• Shame

    “We just…don’t think you’re a good fit for this team.”

    Those weren’t her exact words — I have a terrible memory for conversations — but it’s what they were saying. I remember the awkward, uncomfortable moments of silence; the shame as I tried unsuccessfully to keep back the tears from my eyes. They watched on, tense, wondering how I would take the news.

    Seven months into a job, and here I was, getting fired. I had never been fired before.

    The worst part was knowing it was coming — I had spent weeks in this shaky, nervous state, anxiety a constant fire in my gut, a dampness on my skin, electric buzzing in my chest. I had briefly considered quitting the week before, confiding in sympathetic coworkers, but I could never quit. Quitting was a sign of weakness. It meant I was giving up. More importantly, how would I pay for my loans, my rent? How would I survive without a job?

    I drove home in a daze, trying to keep my hands steady on the sticky, peeling wheel of my car. It was June, and sweltering, and my car had no AC. I barely noticed the heat.

    I parked, went inside, and immediately made myself a drink. I was still crying. My phone was in my hand. Twitter was already open.

    “…I just got let go.” Pause. Did I really want to tweet this? Did I want to make my humiliation public? My desire for comfort outweighed my shame. Within an hour or two I had friends over, sitting on my porch, bringing their laughter and their good humor. I am a lucky person to have such good friends.


    In the end, I only spent two months unemployed. I spent the first month desperately searching for local work, but there were no jobs to even apply to. I gave up, and my partner and I decided to move.

    Once I knew I was moving to Boston, finding a job didn’t take very long. I was hired on as a UI designer for an early stage startup. I liked my coworkers, I liked what we were building, and I fit in well with the culture.

    I’ve since moved on from that job, but I look back on it fondly. That startup helped me start to look past the shame. I was able to separate myself from the shame of failure and see it for what it was: the right decision for everyone involved, especially myself.

    It really was the right decision. I wasn’t a good fit for my previous team, and I didn’t have the right skill set for the job. This caused me enormous stress; each minor failure kept compounding until I questioned everything I did. Every minor misstep or poor design choice felt like a disaster. My performance suffered. My relationships with my coworkers suffered. I was starting to totally shut down. It wasn’t healthy for any of us.

    What I’ve come to realize since moving on is that there will always be places you don’t fit in. There are jobs that you’re not meant to do. My skills were not what this company needed. Conversely, they were what my startup needed. I knew where I fit in, and I understood what was expected of me. It was an immense relief.

    Now that I’ve realized all of this, I’ve been able to make better employment decisions moving forward. I have a better understanding of myself and my capabilities. I feel nothing but admiration and respect for my former coworkers and the great work they continue to produce, and I’d like to think that, despite me being fired, I could sit down with my former bosses for some beers in the next time I run into them. We just weren’t a good fit professionally.

    Yes, I was fired. But I’m no longer ashamed.

    Originally posted on Medium.

  • You don’t need permission to do awesome things

    You don’t need permission from anyone to do awesome things. All you need is the time and space to work on it.

    — Frank Chimero on The Great Discontent

  • The Laura Beckman story

    I was reading an article on Marissa Mayer and this particular section kind of struck a chord with me, as it perfectly describes why I applied to Automattic:

    When people ask Mayer why she joined Google after getting her masters in symbolic systems at Stanford, she likes to tell them her “Laura Beckman story.” It’s about the daughter of her middle school piano teacher, Joanne Beckman.

    Mayer begins: “Laura tried out for the volleyball team her junior year at high school. At the end of the tryouts, she was given a hard choice: bench on varsity, or start on JV.

    “Most people, when they’re faced with this choice, would choose to play – and they’ll pick JV. Laura did the opposite. She chose varsity, and she benched the whole season.

    “But then an amazing thing happened. Senior year she tried out and she made varsity as a starter, and all the JV starters from the previous year benched their whole senior year.

    “I remember asking her: ‘How did you know to choose varsity?’

    “And she said, ‘I just knew that if I got to practice with the better players every day, I would become a much better player, even if I didn’t get to play in any of the games.’”

    The moral of Mayer’s story is that it’s always better to surround yourself with the best people so that they will challenge you and you will grow.

    “My quest to find, and be surrounded by, smart people is what brought me to Google,” she says.

    The Truth About Marissa Mayer: An Unauthorized Biography

  • A Game of Themes

    A couple weeks ago, I decided it would be a fun design exercise to explore a series of themes based around houses from A Song of Ice and Fire by George R.R. Martin. It comprised of three parts: creating a look & feel for each house, designing a base template to skin, and then applying that look and feel to the base theme.

    I started by throwing together some style tiles for each house, looking to explore colors, texture and typography:

    Next, I explored some potential layouts:

    The first layout felt a little too corporate and the second one felt a little too complex, so I ended up going with the last layout, which I thought would fit the multiple skins best. Here’s the skins applied to that theme layout:

    House Stark

    got-mockup-stark

    Built on shades of grey with a desaturated blue accent, Winter is like the Starks: dark, cold, and stoic. Winter features Titillium, a thick sans-serif to ward off the impending cold, and Crimson Text, a serif as sharp as Valyrian steel.

    House Lannister

    got-mockup-lannister

    House Lannister drips danger, arrogance and power. Pride featurs rich crimsons and indulgent golds that hint at wealth. Domine is an enchanting and seductive header font, which is paired with the warmth ofSource Sans Pro.

    House Targaryan

    got-mockup-targaryan

    House Targaryan is the biggest challenge, because while “fire and blood” evokes crimson and black, Daenerys herself is hot and white like the desert sun. She is sand and stone yet as soothing as an oasis. I decided to represent Daenerys with rich browns, tans, and blues. Queen uses Gentium Basic reflects her royal roots, while Cantarell hides danger behind grace and poise.

    I don’t see these mockups going much further than this, but it was overall a pretty fun experiment.

  • Why every new employee should do customer support

    I was recently hired at Automattic as a Design Engineer. All new hires are required to spend three weeks as a Happiness Engineer, answering support tickets for WordPress.com. No exceptions.

    I know what you’re thinking — a designer, doing support? I wasn’t hired for this! That’s not my job, this is pointless!

    That’s where you’d be wrong. Do you know why? Doing support is awesome. It’s probably the best thing you could have your new hires do. It’s been tremendously more effective in introducing me to Automattic than any new hire orientation I’ve gone through, and here’s why.

    You learn your product faster

    Part of any new job is fumbling around, trying to figure out the ins-and-outs of your product or service. Only now, guess what — now you get to do it for someone else! And you’d damn well better do it right!

    After two days of training with full-time Happiness Engineers, new employees are thrown right into the fire of support forums and tickets and oh god I don’t know anything about domains, I better figure that shit out asap. No sir, I have no idea why your theme isn’t working, guess I should set up a test blog and try it out for myself.

    I’m going to be honest: when I started, I had only used WordPress.com a little bit. I’ve always been a self-hosted user. The ridiculous amount of information I’ve crammed into my skull during my three weeks of support about WordPress.com has transformed me into an expert. I know where everything is. I have whole swaths of support documentation memorized. I can refund a dissatisfied user in 30 seconds. Bring it.

    It creates empathy for your customers

    Unless you completely lack empathy, seeing someone struggle with a difficult task is painful. You want to help. When they succeed, you feel excited. Woohoo!

    While doing support, you actually get to experience your customers, in the wild, interacting with your product or service. You get a sense for their workflows, for their habits, and most importantly: where you fall short.

    When your customers have trouble doing something, that’s your fault. But I haven’t even started yet! Doesn’t matter, still your fault. Own it. This is now your company. If there’s something that needs fixing, you don’t shove your fingers in your ears and insist that it’s not your fault, sorry sir but I only just started, I don’t know how to help you. If there’s something that needs fixing,you try to fix it. If you don’t have the power to fix something yet? Bug someone who does.

    I think it’s easy to fall into a trap as a designer or a developer where you just design and code in a vacuum. It’s just you, and your product, and what do you mean other people have to use it? I can use it just fine! Doing support shows you who uses your product or service and how they use it. It’s not just you anymore.

    You feel a greater sense of responsibility

    Every single day of my support rotation I had a ticket I just didn’t know how to answer. I tried looking through the docs, but I couldn’t seem to figure out how to fix a customer’s problem. When that happens, I descended like a starving lion on my support buddy, a full-time Happiness Engineer who was assigned to help me for my three weeks. If he was unavailable, I asked around in our support chat, feeling anxious about not already knowing the answer.

    It was kind of pathetic. But that’s okay, because my buddy, and the rest of the Happiness team, are amazing. They are understanding. They are patient. They are my saviors. They are my friends. You don’t want to make life hard for you friends, do you? You’re not an asshole, right?

    If I left my support rotation and went on to design something hard to use or broken, guess who’s going to feel the heat first? Guess who will need to deal with my mess? My wonderful new Happiness Engineer friends.

    Working support instilled within me a greater sense of responsibility. My actions not only affect our huge user base, but also my coworkers. I better damn well make sure anything I push out is going to make lives easier, not harder.


    I’ve officially finished my support rotation. I’m pumped to start designing. I feel like I’m overflowing with all this creative energy that built up over the past couple weeks of doing support. My last week of support was the most challenging, but the experience I gained will help me become a better designer.

    I’m pretty damn sure that if you try supporting your customers for a while, you’ll become a better designer too.

    Originally posted on Medium.

  • Hack for Western Mass: Recap

    This past weekend, I joined a hundred or so fellow hackers for the first annual Hack for Western Mass, part of the National Day of Civic Hacking. We focused on problems local to Western Massachusetts.

    Hack for Western MA Banner
    Photo by Molly McLeod

    There were a handful of really interested challenges to address, but I ended up going with a challenge I have a personal connection to: local banking. I switched over from a big bank to a local co-op on the National Bank Transfer Day, and haven’t looked back since. Led by Pioneer Valley Local First founder Daniel Finn, the Benefits of Banking Locally challenge aimed to increase the number of people in the Pioneer Valley who bank locally.

    My group was a small, but we had a great mix of people which really helped us focus on specific portions of our challenge. We started Saturday together, trying to identify key problems. What issues do local banks face when trying to gain new members? Why don’t more people bank locally? Daniel’s knowledge as a subject matter expert was exceptional, giving us key insights into the problems. Once we teased out some of these problems, we moved on to users: who already uses a local bank? Who doesn’t, and why don’t they? What triggers could motivate these users to make the switch from big bank to local bank?

    Our group, brainstorming together about problems and users
    Photo taken by Molly McLeod

    Once we figured out our problem and our users, we split off into an individual sketching session, with each of us drawing various solutions we saw to increase the amount of people switching over to banking locally.

    Different sketched out ideas to address our challenge's problem
    Photo by Molly McLeod

    After sketching, we regrouped to talk about all of our potential solutions, mixing and matching until we came up with a game plan: a story-based website that led you through the personal and community benefits to banking locally, culminating in a call-to-action prompting you to switch to a local bank.

    Xin Xin and I worked together on the design of the website, while Julia Mattes and Sam Dana tackled the research and content creation (making Xin and my job much easier!). Daniel updated the current PV Local First website to include the new data about local banking he, Julia and Sam found. Kelly Dwan worked on developing the new story-based site, while Ron Martinez and Matt created an interactive map allowing people to find local banks near them in the Pioneer Valley.

    Sam and Julia working on content while Daniel and Matt talk in the background
    Photo by Steven Brewer

    Sunday was a whirlwind of working — Xin and I finished up the design, and Kelly jumped over from setting up the back-end to working on the front-end for the site. Julia and Sam started entering content and local bank information to feed into the map, which Ron continued work on while Matt floated between sections to help everyone out.

    By the end of the day, we weren’t quite finished, but had enough to show off during our presentation:

    Presenting our challenge to the Hackathon
    Photo by Molly McLeod

    Kelly and Ron are working together after the hackathon to finish up our solution. The website portion is almost complete, and you can check it out here.

    All of the presentations went really well. It was exciting to see what the other groups had worked on over the weekend! Everyone had something really cool to show. Overall, the weekend seemed to be a total success.

    Thanks to the organizers for putting on what was the best organized hackathon I’ve attended (with hands-down, the. best. food), and to the sponsors for helping the event happen! Can’t wait to attend again next year.

  • Happy 10th, WordPress

    Yesterday, a group of us in Boston got together and celebrated WordPress’s 10th Anniversary. We were one of hundreds of parties planned around the world. We had over 100 people RSVP’d, but ended up drawing a crowd of about thirty. It was a pretty nice, intimate event.

    Thanks to everyone who came by last night, special thanks to Steph Yiu from Automattic for getting a bunch of tshirts for us, and extra special thanks to Meadhall in Kendall Square, Cambridge for being such a fantastic venue! Finally, thank you, WordPress, for being a source of employment for so many, a cause to rally for, and a treasure to the world.

  • Designers, we need to care for our young.

    Almost every company in our field is hiring a designer right now. However, finding the right designer is an agonizing process. We are unique in this poor economy in that we have more positions open than qualified individuals to fill those positions.

    There are not enough of us. And it’s our own fault.

    New designers have it hard

    Undergraduate courses in web design are anachronistic remnants of what the web once was, and never will be again. They rely on outdated techniques instead of teaching the foundations that help prepare students for a constantly evolving environment. As a result, graduates leave unprepared for the modern web.

    Unable to find entry level full-time jobs, many young designers enter the field as contractors and freelancers. This is a toxic environment for new designers, who do not yet know how to handle clients, protect themselves, and earn what they are worth. Young designers undervalue themselves, and are constantly persuaded to create more for less.

    What do we do? We sit back and watch as our young are taken advantage of, underpaid, abused. Sometimes, we are the abusers.

    It needs to stop.

    We can do better

    Internships aren’t enough. We need apprentices, and apprentices need mentors.

    If your company is hiring entry-level designers, you need to devote the time and effort required to adequately mentor them. Pay them fairly. Give junior designers a solid framework for success, and be clear about how success is measured. Give them room to fail, and teach them not to fear failure. When they fail, help them see why they failed, and let them fix it.

    If you are a successful senior designer looking to give back to the design community, consider mentoring a younger designer in your spare time.Find a local designer in your community and offer to go over their work with them every now and then. Give them career advice. If they are being mistreated, speak up. Encourage them to value their time and abilities.

    Steps in the right direction

    More companies and organizations are stepping up to train our next generation of designers. Here in Boston, both Fresh Tilled Soil and thoughtbot offer structured, paid apprenticeships for junior designers to gain real world experience and receive individual mentorship.

    Accelerator programs such as Startup Institute might even be replacing college as an option for young people looking to enter the web industry. Startup Institute offers real experience through collaboration with local startups.

    Let’s work together to create a web where we nurture our young. Our entire industry will benefit.

    Originally posted on Medium.

  • New developments to Ghost: Just a blogging platform

    This morning, John O’Nolan relaunched the website for Ghost, a new blogging platform that blew up the internet for a couple days when it was first announced last November. From the few screenshots I’ve seen, it looks like it makes blogging easy. Like, really, really easy:

    Screenshot showing ghost's markdown to preview system

    We’ve seen a pretty big jump in blogging and writing platforms in the past year: just look at Medium and Editorially. I think Ghost is a little more exciting though, because it’s not a service — it’s web software. It’s an open source blogging platform that, from the sounds of it, will work like WordPress — you’ll be able to download and install it anywhere.

    I’m pretty stoked about Ghost, not just for what it is, but for what it means. I love WordPress, I love that it’s evolving, and I’m excited to see where it goes in the future. But it hasn’t had a big competitor in a while, especially on the blogging front. A dose of really strong competition could push WordPress to become something greater.

    Ghost is being funded via Kickstarter, and is poised to meet its goal within 24 hours. Want to help it out?

  • My Experiences as a UX Apprentice at Fresh Tilled Soil

    Two weeks ago, I concluded my three months as a user experience apprentice at Fresh Tilled Soil, a Watertown-based design firm. I spent three months in a team of five apprentices (Xin Xin, Dave Levine, Mat Budelman and Sean Smevik) improving my user experience, interaction and interface design skills (and getting paid!).

    The five of us came from very different backgrounds. I worked as a user interface designer and occasional front-end developer as a freelancer and consultant, within agencies, and most recently within a startup. Xin was an animation major before working as lead designer at a startup. Sean was also an animation major, but went into freelancing. Mat worked as a print designer before picking up web design and development, and Dave, a Starter League graduate, worked with startups in Chicago as a UX designer and developer. We all had varying degrees of prior industry experience and expertise, which made us ideal candidates for Fresh Tilled Soil’s apprenticeship program.

    Now that I’ve had a brief vacation and had time to gather my thoughts, I wanted to give an overview of the program and my experiences with it.

    Bootcamp

    I wrote extensively about Bootcamp on the Fresh Tilled Soil blog, but to recap, we started the apprenticeship out with some pre-work (reading Learning JavaScript by FTS developer Tim Wright and completing assignments based on the book) which we went over in our first couple of days.

    The rest of Bootcamp was a mix of reading (Steal Like an Artist, Thinking With Type and About Face 3), presentations given by the FTS team, and a UX strategy and discovery challenge. Presentations were focused on pretty much every major segment of design and front-end development essentials, all from the lens of user experience. Our challenge focused on the strategy and discovery phase of a web app design project, culminating in a group client presentation and individual clickable wireframes.

    Bootcamp was kind of exhausting, but was a successful way to begin our apprenticeships and get all of us starting on a similar level of theoretical UX knowledge.

    Mentorship

    At the end of Bootcamp, each apprentice was chosen by a mentor who could relate to our individual goals and skills. I was chosen by Steve Hickey, a total design & front-end dev badass with a love of good type. (Obligatory dribbble and github links.)

    Our mentors were tasked with overseeing our work over the course of our apprenticeship. They provided individual (and occasionally group) feedback on challenge and client work. We checked in with them at least once or twice every week.

    Individual mentorship is, by far, the best feature of AUX. Mat wrote a bit about it on the Fresh Tilled Soil blog. I have never before had an opportunity for the type of in-depth, personal mentorship that I received as an apprentice at Fresh Tilled Soil. Steve was able to see exactly where I was falling short in my work and guide me towards better ways of thinking about design problems and potential solutions. He got me to think about each design decision I made and be able to back it up  with solid reasoning (no bullshit allowed). It was, honestly, exactly what I needed to improve as a designer.

    Challenges

    We engaged in several challenges throughout the three months to boost our individual design and development skills. We converted a psd into an accessible form, identified problems with the modern TV experience and came up with solutions to those problems, designed the interface for a mobile MBTA app, and created something we could share with the design community (still a WIP). I was also given some sub-challenges by my mentor, Steve, to help improve specific skills.

    Each challenge culminated in a presentation to the AUX team (apprentices, program leader and mentors), followed by an open critique. They were a chance for us to show of our skills and gain insightful feedback which helped us see where we fell short.

    Additionally, we wrote some blog entries for the FTS website (mine were the aforementioned Learning by Doing and Giving Back)

    Client Work

    No good apprenticeship would be complete without, of course, client work. Each apprentice was involved in some client projects (sometimes alone, sometimes alongside our mentors). We also as a group had total control over one major project.

    Our group project was a major point of learning. We did everything from the initial strategy and discovery phase, up to completion of wireframes for a redesigned mobile application and responsive marketing website with an account dashboard component. Mat acted as project manager, and our team collaborated, jumping in where appropriate and stepping back when not during each of our two-week sprints.

    Sean wrote a bit about our first sprint, a two week deep dive into the existing product and assets, where we looked to identify the problem we would be solving in the next several sprints. We spent most of that sprint going in wrong directions. Finally, we just needed to step back, break the product down into its smallest bits, and build back up.

    Our proposed solution kept only the essentials of the product, stripping away unnecessary layers and features. When it came down to it, the app was brilliant at one thing. It didn’t need the rest. It needed to focus on making that one task even easier, and our proposed solution (and a redesigned marketing site) would need to reflect that.

    The weeks that followed were made of steady work and constant iteration. We would iterate on a deliverable a dozen or more times before it even made it to the client. We were all sad to see our parts in the project wrap up at the end of our apprenticeship, when we handed off all of our work to the FTS team to finalize. That one project taught me more about the user experience design process than any book ever has, and I am grateful we had the opportunity to work closely with such a great product and team.

    Life After AUX

    AUX was an amazing, enlightening, and humbling experience. It pushed me past my limits, challenging me in a way I’ve never experiences. It was exhausting. Overall, I can say with confidence that it was one of the best experiences of my life, and most definitely my best career decision to date.

    Now that AUX is done, what am I doing with my life?

    I’ve spent the past two weeks sleeping in, relaxing, and catching up on some projects I’m involved in. I’ve been working with several designers and developers on MP6, a plugin which updates the WordPress admin interface design. Most of my contributions so far have been to dashicons, the new icon font we’re using within the admin. I’ve also been working on post format icons.

    I’m currently pursuing some job leads, but am still open to chat. If you’re interested in hiring me, I’d love to talk — please send me a message via my contact form.