I had the honor of writing an article for A List Apart on the role research can play as we make our way through the design process. I had been reading A List Apart and referencing it since the earliest days that I was building websites, so this opportunity was especially exciting to me!
http://alistapart.com/article/sharing-our-work-testing-feedback-in-design
Thanks to Sara Wachter-Boettcher and Lisa Maria Martin for their incredible editing
This past April I spoke at Industry Conf in Newcastle upon Tyne, United Kingdom. Industry Conf covers practical topics about the web, ranging from research to design to backend development.
I spoke about two major redesigns that we did at Etsy, a redesign of our seller onboarding and the Listings Manager redesign, and contrasted the different methods we used to gain confidence in the major changes we made.
Today we launched a huge redesign of Etsy’s seller tools that was the culmination of over a year’s worth of work (more on this later). I contributed to a post on Code as Craft, Etsy’s engineering blog, on some of the interesting technical challenges we faced and what happens when you have a blank canvas with which to work.
Pricing your work is hard. Whether you’re a freelancer or you sell handmade goods, putting a value on something you’ve created is tough. It requires balancing a competitive rate with paying yourself what your time is worth, and for many people (myself included), it’s easy to undervalue your time.
In the past few weeks I’ve had a few people reach out to me asking about how I price the items in my Etsy shop. I’ve posted my response to a convo from another embroidery seller on Etsy below. I don’t think I have pricing completely figured out (after all, my shop is only a year old and is only a part-time project), but I feel like I’m in a better place with pricing than I was when I first sold my embroidery.
Read morePart of Etsy culture is blameless post-mortems. It’s a term I’ve heard used a lot and up until last week I thought I thoroughly understood. Etsy supports an environment of learning, people make mistakes, don’t point fingers, etc. All good things and things I believe in.
On Friday I was involved in a smallish incident on the site; I was driving a deploy and, long story short, the deploy didn’t go perfectly. Nothing serious happened and the site was fine so we didn’t have a post-mortem, but I had that terrible I-did-something-bad feeling in the pit of my stomach all day long. True to the culture, no one at Etsy pointed fingers (as expected), but I still felt pretty awful and like I could have done better.
Read moreMy first job in high school was at a small store in the Washington DC-area called Appalachian Spring where I sold jewelry, pottery, glass, and other crafts made by American artists. It’s at Appalachian Spring where I developed a passion for all things handmade. I credit my time there (among other sources) with my desire to support artists, which brought me to New York to work at Kickstarter over two years ago.
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