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 extra excited to bring you this new StudioPress Theme: Breakthrough Pro, which is the first new theme to be launched since our acquisition of StudioPress in June. Breakthrough Pro
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
The Stevie Awards are a set of hundreds of business awards given annually by the American Business Awards organization. They were created in 2002 to recognize the accomplishments and contributions of companies and business people worldwide. Gold, Silver, and Bronze Stevie Awards are given to
Banking is the Next Personal Assistant
Technology can be the catalyst to kick off this shift, but banking decision makers must reconstruct the roles they play if they want to bring this tech-reality to life. Instead of cold, numbers-driven institutions, consumers wish to have banks that offer friendly, knowledgable and familiar faces. A
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
Optimizing Business Decisions With Blockchain Technology
But when the size of the organization and team becomes big, decision making becomes complex and erratic. This explains why the majority of big corporations spend an enormous amount of money in hiring third-party management consulting firms for strategic advice and implementation. Even with these
The Layer-Cake Pattern of Scanning Content on the Web
People don’t usually read every word on a webpage, in an app, or even in an article or text passage. Instead, they often scan — because their experience with many websites has taught them that scanning can deliver almost the same value (that is, amount of information) with significant less
wp engine all hands spring 2019: emea
Brand Is Experience in the Digital Age
Why is it important to understand the components of brand, and to differentiate brand from its common misinterpretation as simply a logo, a figurehead, or a website, among other things? Only when all three brand components — visuals, tone, and behaviors — are present and true to the core brand
The User Experience of Public Bathrooms
Toilets that flush after sensing movement save the user the trouble of coming in contact with a bacteria-laden handle or button. (Many years later, I can still hear my mother’s voice in public washrooms chastising, “For the love of God, don’t touch anything!”). Another benefit of these
Empathy Mapping: The First Step in Design Thinking
Some of these quadrants may seem ambiguous or overlapping — for example, it may be difficult to distinguish between Thinks and Feels. Do not focus too much on being precise: if an item may fit into multiple quadrants, just pick one. The 4 quadrants exist only to push our knowledge about users and
Beyond Usability: 3 User Experiences Reshaping Their Industries
Take Uber for example. While the experience is hugely popular and generally pain free, there is room for enhancement — especially for large groups travelling together. Currently, a group must problem-solve in order to figure out how many “ubers” to call and and how many passengers can fit in
Designing Effective Infographics
Statisticians and information designers have debated the details of scaling in charts for decades. One topic of particular contention is the starting point of the y-axis. Darrell Huff cautioned readers to beware of any chart that does not begin the y-axis with 0 in his 1954 book How to Lie with
Tesla’s Touchscreen UI: A Case Study of Car-Dashboard User Interface
Yet, Tesla’s map app is always displayed in the background of all apps. As a result, the status bar at the very top of the screen can be hard to read, as it blends in with the map text. Moreover, it can be quite irrelevant (and potentially distracting) to a see a brightly colored street
wp engine all hands spring 2019: emea
Sympathy vs. Empathy in UX
Recruit team members with a variety of backgrounds and demographics. That will not guarantee empathy for users, but will at least be a first step in the right direction. Diversity must go wide to include experiences, skills, and attitudes acquired and evolved over each employee’s lifetime —
The New Ecommerce User Experience: Changes in Users’ Expectations
Think about the changing landscape of ecommerce and how these changes affect how your customers expect to engage with your website and services. Assess your overall customer experience based on the large themes discussed in this article. Think about whether you’re delivering on expectations, or
Empathy Mapping: The First Step in Design Thinking
Aggregated empathy maps represent a user segment, rather than one particular user. They are usually created by combining multiple individual empathy maps from users who exhibit similar behaviors and can be grouped into one segment. The aggregated empathy map synthesizes themes seen throughout that
Storyboards Help Visualize UX Ideas
Each step in the scenario is represented visually in a sequence. The steps can be sketches, illustrations, or photos. Depending on the purpose of the storyboard and on its audience, these images can be quick, low-fidelity drawings or elaborate, high-fidelity artifacts. Images include details
Accot-Zhai Steering Law: Implications for UI Design
Why people have trouble maintaining the cursor on a straight path has to do with human physiology: the elbow and wrist, which enable the movement of the hand, describe an arc, not a line. Try it yourself: hold your arm out directly in front of you and move your hand from left to right. You’ll
Why IoT Data Protection Has Become More Important than Ever
Passed in May 2018, the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) is an EU law designed to give users more control over their personal data – and to protect against data breach and misuse. Unlike in Europe, in the US, there is no single, national law that regulates the collection and use of
Big Tech Faces Data Collection Scrutiny, but Big Insurance Might be Next
For most of the past decade, people all around the world sat and watched as significant tech companies started to expand their reach into every part of our daily lives. In many cases, the results were positive, like bringing our favorite entertainment to every device we own. We loved being able to
3 Tips to Convert a Data Science Internship into a Job
Transitioning from an internship into a high-paying career is hard. In the data science world, the competition for employment is intense. While there still are a lot of unfilled roles out there, most of them require something slightly more than just a textbook education. The best way to make the
How to Get into Tech Without a Tech Background
If you look at the greatest recent tech companies there are plenty of newcomers that aren’t even considered tech, let alone, high tech. Uber and Airbnb, are less about tech and more about their concept. You can run a tech company without a tech background but find the best tech you can when
wp engine all hands spring 2019: emea
Small Business Marketing Strategies that Will Work for You
As an entrepreneur and small scale business, you’ll want to find and use all of the techniques and strategy you can leverage to grow your business. Take time to increase in learning all types of business knowledge and how-to’s, then apply your skillset and share what you know with
5 Real Life Blockchain Implementations Outside of Cryptocurrency
It’s not just startups and nonprofits excited about blockchain. Aviation engineering behemoth Boeing is already integrating an IoT-driven blockchain into their engineering operations. Building an airplane takes hundreds of thousands of components, and tracking them throughout the build lifecycle
WP Engine All Hands Spring 2019: EMEA | User Skills Improving, But Only Slightly
User Skills Improving, But Only Slightly
We can't directly assess whether our study participants are idiots, since we don't subject them to an IQ test. But participants' comments during all of our studies these past 14 years indicate that we've mainly had plenty smart test users. Unless a specific study calls for participants with a
Beware Horizontal Scrolling and Mimicking Swipe on Desktop
Scrolling and “swiping” horizontally on the desktop is a different experience than on touchscreen tablets and mobile devices. This is one more example of why it is important to understand that people use mobile devices, tablets, and desktops differently, and why it’s beneficial to optimize
Homepage Design Changes
Although both versions have 7 tabs, the newer design's tabs reached all the way across the page and the color scheme indicating the selected tab was changed. More important, the actual navigation categories were also changed. The 2002 IA categories were Front Page, Enterprise, E-Business
