Last week, some of the most progressive marketers and innovative thinkers using WordPress came together at the 2018 WP Engine Summit. Attendees left exhilarated and inspired to push their brands and agencies forward faster. The theme of this year’s Summit was Breakthrough. Insight into the Internet’s most forward-thinking trends like AI, voice technology, AMP, and PWA energized attendees with the knowledge and inspiration to fuel their professional breakthroughs. Additionally, Becky Hammon, Assistant Coach to the San Antonio Spurs, delivered a keynote speech to help ignite personal breakthroughs.
To conclude the Summit, we heard from WP Engine leaders who offered a look into the WP Engine roadmap. This included a look...
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
WP Engine is the WordPress Digital Experience Platform that gives companies of all sizes the agility, performance, intelligence and integrations they need to drive their business forward faster. WP Engine’s combination of tech and innovation and an award-winning team of WordPress experts are
As we continue to showcase a sample of the amazing StudioPress themes now available to WP Engine customers, we’re shifting our focus to food with this new StudioPress Theme: Daily Dish Pro, which is designed to make your content just as appetizing as the best meal at your favorite four-star
Past Bitcoin to Making Money from the Blockchain
On the blockchain now are things like property records, secure voting records, authentication of rare and valuable items like art. We’ve all heard how much safer our private issues (like health records) but what about even nonsensitive medical records? Even if you want to find a way to make
A 60-Second Trailer of the 60-Day Report on Cybersecurity
Finally, Hathaway sees this as a unique opportunity for the United States to work with countries around the world, and with organizations on an extremely local level. “We cannot succeed if our government works in isolation,” she added. It requires “leading from the top” from
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
3 Design Considerations for Effective Mobile-App Permission Requests
When users install Viber (a messaging app) on an Android device, they are greeted with 5 system-initiated permission requests in a row, inducing a serious case of request fatigue. These are to access the user’s contacts, photos, camera, microphone, and location. While the user can guess why Viber
a look back at the 2018 wp engine summit
Alternative Payment Methods Enable International Purchases
While bank transfers used to take days and seemingly a lot of work to set up (and, in the U.S., consumers rarely if ever transfer money for casual use), online banking has improved, and transfers are fast and easy in many parts of the world. For example, in many countries in Latin America, payment
Beyond Usability: 3 User Experiences Reshaping Their Industries
When they call a regular cab, riders have no control — hence, all the anxieties listed above. With Uber, they suddenly get all the control they need: once they order an “uber”, they see how far away the car is and how much they have to wait, they know in advance how much the ride will cost
Toggle-Switch Guidelines
Every morning, I wake up, pour water into my tea kettle, and flip the switch on. Once the water is boiling, I turn the kettle off and pour myself a cup. The switch on my kettle is an example of a toggle. If you pay close attention, you’ll notice that toggle switches are all around us, because
Modal & Nonmodal Dialogs: When (& When Not) to Use Them
Modal dialogs were originally intended to alert users to an error or to some other system state that required immediate user action. In these cases, it was essential for users to be interrupted in order to fix the error. Thus, placing the dialog box in the middle of the screen as the focal point of
The Anti-Mac User Interface (Don Gentner and Jakob Nielsen)
There are many things computers and other people can do for us if we decide they don't have to maintain perceived stability. Today, electronic messages and news articles appear unbeckoned on our computer desktops. Applications have existed for some time that can automatically scan and sort incoming
Comparison Tables for Products, Services, and Features
The biggest problem with most comparison tables isn’t a design problem, it’s a content problem. When attribute information is missing, incomplete, or inconsistent across similar offerings, otherwise handy comparison tables quickly become useless. This is especially problematic for dynamic
a look back at the 2018 wp engine summit
Visual Design Terms Cheat Sheet
Brightness of an interface can also influence the overall tone and brand identity. Take these two websites of two different investment banking companies, which have similar layouts above the fold, but with different hero image choices. Betterment opts for a darker (low brightness) hero image (with
User Intent Affects Filter Design
Interactive filtering is usually associated with facets: as soon as users have selected a new possible facet, the results are displayed along with the set of new applicable facets (e.g., once the user has selected Refrigerators, new range-specific facets such as Freezer volume will be displayed
Service Blueprints: Definition
Actions that occur directly in view of the customer. These actions can be human-to-human or human-to-computer actions. Human-to-human actions are the steps and activities that the contact employee (the person who interacts with the customer) performs. Human-to-computer actions are carried out when
UX Debt: How to Identify, Prioritize, and Resolve
Score each issue by assigning a value to the experience area, frequency, reporter, and level of effort to fix the issue. Then, use a prioritization matrix in the form of a scatter plot to see where the issues fall on the dimensions of user value and effort to fix. This visualization can help you
User Intent Affects Filter Design
Look for user movement via mouse hover or keyboard focus. If users are moving the mouse around the filters (or using the keyboard to tab between them), they may be on their way to make another selection. Conversely, if the mouse leaves the filter area and moves to main results, it’s a good sign
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
An Insider’s 11 Take-Aways from Companies Winning Industrial (IIoT) Cybersecurity
Even the biggest and best digital companies in the world find malicious or unexplained code in their environments—sometimes threats that have been lying dormant for years. Smart IIoT startups expect that their solutions will be subject to the same types of malicious and/or intelligence gathering
6 Brain Sensors You’ll Be Using Soon
Mattel’s MindFlex is a toy where you use your thoughts to move objects on a gameboard. The device is a headband with sensors on each side, as well as wires that that clip to your ear lobes. Thought signals read by the sensors control the speed of a fan that levitates a styrofoam ball. Once
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
a look back at the 2018 wp engine summit
Top 10 Latin American IoT Startups to Watch
According to the World Cancer Research Fund, breast cancer is the most commonly occurring cancer in women worldwide, contributing 25.4% of the total number of new cases diagnosed in 2018. Mexican company Higia helps women detect early symptoms of cancer with non-invasive biosensors that use thermal
Open Plan Offices Kill Productivity. Here’s What to Do Instead.
Researchers Ethan Bernstein and Stephen Turban summarized their findings by stating: “Consistent with the fundamental human desire for privacy and prior evidence that privacy may increase productivity, when office architecture makes everyone more observable or ‘transparent’, it can dampen
A Look Back at the 2018 WP Engine Summit | The Same Link Twice on the Same Page: Do Duplicates Help or Hurt?
The Same Link Twice on the Same Page: Do Duplicates Help or Hurt?
Note that we don’t count it as wasted redundancy when a picture and its label both link to the same place. For example, if the photo of the football players in the above screenshot were a link to athletics, that would provide a bigger click target (helpful for mobile users), but would not cause
Kill the 53-Day Meme
When I was writing my recent book on hypermedia and hypertext, I needed a simple way to describe the growth of information for the chapter on information overload. One of my estimates was that the number of available servers on the WWW was doubling every 53 days. In addition to putting this
Top 10 Enduring Web-Design Mistakes
Since 1996, we have been compiling lists of the top 10 mistakes in web design. This year, we completed a large-scale usability study with 215 participants in the United States and United Kingdom to see what today’s web-design mistakes are. After analyzing results across 43 sites that ranged from
