Maintaining a healthy work-life balance is on the wish list of many workers in the U.S. and around the world. There is no doubt that happy workers are more productive and motivated. But how can one attain this balance? It all starts with setting manageable goals each day. Being able to meet priorities gives us a sense of accomplishment, which automatically boosts our motivation. Sometimes, we get so overloaded at work that we do not even know where to begin. Once we structure our responsibilities, it is easier to think of strategies that will help us get our tasks completed faster. Stress may
If you were one of those kids who “became a person” in the age of the rotating family pictures inside a frame on an end table–you will relate to this feeling. Remember the real trick to these abominations was to come in the door from school and toss your bookbag in front of it quickly. “Please,” you halfway prayed, “don’t let the friends see my two-year-old-butt in the bathtub.” If you were unlucky, you were also terrorized by these frames in the parents room, family room and the pool-table room. It would be very difficult to study and graph the ptsd these little gems may have
Businesses today have no time when it comes to creating a website and putting in the right effort to rank in local search. It is perfectly normal since you all know that cost of retaining a customer is way cheaper than acquiring a new one. Similarly a business would rather pay for a lead that comes his/her way that putting in upfront cost for building a lead generation website or an engine. This is also normal, and I understand that the business owner is doing this to put food on the table on time. But this will no longer be the case thanks to “Automatic-SEO”. What? How? Why? And Really
Wright is founder and CEO of TREPIC, a virtual travel designer firm. With inspiring content and storytelling, TREPIC uses AI and user preferences to provide unique travel recommendations. Using VR and 360-degree video, users are transported to desired curated hotels, locations, and activities from the comfort of their phone. She was named as one of “50 Inspirational Entrepreneurs to Watch in 2017” by Entrepreneur, as well as one of Inc.’s “15 Female Entrepreneurs to Watch Out For in 2017.” She is a mentor at Stanford University’s Hasso Plattner Institute of Design, an interior
It’s not just startups and nonprofits excited about blockchain. Aviation engineering behemoth Boeing is already integrating an IoT-driven blockchain into their engineering operations. Building an airplane takes hundreds of thousands of components, and tracking them throughout the build lifecycle can be a nightmare. Using an IoT-centric blockchain, “Boeing holds complete provenance details of each component part.” This helps by increasing transparency between multiple groups in the production process: manufacturing teams, aircraft owners, maintainers, and government regulators. In
Besides values, one thing that will sustain a long-term partnership is motivation. Partners who not only share values, but also goals beyond them — such as becoming the go-to provider, building a $100 million company, or establishing a household name — will thrive. But virtual strangers who
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
Anyone who pays attention to the world of search engine optimization knows that maximizing your company’s search results on Google and other search engines is not something you can do with a quick pin here and a hasty status update there. It’s a full-time job. But if you’re
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’
Blockchain’s Mainstream Debut Awaits Dev Ecosystem Evolution
Given that networks like EOS and Ethereum are ground zero for blockchain progress making it easy and inexpensive for developers to create things on these blockchains is paramount. This is a notion that’s been embraced by the blockchain community more in recent years. Major projects now focus the
IoT solution to supply chain management
IoT is simply about providing connectedness and deploying IoT brings a world of difference to the SCM solutions. Connecting each product essentially means establishing communication to transmit data about its whereabouts and condition. Currently, every product we buy from a supermarket has a
‘Our Users Are Everyone’: Designing Mass-Market Products for Large User Audiences
With a large audience it may seem overwhelming to try to describe the full range of user behavior. For example, different people may use a transportation system to travel between hundreds of different locations, for an endless number of reasons such as job interviews, parties, dates, school
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Beyond Usability: 3 User Experiences Reshaping Their Industries
At first, you might think that such an innovation in the field of reverse logistics should not be discussed in a UX article, but many pieces of the user experience are improved by optimizing this backend operation. A traditional UI-only solution to the problem of high demand would be to clearly
Experience Design: Bridging Brand Intention and Brand Interpretation
Remember, your job as a designer (whatever type of designer that may be) is not only to produce a good use experience on each isolated channel. It’s also to ensure that every experience you design is made up of components driven by Brand. With key components defined, as well as a clear framework
What the Erroneous Hawaiian Missile Alert Can Teach Us About Error Prevention
Another application-design heuristic violated by the Hawaiian warning system is the ability to undo an erroneous command. The sending of messages cannot literally be undone, which is why a confirmation step is appropriate before the system starts sending. But one can at least send out a second
Tooltip Guidelines
Tooltips are hard to discover because they often lack visual cues. If tooltips are erratically displayed throughout your site, people may never discover them. It’s important to be consistent and provide tooltips for all the elements in your design rather than just for some. If only some of the
Date-Input Form Fields: UX Design Guidelines
Formatting a date-entry field may seem like a minor detail; however, even small interactions can draw a process to a standstill if implemented improperly. Poorly designed date input leads to distressed or annoyed users — risking the abandonment of the form altogether. Even worse, if the user
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
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10 High-Profit Redesign Priorities
You can usually double website or intranet usability simply by rewriting the text to follow the guidelines for online content. Better writing is probably the single most important improvement you can make to your site, but it appears fairly far down the top-10 list because it's not a one-time fix
One Billion Internet Users
By 2015, Americans will be less than 15% of Internet users and will likely account for about one-third its value (Americans typically spend more than other users). The fact that two-thirds of Internet revenues will come from other countries highlights the growing importance of international
WP Engine Supports the Domain Connect Project .
If you’ve launched a site on WP Engine recently you may have noticed a new feature that allows you to easily connect to your domain name to your site. This integration is powered by an open source technology called Domain Connect, which enables WP Engine to find your DNS provider and be
10 Must-Have Features for a WordPress Website in 2018 .
Lead capture features are easily possible with a wide variety of plugins, having a lead capture box on your website is the best feature of 2018. This doesn’t mean it needs to be an obnoxious popup or take up half your page, but a smart lead capture placed in the right spot can encourage visitors
A Look Back at the WP Engine London Summit .
At the end of September, we held our 2018 WP Engine Summit in Austin, Texas. Last week, agencies, brands, and digital innovators from EMEA came together in London for the WP Engine EU Summit. Attendees discussed the future of digital experiences, Gen Z’s perception of the Internet, and the
Better Link Labels: 4Ss for Encouraging Clicks
Each link in this list fully contains the most important content that users will find if they select it — for example, Marriage, civil partnership, and divorce. The descriptive text beneath this link is useful, but entirely supplementary: Includes getting married abroad, decree absolutes, and
UX Guidelines for Recommended Content
The higher these individualized recommendation areas appeared on the site’s homepage, the more likely it was that users noticed and used them. For example, Amazon included several clearly personalized content areas near the top of the homepage, as well as throughout the long-scrolling page, and
Beware Horizontal Scrolling and Mimicking Swipe on Desktop
Most people use scrollbars to scroll, and not the scroll arrows. However, moving across a thin tunnel (like the scrollbar) is difficult because it requires careful steering of the pointing device. (This is an instance of the steering law, which says that the time it takes a user to steer a pointing
3 High-Tech Ways Companies Are Fighting Cybercrime Right Now
The cost of cybercrime is slated to reach an astounding $6 trillion globally by 2021, according to a report by Cybersecurity Ventures. It seems that cybercrime’s sophistication and scope tend to grow right along with the technologies that enable it. Two such technologies are cryptocurrencies
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Smart data exchange will bring value to smart city innovation
I spoke to Peeter Kivestu, director of travel industry solutions and marketing from analytics solutions and consulting services company, Teradata. Kivestu believes that much of the focus has been on connecting the ‘things’ rather than the data within. The value of data grows with use
CSS conversion of my Radio weblog
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
Sam Plecic secrets on Internet Business | HealthCare.gov’s Account Setup: 10 Broken Usability Guidelines
The more confident users feel about having understood the instructions and the concepts behind the site, the more they will persevere through slight difficulties with the interaction. Conversely, if users are confused to begin with, they'll get even more confused if the site doesn't work like they
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
Four Bad Designs
The last two sites are an intermediate case. For large sites, offering awkward navigation is a prescription for doom: users wouldn't stand for interstitial splash pages or bloated metaphors if they had to find their way through 10,000 products or more. But when dealing with just a handful of
