working here.” So when we were able to dissect the two different audiences, we decided to serve in two different types of screens, so celebration for sellers, and then a screen which offers more advice on how to cross promote their products, how to increase the visibility of their store for people who have made a single sale. So tapping into the addressing the emotions and serving them appropriate content and appropriate moment.

The strategy to introducing colors into the brand and design

Marcus: Yeah. That’s interesting. And just going back to some of what you’ve talked about with the purple and thinking through design and heading in multiple directions, I guess my question is, how do you balance the brand identity that everyone associates WooCommerce with that purple? So if you stray too far away from that, then maybe you start to lose a little bit of that brand awareness and all of that. And where do you start, I guess, where do you start in defining secondary colors? Is it arbitrary? Is it through looking at other pieces of the WordPress ecosystem or photography or in other lots of ways to introduce color into design. Where does your head go? Where do you start when trying to evolve a brand that’s so widely known and for a specific color, in some instances?

Fernando: Yeah. I think the key was to, I mean, we were using a lot of purple, but not other colors. We have different shades from purple. So we started thinking like okay, we need to add some flexibility here, but we don’t want to lose the purple. We are purple. It is part of our identity. So we need to keep this purple, but we can start introducing other colors somewhere in the interface, in some touchpoints. And actually the first part that we started thinking about that was in social media, because we know that in social media, the brands try to be more flexible with their communication. It’s a place where they can communicate a little bit different from the corporate standard marketing or banners that they need to develop. So we started a project around social media, trying to revamp and really design our content.

When we started introducing this new color palette, we created a secondary with five highlight colors, and the idea was, okay, we need to keep this touch of purple, but we can have a publication in blue if we want. It’s okay if they 80% or 50% of the pages it’s purple, it’s still recognizable. So yeah, that was one of the main projects where we started using these colors and then it helped us to test it and see how we use it, how it’s recognized by the people, how people interact with these colors. And then we started introducing it in other touch points, like banners, LinkedIn social cards. We use it this social media as a test and then validate our idea and then started using it across other places. Yeah.

Andrei: And when it comes to brand design and brand strategy, there are a lot of exercises which can be done before we put our mouse to the screen. What Fernando was mentioning earlier, before producing the first iteration of the new design for our social platform, he did a very extensive research in competitive analysis, trying to see what other brands who are operating in the same business as us, what they’re doing, what color they are leaning onto. So it tried to see where can we differentiate ourselves and be a bit more unique but still maintain that brand equity we build with our existing color palette.

Maintaining trust while making brand decisions

Marcus: Yeah. Tying that back to the emotional design, there obviously has to be some level of trust especially with it being an e-commerce product. Everyone needs to know that it’s going to work and money’s going to go where it needs to and all of that. So there’s a large amount of trust. How heavily does that trust weigh on you as you make brand decisions?

Andrei: At Automattic, we’re heavily encouraged to always talk to our customers. When you join Automattic, no matter what level you join at, you have to go through a two week support rotation because the products we’re doing and whatever we are designing, it always ends up with a customer. It’s not for us to just put it in our product design portfolios, but it has to work for people. So the work we do, Fernando and I do, it covers that full spectrum of design, where at the end of the day, we do have to realize that even the smallest decisions, they touch millions of people. So it’s changing a simple color or button shape can really have a very big effect on people and how they interact with our product and perceive our brand.

Working at Automattic is a life changer

Ronald: That’s a really good point. Actually, it’s 3 million active stores I think use WooCommerce so if you change the color of a single button and people get confused and complain about that, that’s quite a big impact that you potentially have caused by making a small change. So I’d like to explore a little bit more on your relationship with your employer Automattic and the culture behind it, because I think you used your example of courage to talk to your clients. And I know Automattic is quite a flat organization and do you feel there’s a lot of responsibility on your shoulders to work within Automattic’s creed and how do you describe or can you describe a little bit more of how you’ve experienced it and also maybe some good examples of some of the challenges that you’ve taken on.

Fernando: Yeah. So, I mean, Automattic is really different from other companies. Is the way of working, they were remote or distributed better as before than other places. And that’s encouraged a lot of collaboration between people of the team, but also encourage you to take the lead on the projects that you are working on. So it’s like you have the responsibility of working in the projects from the beginning to the end. So you are accountable for your work. That’s really important. And it’s really different from working, for example, in the agency side where your work is done by a lot of people touching little things, and then you don’t have a real control of your project because you send to the next person. And then the final result is totally different from you design it at the beginning. But here you have total control through all the project. And that’s really interesting and different.

So you need to get used or be okay to working in that way, this type of managing your own project. But then you have a lot of you working people from different cultures, you learn working differently, distributed. You work the way you want, whenever on whatever you have this total flexibility that is very real in Automattic. So yeah, I mean, I feel that it’s a good place if you are up to working on this way. And working in day to day, for example, for me, when I told people I was joining Automattic, they were all telling me, “Oh, you’re going to work from home. That’s cool. That’s the best thing.”

Actually for me, I was used work from the office. You can see here, I’m working from my coworking space. So the first thing I did when I joined Automattic was okay, I need a place to change, to have a place to work different from home. So that’s probably the more catchy thing from Automattic, the first layer you see is like, “Oh, they work from home.” But I mean, there are other perks and things to enjoy not only that thing that, in my case, I was used for this office life, so yeah.

Ronald: Yeah. Is that for you as well, Andrei? Has it been a life changing thing to work for Automattic?

Andrei: Yes. It was definitely a life changing. I would say that in last four years I’ve been pushed to really reassess a lot of my professional habits and personal life habits. I was lucky that I joined Automattic before everybody was forced into remote work. So at that time, Automattic four years ago was at 500 people. Right now we’re almost 2000 across 92 or 96 countries. So even at that time, four years ago, it was the largest fully distributed company. So no offices at all. And coming after 10 years, working in an agency environment and getting used to the practical aspects of working, showing up to work in office is a part of your job. And now it was you turn on your computer and you turn on Slack and you are at work. So just like the paradigm shift of that was unusual. I was not used to anything like that.

And then, like Fernando mentioned, we are working in the end to end framework where we own our projects. So as much as we own the wins we also own all the fails. And extreme ownership concept of working at Automattic in many ways. And it can be very intimidating, especially coming from an office environment where you have departments and structures, as you mentioned, Automattic is rather flat. And that means that you have to project manage and you have to get used to having the skills of not just doing your core work, actual design work, but also understand how to communicate with other people, how to hand off your projects for the next step. And that adjustment was difficult the first year. Just completely rewiring all my habits to the new way of working for myself.

And then analyzing the work. There are some work which you like to do at home. I think it’s the work which you feel very confident about doing something, what’s almost like you can do automatically, but then there’s work where you venture into something unknown. You’re tackling a new project and then folding laundry or sweeping floor or vacuuming is definitely a lot easier than to venture into this unknown of the brand new project. So for those moments, I realized that I need to go offsite. I need to go into a coffee shop or a coworking space to kickstart this project. And once I got my bearings on and I know what’s coming next, then I can come back and work for my home office where the distractions are not so apparent. And I just have more my work routine activated in there.

Thanks to our Pod Friends WooFunnels and 10up

Extreme ownership with the smaller teams

Marcus: So your team is relatively small and obviously distributed. You all are in different physical spaces. Do you feel like that’s a little bit siloing? Do you feel like there’s a lot of freedom in that? How do you feel about having a small team? Do you feel empowered to be able to run with things the way you want to run with them? Or do you feel like you long for more input or more team members or anything like that?

Andrei: What I meant by saying that extreme ownership, it doesn’t really mean that you do whatever you want to do. Collaboration is very important within our internal communications, part of our creed is communication is oxygen. And we have a lot of internal tools which have been in place before to facilitate this collaboration. One of them is which now became a public tool called P2. So it’s a network of WordPress power blogs or where each team has their own P2. And then there are projects and then discussions happens and you surface things, and it really helps to think work synchronous. So we’re not tied to live communication or taking a lot of the communication outside of the email. If the person leaves the company, all the knowledge, all the communication back and forth in their email goes away. But when it’s present and indexable within P2, we can reference and search things and understand why certain decisions were made.

Fernando: Yeah, I think that one of the key things is that Automattic was remote or distributed before COVID, as Andre was saying before because the process is there and it’s really well implemented, all this documented, all the projects and yeah, no matter what happened, you are going to always have these P2 or the field guide when you have the different steps of the project, the way the decisions were taken versus other places that are moving to remote or distributed now, and they don’t have the proper way to work with this some of the knowledge can go away with the people. So it’s very different but it is really working really well. So that’s make much easier collaboration when we have this common spaces where people can comment, give feedback. And through Slack and P2, I think it’s like very useful and helpful. Yeah.

Prioritizing and managing time

Ronald: So I suppose it’s a question for both of you that it’s only two of you in a relatively big organization. How many employees? 1500, 2000 now? I know that’s the bigger part of Automattic. You are only the WooCommerce part, but your job list must be enormous because there are so many design elements that you need to work on and work with. How do you manage your time and task and prioritize things?

Fernando: So we mainly cover, from the branding marketing department squad that we work, Andrei and I. We try to cover. We have two sides, we work with marketing petitions we receive when marketing teams needs banners or landing pages or some resources. That’s one side. But the other side, we always try to balance and have some time for more branding on long term projects, such as this social media or illustration or color. So we try to balance a little bit between the petitions. Of course we prioritize by urgency or timings or deadlines, but we always try to have some time to try to make the brand growth thinking more long term and having this both sides.

Andrei: I would say that, like Fernando mentioned that there are two sides of the work we do. The marketing design work and then the brand work. So marketing design work from both of our experiences working in the agency environments, a lot of it is timeline driven and deadline driven. So wherever it’s a marketing campaign, it needs to launch in a certain day or partner activation. So a lot of the times that work take being prioritized first, because a lot of other stakeholders rely on that. And then there’s brand work, which we have to be very intentional about making space for us to work on, because it’s a bit more of a long term investment thinking about brand expressions. And it’s not really driven by the market, the timeline or deadline need though it also has deadlines. Don’t get us wrong because sometimes that can get carried away.

Ronald: Deadline was yesterday, wasn’t it? Yeah.

Andrei: Yeah. But managing time, we have weekly check-ins with our marketing stakeholders. And in that particular team example we use Trello. I know that other marketing teams within Automattic, they use Asana for example, and traditional project management approach to that stuff where we have a sign up person, other people who we call DRI, directly responsible individual, and then any other stakeholders who need to weigh in on final approval and that kind of stuff.

Choosing your own adventure

Marcus: You were talking a little bit about how the organization is relatively flat. And when we were talking before you mentioned something about choosing your own adventure is that something that you are able to pull other people in that are interested in working on branding and marketing pieces as well from across the organization to help you out when you have deadlines approaching or campaigns that you want to tackle and that kind of thing.

Andrei: So choose your adventure is very interesting part which for me at Automattic, was very different from agency experience. In the agency world usually when you hire, there’s a creative. You were assigned to a particular account and you stay with an agency. And sometimes you have to change an agency if you want to work on something else. But at Automattic being an umbrella brand for so many other things, Pocket Casts, Tumblr, WordPress.com, WooCommerce, Jetpack.

And I think that our leadership realizes that the burnout on working on something can be real. So a lot of our designers are encouraged to rotate, and it can either be a permanent rotation to a different product, or it can be a three, six months rotation to a different team. And besides for your personal sanity, it’s also really beneficial to Automattic because there’s a lot of cross pollination happens when it comes to choosing own adventure, each team has power to pick their own tools of work. What they work with, how they work, how they run certain processes, how they run meetings.

And then the ability for Automatticians to shift around allows these ideas go around and be shared in this format. So when it comes to projects, choose your own adventure. Also with P2, it’s extremely transparent. So you can see what other divisions and what other products are working on. And I guess the democratic approach of this openness and transparency of P2’s allows you to really see what’s happening at other divisions. And I think that cliche expression, that good ideas can come from anywhere. Our P2 and transparency really enables us to see what’s happening. And if it really inspires and activates some insights in you, or you want to offer help to another division, you’re more than welcome to jump in and collaborate and participate or contribute.

Ronald: That’s really nice. So in a way, Jetpack could comment on some Woo assets and say, “Oh, by the way, we do it like that.” Or maybe, “It’s better to do it the other way around.” And also vice versa. You can comment on things of even Tumblr or so, is that how far it goes in-

Andrei: Actually, Fernando, Automattic acquired Day One app, a journaling app, and Fernando was doing a lot of work helping them out because they don’t have their own designer.

Fernando: Yeah. I mean, everything is open internally, so yeah you can go to other P2s and see what they are doing. You can give feedback. You can offer your help. Especially if you are, for example, good in motion graphics, and you see that some illustration from some collage can be good animated you can say, “Hey, do you need some help? I have some time.” And it’s pretty flexible. It’s pretty natural the collaboration in that sense. And yeah, I want to reinforce the message of Andrei that he was saying that especially in the, I don’t know if it’s for creative or designers, but there is this thing of thinking that if you work for only one client, you’re going to get tired of that. You’re not going to get inspired because it’s going to be boring. But I don’t think so because we have a lot of different things to do. Different type of projects.

I can imagine depending of the brands, but with brands that have a lot of touch points on things, it’s like you can work on a packaging product and then you can do something digital, and then you can extend the illustration system. So at the end, you have so much different things that you don’t get tired, but it’s also good as Andrei was saying, to collaborate and to try to work with other brands, just to disconnect a little bit from one and try to other visual styles. And yeah, recently I’ve been working with Day One, helping them with some projects and it’s been really good to see the real collaboration in Automattic, but that’s something that you read at the beginning in the field guide and create, but you say like, “Oh, maybe it’s like the standard cliche that we all collaborate.” But no, it’s really real in the way that P2 is open. You receive message from other brands or help people from other brands to help you so, yeah.

Team feedback

Ronald: Yeah. Does it give quite a feeling of belonging and being appreciated, and I suppose you also need a sense of humbleness to be able to take the feedback from other teams as well.

Fernando: Yeah. I mean, a sense of belonging for sure, because at the end you are taking comments from other Automatticians. It’s also a good test to see if you are explaining well to job, because sometimes you receive feedback because you didn’t express well, or they ask things that you thought that you already explain in the documentation. So it’s also a good test to see if the persons not involved in the project can understand. And yeah, but for some designers, it’s always like touch your ego sometimes if you receive feedback, but I think that in this type of jobs where you want to do it better, it’s totally normal and totally acceptable to receive feedback and then iterate. And actually there is always people that can give, even not designers can give so much good feedback, in details that you don’t think about. Happiness engineers give amazing feedback because they’re in touch with the users. And the support rotations we do at the beginning is also helpful to understand the customers. So at the end, it’s like everything connected in that sense that, that guy’s really helpful to these collaborations.

Andrei: So you do have to be very intentional sometimes about general sense of belonging, because it is remote work and it’s very easy to shift into more a transactional pattern where you have a Zoom call or a Slack exchange of just assets. So before pandemic Automattic teams would have two meetups a year, and then there’d be like a divisional meetup. So these moments were also very treasured and valued to create a bond between team members outside of just the exchange of like, “Here’s my core work. Now, I’m giving you a ball you run with it.” But I guess a lot of companies right now are trying to figure out that secret sauce for keeping morale and productivity and engagement up or just sustain it.

Connecting the overall results and aligning the brand systems

Marcus: Definitely you’ve touched a little bit on being able to collaborate it with other teams like Jetpack and Day One and Tumblr and stuff. I’m curious how much there is strategy between all of the teams on unifying direction, unifying look as the Automattic look or whatever, say one decides they want to do glass morphism design for the marketing. Do they all get together and say, “We’re all going to do this,” or is everyone doing their own thing and then just getting some feedback from the other teams to stay in a general brand direction?

Fernando: I think that each team has its own timing processes, but at the end, we also are communicated and we see what others are doing. So I think that the end result sometimes is connected somehow, even each one is in a different timing. Someone is implementing fast. Some brand is periodizing another aspect of the brand. So, but I think for example, we are seeing some connections in illustrations with other brands from Automattic. We are trying to iterate sometimes.

Marcus: You pull inspiration from each other as you make shifts in brand decisions, maybe?

Fernando: Yeah. And we have this monthly calls from all designs from all the brands where we serve, the work where we are doing. And we have biweekly, also everything shares their news. Our own design specifically, we biweekly for each brand. So at the end you are really excited looking forward to see the new post about what Jetpack or Tumblr is doing, because you want to see like what others are doing. So it’s something that, again, we have this P2 communications and-

Andrei: Yeah, and I think that there is definitely a general desire for, if we were to look like at the expression in product design and brand design, on the product design, there’s a general goal to align the design systems because it helps the product designers when they come in and onboard to understand that there is a certain components which are shared across different products. It helps product designers to understand that there are certain rules and guidelines which help them to iterate and build fast. But when it comes to brand design, it really depends on the audience of any particular product. So instead of just chasing style or a trend we have to come back to who is this product for, is a target audience for Tumblr same as it is for WooCommerce or same for WordPress or Day One. So we wouldn’t really approach the brand and marketing design across all the products, trying to find one unifying element in there because we’re talking to different people, different audiences.

Resources for design and branding inspiration

Ronald: One of my things actually, I did want to ask earlier is you get a lot of inspiration from within Automattic and from different divisions. Do you have resources that you maybe want to share or that’s outside of Automattic, or you find really useful to get inspirational, whether these are websites or platforms that’s where you really need to look for to be current and up to date.

Fernando: I mainly use Pinterest. I don’t know if it is always cool, but I still continue using Pinterest. And I really like the way they recommend new content. And I have a lot of mood boards there for inspiration at the earliest stages of the projects. I mainly put everything, all the inspiration there. I use also other more design specific platforms like Dribble or Behance to see what is happening. In terms of branding, I read a lot, Brand New, UnderConsideration is a blog about branding, but in terms of gathering, compiling for me the best platform is Pinterest.

Ronald: That’s a really good one. How about you Andrei? Do you have resources like that or platforms that you use?

Andrei: Yes. I also a big fan of Behance, which is an Adobe platform for creative project sharing, unlike Dribble. I really like that a lot of the projects there we go more in depth. So instead of just seeing a single shot, which is a bit of, sometimes can be out of context, in Behance you can explore and then it teams what people involve with products they used to create stuff. And it’s also such a wide range of stuff there because you can also find photography, art direction, advertisement, 3D, the full spectrum of creative projects. And Brand New has been around. It’s a blog which covers corporate and privately owned company brand redesigns quite popular in a branding world. I would say probably the biggest source. So they cover a lot, they have conferences, or they used to have conferences, but then a lot of my other inspiration comes from I like reading, listening to podcasts and that sometimes triggers ideas, which then I try to find the ways how I can execute them in this practical, visual way.

The future of Woo assets

Ronald: That’s interesting, actually, that you take inspiration from something you hear and then be able to visualize that of how things should work or head towards. I think probably the final question is, are there things on the WooCommerce assets of property that we should look out for in the coming future that are quite significant, or even something quite small that we should look out for?

Andrei: I would say that our goal is always to think about the user. And a lot of the internal projects, which we’re working on are all about simplifying the experience and allowing our users to go from no product online to having a product in the shortest amount of time possible. Maybe right now, it’s not the most efficient route in certain scenarios, but that’s the goal. And that’s what currently a lot of teams are working on trying to optimize the flows and ability for customers to go to market in a very short time in under 20 minutes, hopefully. So that’s something, what probably will be on our roadmap and coming out soon. And with a lot of these big product changes, that’s where Fernando and I will start also tackling the messaging and visual expression of how we communicate the faster, better, and more user friendly WooCommerce.

Fernando: Yeah. I think that one of the things that we try is we are introducing small iterations. We are changing little things that maybe you don’t notice, but iteration after iteration you can see something has improved, but maybe it’s not super noticeable at the beginning. We are not going to change the purple. We are going to keep purple, but we introduce secondary colors. We introduce icons, we introduce key swells or other graphic elements. So this type of things.

Ronald: Andrei and Fernando, if people want to give feedback to you, or how can they reach out to you? What’s the best way to communicate?

Andrei: Yeah, I would say that they can probably reach out directly. So I am on Twitter @andrei_co and then also my Automattic email andrei.slobtsov@automattic.com, always happy to provide advice or answer any questions.

Fernando: I would add. I mean, also my email, fernando.perez@automattic.com, but we also have a channel in Slack in the WooCommerce community is design feedback where somebody can drop any message and give us feedback about product or brand. And we are there, the design team so yeah, you are open to go there.

Ronald: No, that’s really fantastic. And I do like that, the Automattic team and the WooCommerce team, they’re very open and approachable to have that communication with and the feedback and learn because it is a constantly evolving entity, platform, whatever you want to call it.

Andrei: Yeah, we’re a rather small team. I mean, we’re around 260 people, the WooCommerce division with Automattic, but a lot of people, there’s a very shared sense of ownership and responsibility to all users. So I feel like everybody from a happiness engineer to a product designer or product marketer will feel like we’re part of it. And we have responsibility to our customers.

Fernando: And it’s worth mentioning that we are actively hiring. So if you are a designer, product designer, branding designer, or other positions, you can see the work with us page of Automattic. We have a blog called Automattic.Design where you can see the open positions and we are open to new talent of design of other topics.

Ronald: Amazing. I’ve learned so much actually, not just about the work you two do, but also a bit more about the culture of Automattic and working there and how you give feedback. So thank you so much, both of you, Andrei and Fernando for giving up your time and explaining all of this.

Andrei: Yeah. Thank you for having us. It was fun.

Fernando: Thank you.