Last week, WP Engine employees from our Limerick and London offices came together for the bi-annual All Hands event in Limerick. All Hands is a 2-day event where employees come to engage with, collaborate, and strategize with employees from other offices. This year’s theme was “Boldly Go” in honor of the famous sci-fi sagas Star Wars and Star Trek. In addition to discussing goals for the upcoming year and new strategies for success, the team took moment to have a good time.
Events on the agenda included team lunches, Q&A sessions with executives, information sessions, and a company party with a talent show. Next week, employees in US offices will come...
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
It comes then as no surprise that Gartner forecasts worldwide enterprise security spending to total $96.3 billion in 2018. Organizations are spending more on security as a result of these incidents, increased regulations, shifting buyer mindsets, awareness of emerging threats and higher levels of
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
2 Billion Downloads Later, Apple’s App Store is Still Going Strong
The App Store is obviously one of Apple’s most important assets in the mobile market. While Microsoft’s Zune HD, for example, is getting a lot of favorable reviews, the absence of an application ecosystem makes it a far less compelling product than Apple’s more expensive iPod
Blockchain Trends that Everyone Should Watch Out For 2019
Just as security, blockchain offers utility advantages in the IoT field, as well. With the number of associated gadgets anticipated to top 26 billion amid 2019, large measures of machine-to-machine correspondence will occur, at dreadfully high a speed for people to keep up physically. Specialists
How Blockchain Can Solve Major Problems for Gig Economy Freelancers
The modern workplace includes a ridiculous number of freelancers and third-party service providers. Despite this prevalence, a survey by the Freelancers Union shows that 50 percent of freelancers have trouble getting paid for their work. Delayed payments are the main issue, though one-third of
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
wp engine all hands spring 2019: emea
Brand Is Experience in the Digital Age
Though interaction has always been important for forming customer impressions in service industries — customers would quit going to McDonalds if they were consistently treated rudely by staff no matter how highly they rate the fries — what’s new is that interaction and user experience have
UX Mapping Methods Compared: A Cheat Sheet
All UX mappings have two-fold benefits. First, the process of creating a map forces conversation and an aligned mental model. Second, the shared artifact resulting from the mapping can be used amongst your team, organization, or partners to communicate an understanding of your user or service. This
Scrolling and Scrollbars
If you must make your own scrollbars, stay as close to user expectations as possible. Unless your scrollbars look like scrollbars, users might not notice them. Unless your scrollbars behave like scrollbars, users might not be able to bring the desired content into view. In either case, your
Indicators, Validations, and Notifications: Pick the Correct Communication Option
Notifications have the design challenge that they are not the immediate and obvious result of a specific user action. On the contrary, the user is likely in the middle of doing something different and may not be thinking about the issue raised by the notification. This requires notifications to
Defeated By a Dialog Box
The lesson from this case study is not how to design a better "Save As" dialog. Depending on the circumstances, you could use any of the four designs I listed, or perhaps even design a fifth that works better for your particular type of data. It's easy enough to find out what's best for your users
10 Heuristics for User Interface Design: Article by Jakob Nielsen
Visibility of system status The system should always keep users informed about what is going on, through appropriate feedback within reasonable time. (Read full article on visibility of system status.) Match between system and the real world The system should speak the users' language, with words
wp engine all hands spring 2019: emea
Why User Interviews Fail
Few teams record their interviews, and even fewer teams transcribe the sessions. If you interview a lot of people, it’s worth recording them. Even a good notetaker can miss things, as it’s virtually impossible to capture everything that was said verbatim. Most participants have no problem with
How to Display Taxes, Fees, and Shipping Charges on Ecommerce Sites
Some organizations take advantage of the principle of commitment & consistency to force users to make the purchase: they know that, once people have invested time and effort to find a product they like and have decided to buy it, they will have a hard time giving it up when they find about
Breaking Web Design Conventions = Breaking the User Experience
Instead of the traditional global navigation bar with several categories, the Bucknell site has an extremely narrow and deep hierarchy, with just 2 menu items: Start Exploring, (which has a drop-down for audience-based navigation) and The Everything Directory (which leads to an A-Z index). On
Flat-Design Best Practices
Google’s Material Design, which has been around since 2014, took an admirable stab at this concept. The best thing about Material Design was that it defined a carefully considered framework with specific rules, behaviors, and visual properties. Unfortunately, it’s not always implemented
While a couple of users appreciated that they didn’t need to make a purchase to benefit from personalized recommendations, most wanted their direct activity such as past purchases, saved items, or entered profile information to be weighed more heavily than simple browsing. They felt that not all
3 High-Tech Ways Companies Are Fighting Cybercrime Right Now
One of the most alarming threats to emerge is cybercriminals’ use of artificial intelligence to make their attacks smarter and more effective, an approach now called “adversarial AI.” By using tactics to fool machine learning, AI could learn and infiltrate security systems with repeated
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
In an Experiential-Obsessed Marketplace, Surkus Uses Tech to Stand Out
Surkus’ knowledge of where members are at every touchpoint is valuable: By tracking members’ locations and activity, the platform can nudge them and offer reminders. The platform, designed for Instagram posts, can point out that a member, still at an event, just took 50 photos and should post
How Healthy Office Snacks Can Help Create A Better Culture
Online grocer Peapod also found that healthy office snacks boost employee happiness. In their study of more than a thousand office workers, about two thirds (66%) of employees who enjoyed free snacks at work reported being either extremely happy or very happy with their current job. On top of that
wp engine all hands spring 2019: emea
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
Is Artificial Intelligence Still Relevant for Startups?
The larger the data set you can gain access to, the more interesting work your platform can do. Look at CentralSquare Technologies, an AI startup that connects emergency call centers around the country. Emergency dispatch centers ran independently for a long time before startups like CentralSquare
WP Engine All Hands Spring 2019: EMEA | Login Walls Stop Users in Their Tracks
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
Flat Design: Its Origins, Its Problems, and Why Flat 2.0 Is Better for Users
For years, users had been exposed to traditional signifiers of clickability, such as blue, underlined links and 3D effects on buttons. As design trends shift and users are exposed to new patterns, the average user’s ability to intuitively identify linked elements has evolved. But just because
Ensure High Contrast for Text Over Images
There is no need to choose between creating a usable design and an aesthetically pleasing design—both can be achieved simultaneously if attention is put toward both goals. When combining emotion-provoking imagery with informational text, ensure that the text is readable by creating a
