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
Taking the last tip a step further, when expending serious brainpower, eliminate distractions from your environment. Log out of your email (or pause your inbox using a tool like Boomerang), turn off your phone, close your office door — whatever you have to do to keep your brain from losing focus. Whether you realize it or not, constant email updates or social media notifications keep you from doing your best work. Your brain is pulled in so many directions it can’t possibly produce at peak level. So do your time management skills a favor and remove distractions while working. One
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
History of Design Thinking It is a common misconception that design thinking is new. Design has been practiced for ages: monuments, bridges, automobiles, subway systems are all end-products of design processes. Throughout history, good designers have applied a human-centric creative process to build meaningful and effective solutions. In the early 1900’s husband and wife designers Charles and Ray Eames practiced “learning by doing,” exploring a range of needs and constraints before designing their Eames chairs, which continue to be in production even now, seventy years later. 1960’s
The Startups That Create Startups Over the past year, venture studios have seen an impressive influx of funding, marking the beginning of a sea change in how new companies are conceived and grown. Late last year, for example, startup studio Atomic closed on the second fund of $150 million. Then, just this spring, Madrona Venture Labs announced its own new funding of more than $11 million. The venture studio model is designed to attract and nurture first-time and experienced entrepreneurs alike. The venture studio provides more than capital, advice, and introductions to entrepreneurs; it
She explained that the original design of the Internet was driven more by considerations of interoperability rather than security, and as a result we are now faced with almost insurmountable issues. Some examples include online criminals who steal our information, mass bandits who have the ability
She explained that the original design of the Internet was driven more by considerations of interoperability rather than security, and as a result we are now faced with almost insurmountable issues. Some examples include online criminals who steal our information, mass bandits who have the ability
The company has also made it a goal to combat the short-term perspective by developing some long-term engagements of its own. “Average agencies will only keep clients for six months,” Young says. “We’ve been with the Golden State Warriors for almost five years now, so it’s been great to
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’
Is Blockchain Winning or Losing? — 4 Stages of Blockchain Evolution
Before 2010, bitcoin had never been traded, only mined, it was impossible to assign a monetary value to the units of the emerging cryptocurrency. There was no way to buy or sell bitcoin, make peer-to-peer payments outside the blockchain community network – cryptocurrency had not been adopted yet
Cryptocurrency Fraud Is the Exception, Not the Rule
In the United States, most state and federal regulators deal with crypto projects on a case-by-case basis. Take the CFTC’s charges of fraud and misappropriation of funds against Patrick McDonnell. McDonnell allegedly promoted himself as an expert in cryptocurrency investment and promised
Beyond Usability: 3 User Experiences Reshaping Their Industries
Airbnb makes it easy to satisfy the needs of these travelers by connecting them with owners who want to make an extra dollar by renting out their property. Before Airbnb, sites such as Home Away and property-management agencies used to connect owners with interested renters, but these were focused
it free up the world’s best entrepreneurs to keep inventing otherwise
When to Use Which User-Experience Research Methods
The distinction here is an important one, and goes well beyond the narrow view of qualitative as “open ended” as in an open-ended survey question. Rather, studies that are qualitative in nature generate data about behaviors or attitudes based on observing them directly, whereas in quantitative
Branding an Intranet
The colors and fonts used in the intranet’s visual design often closely match those used on the organization’s public-facing website, since intranets usually adhere to corporate branding guidelines. In theory, it’s a good idea to for the intranet to support the organization’s sanctioned
When to Use Which User-Experience Research Methods
The distinction here is an important one, and goes well beyond the narrow view of qualitative as “open ended” as in an open-ended survey question. Rather, studies that are qualitative in nature generate data about behaviors or attitudes based on observing them directly, whereas in quantitative
When and How to Create Customer Journey Maps
At the heart of a journey map’s narrative is what the user is doing, thinking, and feeling during the journey. These data points should be based on qualitative research, such as field studies, contextual inquiry, and diary studies. The granularity of representation can vary based on the purpose
Progress Indicators Make a Slow System Less Insufferable
The worst design is seen on sites that warn users not to click twice by threatening them “clicking again may create an extra order” (or funds transfer, or whatever is the object of the command). First, it’s certainly a guideline for user-friendly design not to threaten the user. Second, this
The Distribution of Users’ Computer Skills: Worse Than You Think
This is what level-1 people can do: “Tasks typically require the use of widely available and familiar technology applications, such as email software or a web browser. There is little or no navigation required to access the information or commands required to solve the problem. The problem may be
focus free up the world’s best entrepreneurs to keep inventing solution
Typography Terms Cheat Sheet
Some typefaces must be purchased from a type foundry, while others are available in the public domain. When deciding between typefaces for your designs, it is important to consider whether it is web-safe or not. If a typeface is not web-safe, the text may not load as desired, which typically
Teenager’s UX: Designing for Teens
Help teens learn and stay focused by choosing your words wisely. Use words that teens understand. Write in short sentences and paragraphs. Format key points or steps of a process using bullet points. Teens generally have poorer reading and comprehension skills than adults. If your site targets a
Join WP Engine in Web Week 2018
Are there old shortcodes lingering around, bulking up your code? Do you still have widgets installed that you don’t use anymore? Perhaps your dashboard is full of comment spam. Maybe you need better analytics software or want to start reaching more audiences by adding more localized content
WP Engine Sales and Customer Service Teams Recognized at The Stevie Awards
The Stevie Awards are a set of hundreds of business awards given annually by the American Business Awards organization. They were created in 2002 to recognize the accomplishments and contributions of companies and business people worldwide. Gold, Silver, and Bronze Stevie Awards are given to
WP Engine: 2018 in Review
New year, new you, did you say? Well, that was our reality in 2018 as we rolled out some of our favorite new platform additions. We took the lead on the Amazon Polly plugin, the first plugin to bring voice technology to WordPress. The WP Engine Digital Experience Platform continued to evolve and
UX Mapping Methods Compared: A Cheat Sheet
Designing and developing a product often involves a large team of people with different backgrounds and experiences who must be on the same page about the project goals, the user needs and behaviors, and even the component processes involved. This common understanding is often built with
Design Critiques: Encourage a Positive Culture to Improve Products
The facilitator gathers a specific, predetermined number of positive and negative comments from each participant. For example, each participant could share two aspects of the design that seems to accurately meet users’ needs, and one aspect that could be improved. This approach specifically
Top 10 Application-Design Mistakes
This table has meaningless ID information as the first column; the Net Code and Location Code fields also include encoded information that is intended to represent complex information in a compact space. The Location Name is the only column that makes sense to humans; to decipher the others
Security Teams Need to Be Prepared With an Incident Response Plan
Europe’s GDPR legislation has a section attempting to provide some standardization for incident response, but those guidelines only provide a starting point for organization-specific plans. CISOs and their teams face too many variable questions to depend on cut-and-paste plans. If the company
where free up the world’s best entrepreneurs to keep inventing glean
A 60-Second Trailer of the 60-Day Report on Cybersecurity
She explained that the original design of the Internet was driven more by considerations of interoperability rather than security, and as a result we are now faced with almost insurmountable issues. Some examples include online criminals who steal our information, mass bandits who have the ability
8 predictions for the future of IoT in 2017
As IoT gains momentum, the volume of data generated will be stratospheric. Not only will there be more data, but there will be different types of data, and data from sources that have yet to be considered. Big Data analytics will evolve into a distributed analytics model, which will help with the
Sam Plecic secrets on Internet Business | Comparison Tables for Products, Services, and Features
Comparison Tables for Products, Services, and Features
Some websites just remove their comparison functionality altogether for small devices. If at all possible, you should try to support some level of comparison on mobile, but it’s unlikely that you’ll be able to show more than 2 items at a time in a comparison table. Remember that on smaller
Homepage Design Changes
Although both versions have 7 tabs, the newer design's tabs reached all the way across the page and the color scheme indicating the selected tab was changed. More important, the actual navigation categories were also changed. The 2002 IA categories were Front Page, Enterprise, E-Business
Computer Screens Getting Bigger
The 1024×768 became the leading monitor size in 2004 and has only just been dethroned by a (slightly) larger screen resolution of 1366×768, according to StatCounter. The change over from 1024×768 to bigger screens actually occurred in 2009, but there were so many different larger-resolution
