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...
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
Imagine this: You’ve spent months getting your new eCommerce shop up and running. You set up WooCommerce, installed a bunch of plugins, found a perfect theme, dotted all your i’s and crossed all your t’s on tax compliance, logistics, and customer service. You roll out your beautiful new shop
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
Cryptocurrency Fraud Is the Exception, Not the Rule
Cryptocurrency and blockchain are revolutionary technologies, but being so far ahead of the curve comes with consequences. With few precedents to learn from and regulatory frameworks still in their infancy, the crypto space has attracted its share of shrewd opportunists whose scams — such as
RW Q&A: Monisha Perkash, founder of Lumo Bodytech
Lumo’s wearable products are characteristically small with intelligent sensors. Perkash described the Lumo Lift, a small lapel pin that attaches to your shirt with magnets, and the Lumo Run, a tiny clip that could be attached to the waistband of your shorts. “When you slouch, the Lumo Lift
Why Small Businesses Need to Be Vigilant About IoT Security Too
Their staff may not also be trained to apply the best practices in technology use. Untrained end users are likely to commit errors or cause incidences like inadvertently downloading and installing malware from their office devices. Small businesses are also likely to pay the ransom from ransomware
Cognitive Maps, Mind Maps, and Concept Maps: Definitions
Taking fuzzy, abstract concepts and making them tangible enhance team communication and creates common ground. It’s also make it easy for a team member to immediately spot something on the map and say, “that’s not right.” Maybe your colleague is right, and something wasn’t captured
a look back at the 2018 wp engine summit
Beyond Usability: 3 User Experiences Reshaping Their Industries
Unless you have an unlimited clothes budget, it’s unrealistic (and wasteful) to wear a new outfit for every single occasion, yet social media pressures us into it. Rent a Runway solves this tension elegantly by recycling (expensive) clothes across a large set of women. It’s an example of the
Brand Is Experience in the Digital Age
The Concept of Brand: A Lesson from Edward “Blackbeard” Teach Edward Teach, the pirate better known as Blackbeard, is one of the most infamous pillagers in history. More relevant to our interests, however, is that he was also a man who understood the importance of creating an enduring
The Anti-Mac User Interface (Don Gentner and Jakob Nielsen)
Current interfaces have access to very little information about the objects the user deals with. For example, the only information known about a file may be its name, size, and modification date; the type of data it contains; and the application that created it. In order to deal more effectively
Contextual Menus: Delivering Relevant Tools for Tasks
Don’t make users scan through a long list of disorganized commands. To help users focus on the most relevant options, place the ones used most often at the top. Because people scan lists from top to bottom, place seldomly used commands low down in the menu. Let users decide which option best
‘Our Users Are Everyone’: Designing Mass-Market Products for Large User Audiences
You can learn a lot from doing usability testing with just 5 users. But if your audience includes a range of people who have fundamentally different tasks, needs, and expectations, then 5 users will not be enough. Instead you will need 4–5 test participants from each major type of user. (You can
Wishlists, Gift Certificates, and Gift Giving in E-Commerce
For wishlists and gift certificates, achieving highly polished website usability is a must. Beyond that, however, both offerings are often communicated through email, which is a highly brittle medium. We've studied usability for both e-mail newsletters and confirmation messages and have found
a look back at the 2018 wp engine summit
What B2B Designers Can Learn from B2C About Building Trust
It is a false perception that people “don’t read” the About or Company Values pages because they think those pages are just filler. In fact, when users are interested in establishing a long-term relationship with a company, they often want to ensure that it aligns with their own long-term
Typography Terms Cheat Sheet
Typography is a key component in almost every digital experience. However, its complexity and industry-specific language makes it a common source of misalignment and confusion. You don’t have to be a typography expert to design digital interfaces, but it’s important to know some of these terms
Parallel & Iterative Design + Competitive Testing = High Usability
In any case, to stay within a reasonable budget, all parallel versions should be created quickly and cheaply. They don't need to embody a complete design of all features and pages. Instead, for a website or intranet, you can design maybe 10 key pages and, for an application, you can design just the
The Sketch Test: Test and Improve Your UX Deliverables and Other Documents
While it is tempting to focus primarily on what the participant says (especially direct suggestions for changes), the observation process can provide equally or even more important insights. Watch for areas of the document that the participant refers to when explaining ideas in order to figure
Why Personas Fail
Get a core group of advocates to help lead the charge. Do a lunchtime roadshow, or a series of lunch-and-learns. Visit teams and introduce the personas, where they came from, and how to use them. Teach them how to recruit representative users for testing, how to write scenarios for design
Is Business Headed for a Cognitive-First Future?
With decades-old pipelines, old technology, and dangerous terrain, the oil and gas industry is ripe for machine intervention. Its outsized impact on the environment underscores the importance of predicting failures before they happen. Updated sensors and data analysis can result in not only avoided
How to Choose and Implement the Right Cloud-Hosted Desktop
It shouldn’t take long for a provider to configure your virtual desktop. Depending on the DaaS provider, it can take anywhere from 30 minutes to 24 hours to provision a hosted desktop. The reason for this wide range is that some DaaS providers completely automate the provisioning (requiring no
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
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 look back at the 2018 wp engine summit
How to Get Away From a Growth Mindset and Start to Scale
Clean data changes everything. Move integral datasets to the forefront so they’re highly visible. Hint: You can train your software to use metadata to sort all of your data, ensuring the most frequently used and most important datasets remain top of mind. Also, store the most important data in
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 | Why Country Sites Are So Bad
Why Country Sites Are So Bad
When they're fed substandard websites, local customers notice. In our testing of B2B websites, we often hear business customers express contempt for international vendors' localized sites. Users suspect that these sites have impoverished product information that's been translated without an
Login Walls Stop Users in Their Tracks
Some designers think that giving users a preview of what’s in store for them (rather than access to the actual functionality) is going to be tantalizing enough to motivate people to register. Maybe. A well-chosen preview might boost users’ assessment of the expected utility, but they will still
Simplicity Wins over Abundance of Choice
There is tremendous business pressure to tack on options and features to products as a way to differentiate from the competitors or to remain relevant. In designing any user interface, key decisions must be made concerning the tradeoff between feature richness and simplicity. Deciding the
