Matt Mullenweg delivered the State of the Word in Nashville, Tennessee this past weekend. The speech was almost immediately following the release of WordPress’ new editor, Gutenberg. The editor’s progress and release have been much anticipated by the WordPress community. This State of the Word was the first time Mullenweg had addressed the WordPress community since Gutenberg’s release just two days earlier.
Mullenweg began the talk by offering the audience a perspective. “With so much going on, I’d like to give WordPress a chance to reintroduce introduce itself,” he said. “WordPress isn’t a physical thing, it’s not a set of code. It’s kind of an idea. It only exists 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
The process of disabling the 5.0 editor should not be a hassle. In the coming days, we will be rolling out an admin notice that will display on the Dashboard page* of your site(s). This notice will have information about adopting the new editor and will provide buttons to install/activate the
Last week, WP Engine employees from all over the U.S. came together at our Austin headquarters for the first biannual All-Hands event of 2019. All Hands is a two-day event in which employees from other offices and teams around the country get the chance to collaborate and strategize with one
The Blockchain Talent Shortage May Be Nearing Its End
The high price tag associated with blockchain talent has drawn the most opportunistic developers to learn more about the career opportunities in the blockchain. A few years ago, investing time and energy into blockchain skills was a gamble that wasn’t sure to pay off, but now, it’s a path to a
Shaping Healthcare Ecosystem with Blockchain
Blockchain has become a hot topic of discussion these days as it has made its way into a number of industries. From finance to infrastructure, blockchain or distributed ledger has found interoperability in every sphere of work. Healthcare is another realm that has found a widespread implementation
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
The Impact of Tone of Voice on Users' Brand Perception (Nielsen Norman Group UX research)
In this scenario, Zeta’s friendliness without an attempt at humor seemed to reassure users during a potentially stressful situation. One participant in the qualitative study compared the difference between Zeta and Epsilon to the difference between a doctor and a nurse. She described Epsilon as
transition recapping the state of the word 2018 editor
The Attention Economy
Certain facts of the digital economy may not change. Advertising will fund some free content for the foreseeable future, apps will compete for new users’ attention, and people will still only have so much attention to dedicate. However, designers have a choice in this economy of attention: they
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
Teenager’s UX: Designing for Teens
Despite usability improvements, we observed users struggling with the same issues as in previous years — as well as new issues created by emerging features and design approaches. Thus, both traditional and new guidelines must be considered as technology and people continually evolve; our new
Best Application Designs
That we would ever classify a radiology application as "lightweight" defies the imagination, but it's appropriate in the case of VitreaTeach because it focuses on one thing: allowing residents and experienced radiologists to manage images for learning purposes. We might even call it the Pinterest
Teenager’s UX: Designing for Teens
Are teens getting better or are websites getting better? Probably a bit of both. We observed many of the same bad user habits among teens in our last study as we saw in our first study, back in 2004. Thus, the improved performance obviously stems in part from improvements in website design. That
6 Rules for Persuasive Storytelling
In our work as UX professionals, we use stories to help create a shared vocabulary, focus the team on a common goal, and persuade stakeholders — ultimately leading to buy-in. UX stories are a communication tool that can be used in lieu of boring task check lists that are far removed from the
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How to use Screening Questions to Select the Right Participants for User Research
If you need to recruit people who are highly familiar with a certain topic, open-ended questions can elicit authentic details that tell you whether respondents have the relevant experience. If you ask people how often they play online games, it’s easy for someone who plays a few times a year to
Why User Interviews Fail
The color preference affects the user's overall perception of the product. Even if users actually do like, dislike, or feel some emotions related to the color, it doesn’t mean it will affect their overall perception of the design or organization to any meaningful degree. A background color is
Customer Journeys and Omnichannel User Experience
I recently emailed myself a link to the a CPR training page on the American Red Cross mobile site to remind myself to sign up for training. When I clicked the link on my laptop, I was directed to the mobile site’s homepage instead of the CPR training page. According to a 2012 Google report, 49
This finding has implications for the choice of recommender engine. Let’s say you’re running a streaming video site with a page layout that allows you to show only two recommended movies to each user. You have the choice between two recommendation algorithms: Algorithm A selects two movies that
Fight Against “Right-Rail Blindness”
The right-hand side of the page consumes maybe 20% of your available pixels: the most precious resource in computers. It can serve many significant and practical purposes. It’s a place to feature secondary content — to recommend or extend the user journey to other areas of your site. Not
Data Lake vs. Data Warehouse: Which Is the Best Data Architecture?
But one shouldn’t count data lakes out just yet. Data marketplaces can rescue the promise of data lakes by organizing them for the end user. Just as the internet was much more difficult to navigate before Google, data marketplaces unlock the powerful data lake architecture.In the analytics
AI-Based Framework for Agile Project Management
With the recent trends towards automation, machine learning and artificial intelligence as it appears that just the application of AI can not transform the enterprise computing as now, it has the power to change project management as well. A well-known core concept with AI systems is that their
An Insider’s 11 Take-Aways from Companies Winning Industrial (IIoT) Cybersecurity
Successful IIoT startups recognize that some of the most dangerous vulnerabilities aren’t just flaws in their code, but weaknesses in their supply chain. They know that any OEM that incorporates subassemblies made by others can potentially introduce tampered firmware into their system by
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
time recapping the state of the word 2018 phase
9 Steps to Assess Whether a Startup is Suitable for Investment
Also, keep in mind the presence of earning potential, sustainable competitive advantage and potential market share. Finally, the “what” is focusing on the questions regarding the list of top customers, strategic relationships. Suppliers need to be considered, as well as on the thorough analysis
A 60-Second Trailer of the 60-Day Report on Cybersecurity
She explained that the original design of the Internet was driven more by considerations of interoperability rather than security, and as a result we are now faced with almost insurmountable issues. Some examples include online criminals who steal our information, mass bandits who have the ability
Recapping the State of the Word 2018 | Zigzag Image–Text Layouts Make Scanning Less Efficient
Zigzag Image–Text Layouts Make Scanning Less Efficient
If you look closely at the heatmaps, you will notice that the images in the zigzag layout have slightly more purple "heat” over them — that is, they attracted more gazes than the corresponding ones in the aligned layout. These gazes are likely accidental: as people moved their eyes to the next
Usability Testing of Advanced Homepage Concepts (by Jakob Nielsen)
Users generally liked having news stories on the home page as opposed to reserving the page strictly for navigation. Some users expressed a preference for limiting the news coverage to a small number of stories in order to avoid scrolling. Several users related recent experiences where they had had
Changes in Web Usability Since 1994
There are still a few users who rarely scroll. Even those users who are willing to scroll may be tempted to choose one of the initially visible options when it seems to match their goals. Such users will never see an even better, but invisible, choice that would have required scrolling. Therefore
