Are you ready for 2019? More importantly, is your website? Web Week is designed to help you take advantage of low traffic and inactivity by encouraging you to make changes to your site, try out new things, and revamp for the new year.
During Web Week, we encourage our customers to take advantage of this low-stress time of year to create more personalized, dynamic, and better-performing digital experiences. For brands and agencies, this is the perfect time to kick your feet up, re-access, and get creative. It’s the ideal time to get inspired and do all the things you’ve been neglecting during the hectic holiday season.
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
At WP Engine, we’ve realized this is just as important as the speed and SEO that helps you show up in search rankings, or the analytics and targeting features that help you cater to narrower sets of demographics. Great-looking websites are the basis of effective digital experiences, and with our
Austin’s Annual PRIDE celebration is one of the largest opportunities for local non-profit organizations, social groups, and causes to gain exposure in the LGBTQ community. This year marked 28 years of Pride events in Austin. This year’s parade emphasis was awareness, equality and
5 Real Life Blockchain Implementations Outside of Cryptocurrency
Medicalchain aims to use blockchain technology to securely store medical records. Using a distributed ledger for healthcare is a godsend as it allows doctors, hospitals, laboratories, pharmacists, and health insurers to have more immediate access to health records, which could help save lives
Blockchain in Retail: Changing the Shopping Experience
Along with this authenticity comes transparency that helps consumers know more about what they are buying. Consumers get access to data collected during the verification process. That includes the where, how, and when about the product. Also, it could provide insights into the materials used
The Blockchain Talent Shortage May Be Nearing Its End
As mentioned previously, the blockchain isn’t perfect. It isn’t as scalable as other technologies, and it may not last forever as our standard for secure, decentralized exchanges. But in the past several years, it has proven that it’s much, much more than just a gimmick for cryptocurrency
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
join wp engine in web week 2018
UX Responsibilities in Scrum Ceremonies
It’s easy for UX professionals to question whether they should attend Scrum ceremonies and, at times, UX may even perceive these meetings as barriers to productivity. However, UX should be involved in Scrum ceremonies to stay engaged and aware of what’s going on with the team. For more on
Service Blueprinting in Practice: Who, When, What
In defining service blueprinting, respondents with the artifact mental model placed an emphasis on the artifact, map, or visualization that is created in the service-blueprinting process, rather than on the process, people, or method used to create it. This model can be limited and limiting
10 Best Application UIs
When it comes to modal dialog boxes, our winners have very distinct ideologies. At one extreme is Seating Management. As a real-time application monitoring a physical environment, Seating Management didn't set out to interrupt hostess work in any way. If a hostess wants to seat 5 guests at a table
Beyond Usability: 3 User Experiences Reshaping Their Industries
Pre Uber we were all plagued with standing on the corner, possibly in the rain, belongings in hand while attempting to wave down one of the few free taxis. (The worse the rain, the fewer the taxis — that’s a law of nature.) An abundance of unknowns adding further anxiety: how much is it going
Confirmation Dialogs Can Prevent User Errors (If Not Overused)
Saying these 2 items doesn’t tell users which files will be deleted. In contrast, the single-file confirmation shows the name of the file, as well as some supplementary info that’ll help the user determine whether the right file will be deleted. (For even better usability, display a thumbnail
Creepiness–Convenience Tradeoff
It’s likely that over time, increased exposure and familiarity with a product diminishes users’ perceptions of strangeness. Even if an individual isn’t using the product or service, she may have friends or family who use the technology, or she may encounter advertisements and learn more about
join wp engine in web week 2018
Transactional Email and Confirmation Messages
The very best subject line in Study 1 was "Order has shipped," and similar subject lines continued to score very well in Study 2. In fact, "Order has shipped" was so good that many users didn't open the message. This is fine if your message contains no additional information that requires the
Why Personas Fail
Personas are my jam. I teach a full-day training course on them: what they are, why they work, how to create them, and how to use them to do great work. I love teaching this course because personas are one of the most abstract components in the very analytical discipline that is UX. I love
Personas vs. Jobs-to-Be-Done
While the JTBD approach does not prescribe a specific format or deliverable, most often a job-to-be-done is defined in sentence format, noting what users have to do, and any key contextual information, such as why or where they do it. Finally, a JTBD description typically captures the functional
Storyboards Help Visualize UX Ideas
Storyboards are often used to describe a fragment of the user journey (and several of them may be needed to capture the different branches in the journey). They are an efficient way to establish context and common ground for all the team members working on a specific problem. In contrast to journey
Variable Fonts and Wide-Screen Layouts: Adopting Data-Driven Progressive Enhancements
To expedite page load time, we previously used just one custom font for headings, and relied on standard browser-safe fonts for most text, since browsers can render both normal and bold weights without needing to download any font files at all. This approach wasn’t ideal because it was a
Internet of Warnings: How Smart Technology Can Threaten Your Business’s Security
IoT technology ranges from entire smart cities that streamline traffic to fridges that detect when you’re low on milk and order it for you, among many other products and services. Devices such as Fitbit and Nest are growing in popularity due to their low price, practicality, and variety of
Why the Free Market is our Last Best Hope for Industrial Cybersecurity
We saw this play out in the business domain a couple of decades back. Initially, attackers broke into business networks primarily for the challenge, or to disrupt or vandalize specific organizations. These semi-simple break-ins resulted in some negative headlines, but for the most part, these
In Mark Zuckerberg We Trust? The State and Future of Facebook, User Data, Cambridge Analytica, Fake News, Elections, Russia and You
Not everything is Facebook’s fault, according to Facebook. Mark places some of the onus ofresponsibility on Facebook userswho didn’t read the ToS, manage their data settings or fully understand what happens when you put your entire life online. In his view, and it’s a tough pill to
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
join wp engine in web week 2018
You Have a Great Tech Idea. Now What?
This may be a hard question to answer if you don’t have much firsthand experience in the tech field. Fortunately, there are a few approaches you can use to make this determination. If you have the time and inclination, you could research the possible development options yourself, learning about
4 Unique Growth Tactics for 2020
If you want to grow your business in 2020, repeating the same overused tactics isn’t your best bet. While you can still hammer home the fundamentals — there are plenty of unique growth tactics at your disposal. Implement these four unique growth tactics in the coming year for improved growth
Join WP Engine in Web Week 2018 | Site Map Usability, 1st study
Site Map Usability, 1st study
I have often predicted that Internet Explorer version 8 will be the first decent Web browser. One feature request for version 8 is better navigation support by offering a visualization feature that would pull the site map out of the website and make it a standardized browser element. Unfortunately
TV Meets the Web
In my review of WebTV's usability, I concluded that they had great design, especially regarding novice user usability, but that the design constraints relating to using a small screen and cursor keys on a remote control were too severe for an optimal Web-browsing experience. Well, maybe Web-access
Aspects of Design Quality
Note that a perfect score wouldn't indicate a site with perfect usability. A score of 100% would simply indicate that the site got full marks with respect to the current state of the art in all the usability aspects we evaluated. In actuality, the highest-scoring site in our study got a rating of
