SXSW 2019 is just days away. Beginning this Friday , digital pioneers, business leaders, and artists from around the world will head to Austin for the annual festival. For ten days, the capital city will be bustling with the best of music, technology, and film.
WP Engine is proud to take part in SXSW 2019, and this year, WP Engine CEO Heather Brunner will take part in two different panel discussions. WP Engine will also host two networking events alongside tech partners AWS and Google Cloud. Additionally, we will host a party for our WP Engine affiliates. Finally, in partnership with our digital marketing magazine Velocitize , thought leaders from...
Sifting through the thousands of themes in existence today is a daunting task, and finding the right one for your website is just part of the challenge. No one wants to trust their portfolio, online magazine, or e-commerce site to just any formulaic theme. Making sure it’s well designed, well
When it comes to facilitating a truly enjoyable and productive workplace, it takes more than just the promise of perks and ping pong. Employees want their workplaces to reflect what they value and expect out of the company they work for: trustworthiness, morality, and the opportunity to grow both in
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
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’
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 Success Stories Show Valuable Opportunities
Judging by these already-successful blockchain use cases, it would be tempting to draw the conclusion that there’s little room for entrepreneurs when so many moneyed interests are behind the biggest successes to date. The easy takeaway is that if you want to be among the 8 percent or so of
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
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Eartracking: A New UX-Research Method
Eartracking found another interesting difference between male and female users: Male ears twitched quite substantially when the user interface included pictures of wooly mammoths or stereo equipment. (In fact, these are the only instances in our entire research study where the micromovements
The Most Hated Online Advertising Techniques
Banner ads, ads that could be dismissed through a user action, and video ads that could be skipped received some positive comments, although most of the comments were negative in affect. The distinction here is that users positively viewed advertisements which could be skipped or ignored, in which
Layered Interaction Analysis of Direct Manipulation (Jakob Nielsen)
A typical example of the lack of transparency is the complicated installation procedures involved in transferring certain large applications from the floppy disks on which they are sold to the user's hard disk. The user's goal is to move the application to the hard disk and to run it, but it is
Dashboards: Making Charts and Graphs Easier to Understand
Unlike operational dashboards, which are intended to support time-sensitive decision making and immediate action, analytical dashboards help users identify the need for further thought, investigation, research, or analysis. A sales dashboard (which is usually an instance of analytical dashboard
7 Tips for Successful Customization
You may want to allow users to select the background color of their interface, but is there adequate payoff or interest in that option to account for the additional cost of implementation? You may want to allow users to move content areas around a page to create a unique experience, but again, it
UX Guidelines for Ecommerce Homepages, Category Pages, and Product Listing Pages
Navigational options and product categories need to be clear, with labels that make sense to users on their own, as well as in relation to other options on the site. Users must be able to quickly understand each category, and how it differs from the others in order to decide where to click. When
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User Experience vs. Customer Experience: What’s the difference?
Whether you use the term “UX” or “CX” is not important, because they basically mean the same thing if you have the “correct” interpretation of the terms. What’s important is: (1) that you understand the different scopes of experience and strive to optimize the experience at all
Infinite Scrolling is Not for Every Website
The success of infinite scrolling on social media sites such as Twitter have made this technique popular, but that doesn’t mean you should do it too. Continuous scrolling is advantageous for content that streams constantly and has a relatively flat structure, where each unit of content belongs at
Better Link Labels: 4Ss for Encouraging Clicks
For example, one link from Emory University’s homepage reads, Restoring vision and hope. What does that mean? Hope for what? Vision for the future? The meaning only becomes clear when the text below the link is read. That descriptive text is necessary for the reader to understand that the link
Dropdowns: Design Guidelines
A while back, as part of a presentation on web-usability methods, we ran a small user test for the audience. When completing a registration page, our test participant had to enter her address on a form with a text field for the name of the street but a dropdown menu for the type of street (Avenue
Cards: UI-Component Definition
The iOS Weather app presents each city's weather forecast in the hypertext deck-of-cards style (rather than the UI-card-component style that is the main subject of this article). Each city is a full-screen node, and viewing the weather in other cities is accomplished by swiping to the left or right
Security Teams Need to Be Prepared With an Incident Response Plan
A true security incident refers to something that could negatively impact information security objectives like confidentiality, integrity, or availability. When something in the system triggers an alert or looks unusual, security teams need to have a protocol in place to diagnose, act on, and
How IoT has Exposed Business Organizations to Cyber Attacks
This is why you can’t only focus on managing your IoT from a technological standpoint. You must also pay attention to the people who work for you, especially those who come into contact with your company’s sensitive data. If any of them want to harm your business, it’s up to you to intervene
29% of Internet Users Have Bought Things From Spam Email?? Say It Aint So!
The announcement of the study concludes with these funny lines, from Anstis again: “The other way to look at this situation is from a spammer’s perspective. There are approximately 250 million people out there who are interested in these kinds of products and have made purchases from
Building a Startup Culture that Encourages Wellness
Doesn’t matter if you’re a janitor or a member of senior management, everybody likes when they feel respected and their ideas worthy of someone’s time. If your company has a reputation of a prison camp, where bosses bark orders and everyone else is keeping their mouth shut, that’s bound to
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Production Quality Over Cost: What Really Generates Engaging Video Advertising
A highly polished production doesn’t mean a larger audience feels engaged. If anything, those that participated in the test were less impressed with the $100,000 ad. Instead, the participants preferred the $10,000 video ad because they more closely connected to the storyline. Also, they liked how
How to Battle Anxiety and Depression as an Entrepreneur
Unfortunately, it isn’t always easy to find information on how entrepreneurs can manage and overcome depression. Society often encourages entrepreneurs to ignore the signs. Many feel isolated and afraid that their peers will judge them. What does depression look like? What does anxiety look like
Join WP Engine at SXSW 2019 | Iterative Design and Testing of Icon Usability
Iterative Design and Testing of Icon Usability
As you can see, all the versions of the color icon were essentially the same since the computer with a light bulb going on was easily recognized by all users as representing some combination of computers and bright ideas (the Sun solutions!). The light bulb did double duty as representing software
Comparison Tables for Products, Services, and Features
To narrow down the number of alternatives to a manageable one, they usually use one hard criterion that outweighs any other considerations. For example, a user looking to buy a new car might filter out all the cars that are more expensive than that $20,000, even though some of them may be
Ad Placement for Mobile
Ads: that necessary evil we encounter every day, and to which we all believe ourselves to be immune. Whether a user ignores an ad completely or becomes annoyed with its presence is strongly related to the ad's size and placement on the page. On mobile phones, screen real estate is already at such a
