Not everyone is skilled at writing for the web, nor is it realistic to assume that nondigital experts can quickly pick up the proper skill sets needed to effectively manage content. Despite providing content style guides and standards, content admins will often fall prey to bad practices when creating content. To keep content useful and usable, a central team needs to perform regular auditing. Common problems that need rectifying include: blank pages that have been created because there’s an expectation that they will be needed but then go unused, a lack of page descriptions, and poor
Knowing when you work best is one of the most valuable time management skills you can have. For some, it’s the first thing in the morning. Others are more productive at night. There’s nothing wrong with either approach as long as you’re able to optimize your schedule to accommodate your natural tendencies. Your work environment should also be taken into account. Do you need complete silence and a tidy desk to perform your best? Perhaps more chaotic surroundings (like a coffee shop) are better suited to you. Again, there is no right or wrong way to work. It’s about discovering what
There are plenty of macro and micro trends which impact upon whether companies are building at any given time. This means that flexible companies with an on-demand workforce are better placed to match the workflow of any given moment. In busy periods, the company may be shorthanded and require additional employees to complete work on time, while leaner times means additional staff drain on company resources. The company resources are where hiring from project to project makes complete sense for the company and the worker. The gig economy in construction means the removal of talent-management
The design-thinking process Scalability — Think Bigger The packaged and accessible nature of design thinking makes it scalable. Organizations previously unable to shift their way of thinking now have a guide that can be comprehended regardless of expertise, mitigating the range of design talent while increasing the probability of success. This doesn’t just apply to traditional “designery” topics such as product design, but to a variety of societal, environmental, and economical issues. Design thinking is simple enough to be practiced at a range of scopes; even tough, undefined
Thomas Edison wasn’t just known for his startup, the Edison Company. He was known as an inventor — and a prolific one at that. He contributed to innovations, including the phonograph, the light bulb, the motion picture camera, and others. In generating ideas and inventions that had a profound and lasting impact on the world, Edison became synonymous with invention. How do we free up the world’s best entrepreneurs to keep inventing today? Silicon Valley isn’t producing new “Edisons” to keep inventing. These days, Silicon Valley has become synonymous with the concept of the
From ages, Digital Marketing experts like Neil Patel talk about keywords, short-tail keywords, long tail keywords, LSIs etc. All of them did play a vital role in ranking for SEO, but that again is a traditional method. The method we want to use will require keywords, but they should sound like
I’ve done a re-design of my Radio weblog, using CSS. Look ma, no tables! Yes, it’s now a tableless design. I’m doing my bit for the web standards cause, although I haven’t yet achieved 100% XHTML validation. For my re-design I used a CSS Zen Garden design by Michael Landis
The free version of SurveyGizmo lets you have three surveys open at a time. You can collect up to 100 responses per survey and ask questions with a variety of answer styles (multiple choice, short answer, rating scale, etc.). Again, this tool is better suited to businesses with smaller customer
A 60-Second Trailer of the 60-Day Report on Cybersecurity
Melissa Hathaway came across our radar recently when President Obama tasked the former Bush administration aide with leading a 60-day review of Bush’s Comprehensive National Cybersecurity Initiative; a largely classified, purported $30 billion, multi phase plan to address cybersecurity issues
Robotics and Big Data are Transforming Nursing: 4 Key Insights
In healthcare, the robot’s role is to take over tedious, time-consuming, and dangerous or dirty jobs for nurses. Very few nurses dream of sanitizing equipment or dispensing medication when they enter nursing school. They want to be working directly with patients, healing the sick and providing
9 Blockchains Transforming the Way We Pay, Play, and Work
Look past digital currencies’ nosebleed pricing volatility, and you’ll discover a robust, decentralized, secure database. Brands and technologists are quickly figuring out how to put this powerful ledger to good use. Here are several real-world examples that demonstrate cryptos’
Trustworthiness in Web Design: 4 Credibility Factors
UniHomeCleaning.com.sg: Participants commented that the website only displayed photos of clean places and not of the actual cleaning process. Although this was not a deal breaker for the site (which did include text explaining what services were included), people appreciated competitors’ photos
with free up the world’s best entrepreneurs to keep inventing ultimately
Design Thinking 101
We live in an era of experiences, be they services or products, and we’ve come to have high expectations for these experiences. They are becoming more complex in nature as information and technology continues to evolve. With each evolution comes a new set of unmet needs. While design thinking is
When to Use Which User-Experience Research Methods
While it's not realistic to use the full set of methods on a given project, nearly all projects would benefit from multiple research methods and from combining insights. Unfortunately many design teams only use one or two methods that they are familiar with. The key question is what to do when
Why Personas Fail
In order for stakeholders to use personas, they have to believe in them, feel invested, and have ownership over them. The most successful personas are created with involvement from their end users. Otherwise, people will have no understanding of the data behind them and the rigor that went into
Direct Manipulation: Definition
Because the objects of interest and the potential actions in the system are visually represented, users can use recognition instead of recall to see what they could do and select an operation most likely to fulfill their goal. They don’t have to learn and remember complex syntax. Thus, although
Placeholders in Form Fields Are Harmful
In this pattern, labels are placed within the form field as placeholders until the field becomes active and the user moves the input focus into the field. At that point, the placeholder label moves to the top of the field. As a result, the floating label (also known as an adaptive placeholder) is
M-Commerce: Terrible UX
At the end of 2015, the data shows that if a website can make a dollar from a mobile visitor, then that site will on average make $3.24 from a desktop visitor. If these sites were able to improve their mobile user experience to the extent that mobile equaled desktop, then their mobile revenue would
country free up the world’s best entrepreneurs to keep inventing a
What B2B Designers Can Learn from B2C About Building Trust
Similarly, sales representatives often need to gather information about each user’s needs in order to answer these open questions, tailor the order, initiate a contract, or offer a better deal. To do this, a B2B firm usually needs to ask for personal information (like contact information) or
10 Heuristics for User Interface Design: Article by Jakob Nielsen
Visibility of system status The system should always keep users informed about what is going on, through appropriate feedback within reasonable time. (Read full article on visibility of system status.) Match between system and the real world The system should speak the users' language, with words
WP Engine Participates in the Day of Understanding
WP Engine was proud to take part in this event sponsored by the CEO Action for Diversity and Inclusion. Each company was encouraged to customize the events during the day according to the needs, nature, and geography of its workplace. At WP Engine, multiple company-wide workshops were held in
Fortune Names WP Engine a Best Place to Work in 2018 .
At WP Engine, we believe our people are the core of every success, award, milestone and every achievement. That’s because employees who truly feel empowered and validated by their workplace are energized to delight and inspire the customer in every interaction. When new employees walk through the
How to Recover Abandoned Shopping Carts for WooCommerce Stores
Many of those abandoned carts are probably lost for good because you don’t have any contact information from the shopper to try to win them back to checkout. But for a percentage of the carts, your shopper will have gotten far enough along in the process that you’ll have an email address (or
Cards: UI-Component Definition
This wireframed example of a card component features several different types of information: an image, a title, a short summary, a time stamp, a hashtag, and a secondary call-to-action button for social media sharing. The design (with optional rounded corners) visually resembles a playing card; the
UX Stories Communicate Designs
Qualitative user research is made of stories. These stories naturally exist in observations, survey data, interviews, customer-service transcripts, research notes, and/or conversations. The goal is to harness these fragments and build on them until you have a compelling narrative that accurately
Variable Fonts and Wide-Screen Layouts: Adopting Data-Driven Progressive Enhancements
Let’s consider a case from the history of the web, at the time when 20% of users were still using slow dial-up modems. You would like to use a nice big hero image that would increase page load time by 1 minute for these dial-up users, even though the delay would be negligible for broadband users
Despite the Hype, Big Data Might Not Be What You Need
Before jumping in, make sure the problem you’re trying to solve or the goal you’re hoping to achieve actually requires big data rather than just a lot of data. As Jim Gallo, national director of business analytics at ICC, explains. “Just because you have a lot of data doesn’t mean it
helps free up the world’s best entrepreneurs to keep inventing the
6 technologies you need to know to secure your IoT network
Encrypting data in rest and data in motion will help you to maintain the integrity of your data and reduce the risk of data sniffing by hackers. Due to varying hardware profiles of different devices, no standard protocol and encryption that can be implemented across all IoT devices. This pose a big
Why IoT Data Protection Has Become More Important than Ever
Passed in May 2018, the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) is an EU law designed to give users more control over their personal data – and to protect against data breach and misuse. Unlike in Europe, in the US, there is no single, national law that regulates the collection and use of
Sam Plecic secrets on Internet Business | Website Forms Usability: Top 10 Recommendations
Website Forms Usability: Top 10 Recommendations
The usability of web forms is by no means a new topic. It has been covered in general usability references (including several NN/g books of both general usability guidelines, eyetracking usability research, and mobile usability). Many of the 114 UX guidelines for e-commerce shopping carts are
Instilling Confidence in Online Shoppers: I Bought a Sofa Online and Good UX Sealed the Deal
Joybird, a niche furniture manufacturer that strictly sells furniture online, was able to focus its knowledge of this domain and design the entire shopping experience around it. Although not all organizations have as narrow a focus, Joybird’s example shows that optimizing an experience to the
Website Response Times
In a recent study for our work on Brand as Experience (now a full-day training course on branding and UX), we asked users what they thought about various websites they had used in the past. So, their responses were based not on immediate use (as in normal usability studies), but on whatever past
