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...
That’s where PWA (Progressive Web Apps) come in. What AMP does for landing pages, PWAs do for the rest of the website. AMP brings users in, ensuring consumers reach your landing page quickly without bouncing, while PWAs allow for immersive and complex shopping experiences that keep users on your
The annual Greater Austin Business Awards competition, presented by The Austin Chamber of Commerce, is designed to honor excellence in all aspects of business. In order to promote awareness and perpetuate good practices, the Awards recognize companies and organization in the Austin region for
Surprisingly, my favorite session of the weekend came from Joe A Simpson Jr who brought a refreshing perspective to why accessibility is important. Imagine a colorblind person watching a football game in which team uniforms were all solid colors. Through a color simulator, we couldn’t tell the
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
Is Blockchain Winning or Losing? — 4 Stages of Blockchain Evolution
At the same time, governments across the world have decided to join the game investing heavily in R&D of the blockchain, or distributed ledger technology (DLT). Many governmental institutions around the world have already implemented national pilot blockchain projects in the healthcare (e.g
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’
Centered Logos Hurt Website Navigation
Based on these observations, it’s clear that left-aligned logos are better than centered logos for supporting user navigation to the homepage. Note that the left-logo sites in this study still caused some homepage-navigation errors (although far fewer than the centered-logo sites). This is
for wp engine all hands spring 2019: emea goals
User Need Statements
User need statements, if properly crafted, have the added benefit of providing a metric for success prior to the onset of ideation, prototyping, and testing. Use the insight, or goal, and ask yourself: how will we know if we accomplish this? Then, as you create your needs statements, establish
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
Group Form Elements Effectively Using White Space
If form length is a concern, you can place field labels to the left of the text fields. However, make sure that labels are of similar length and are placed as close to the text fields as possible. If the labels are too far to the left, it can be difficult to associate the correct label with its
6 Tips for Successful Personalization
As personalization has become increasingly possible on intranets throughout the years, we’ve seen an increase in the number of sites that provide an “out” to personalization, often for troubleshooting purposes. One concern with personalization is that it results in an experience that differs
What the Erroneous Hawaiian Missile Alert Can Teach Us About Error Prevention
Another application-design heuristic violated by the Hawaiian warning system is the ability to undo an erroneous command. The sending of messages cannot literally be undone, which is why a confirmation step is appropriate before the system starts sending. But one can at least send out a second
UX Responsibilities in Scrum Ceremonies
Since UX is typically working a sprint or more ahead of the engineering team, it is already a challenge to keep the team aligned. It is for this reason that attending daily standup and clearly and concisely communicating what UX is doing are so important. Additionally, UX should listen to other
year wp engine all hands spring 2019: emea new
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
6 Rules for Persuasive Storytelling
Thinking about how to build a product usually involves feature lists and backlogs. Stories bring user pain points and goals to the forefront of the conversation and help teams create a shared language of why they’re building a product or feature and whom it benefits. These stories can also be
Accordions for Complex Website Content on Desktops
An accordion menu is a vertically stacked list of headers that can be clicked to reveal or hide content associated with them. It is one of many ways you can expose content to users in a progressive manner. Allowing people to have control over the content by expanding it or deferring it for later
Parallel & Iterative Design + Competitive Testing = High Usability
Many design teams skip competitive testing because of the added expense of testing several sites. (For example, Nielsen Norman Group currently charges $45,000 for most competitive testing and only $22,000 to test a single website. Of course, you can get cheaper tests from Tier-2 or Tier-3
Parallel & Iterative Design + Competitive Testing = High Usability
Just as with parallel design, a competitive test shouldn't simply be a benchmark to anoint a "winner." Sure, it can get the competitive juices stewing in most companies to learn that a hated competitor scores, say, 45% higher on key usability metrics. Such numbers can spur executive action. But as
What Does Your Credit Card Company Know About You?
Chatbots haven’t completely taken over customer service (at least not yet), but your credit card company can still gather information about how you’ve spoken to customer service representatives in the past. When talking to another person, they usually have the ability to jot down notes about
How a VPN Can Enhance Your IOT Devices Security
A botnet is a network of computers or other internet-connected devices that are infected with malware. The devices are controlled as a group, making it possible for hackers to launch large-scale attacks. These attacks can be conducted not just from computers but from all IoT devices as well
How tweaks to IoT’s supply chain can close security gaps
When it comes to the Internet of Things, traditional cybersecurity approaches are difficult to integrate and can’t keep operational devices secure. Many embedded device approaches isolate systems, offering only partial protection, and only against known attack vectors. Could all of our IoT
Here is Why Your Business Should Take Digital Adoption Seriously
Introducing customers to your newest digital offering is just as straightforward. While you can’t force them to undergo training sessions like you might an unenthusiastic or stubborn employee, you can utilize your marketing department to prepare and disseminate outstanding educational materials
to wp engine all hands spring 2019: emea with
The Freelance Entrepreneur’s Guide to Surviving In The World of IoT
Your clients need every option available to them, and their options are only as diverse as the software in your portfolio of knowledge. The more you stay up-to-date with the latest technology trends, the more knowledgeable you will be perceived to be by your clients. Clients like working with
JS-Kit Score: Turn Your Site into a Localized Digg
Widget provider JS-Kit has released their latest widget this morning, Score. Score adds a thumbs up/thumbs down-style ratings widget to any page content, and then aggregates the data across the entire web site into an info box that can highlight a site’s top content. It can also integrate
WP Engine All Hands Spring 2019: EMEA | Pop-ups and Adaptive Help Get A Refresh
Pop-ups and Adaptive Help Get A Refresh
The size constraint of a small overlay window can be an effective way to ensure help documentation is succinct and to the point (following rule #2 above). For simple questions and answers, such as finding a phone number, a small window is all that’s needed. However, for more complex questions
Top 10 Web Design Mistakes of 2003
Without dates on articles, press releases, and other content, users have no idea whether the information is current or obsolete. It's great to keep content in archives. The Alertbox, for example, gets 80% of its readership for old columns, which readers continue to find useful. But some facts and
Usability Testing of Advanced Homepage Concepts (by Jakob Nielsen)
Almost all users disliked the scrolling tickers (marquees) in some of the prototypes. Users complained that they were hard to read and time-consuming to interpret. One user kept missing the beginning of the text and thus had difficulty understanding what the message was about. One user said that he
