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...
Atomic Blocks is one of the most popular and most downloaded libraries of beautiful, responsive, and customizable blocks for WordPress 5.0. In addition to giving users the ability to quickly add great-looking elements to their web pages without touching a line of code, Atomic Blocks also offers
AMP was effectively loading up landing pages faster and more efficiently than previous technology, but what about the rest of the website? Consumers desired a top-notch mobile ecommerce experience; they wanted to search for products, add to their cart, manage their points, use coupons, etc. AMP
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
How Blockchain Can Solve Major Problems for Gig Economy Freelancers
Blockchain technology maximizes the efficiency of cryptocurrency by routing the power to authenticate transactions through a network of nodes and participants. By bypassing banks, blockchain is able to eliminate time delays and transactional errors. Beyond expediting transactions, cross-border
A marketplace solution for IoT development through decentralized smart contract ledger
Otherwise, the person cannot have the desired item. Smart contracts are based on blockchain technology and hence, it works in a decentralized manner ensuring security and immutability of the contract. Ethereum is one such private blockchain platform that enables the creation of smart contracts. As
Emerging Technologies are Banding Together to Accelerate Big Data’s Growth
Thanks to the growth of the internet, the rate at which new information is being released is growing exponentially. Accelerating big data between machines. We are in an age when communication is not just between human beings. Machines are now the go-to for connections between the people to people
Beyond Usability: 3 User Experiences Reshaping Their Industries
It used to be that you would buy two or three nice outfits to have in your wardrobe and would rotate them for special events. But in today’s era, with social media like Instagram, Facebook, and Snapchat, all your friends will see what you wear, whether they go to the same event or not. And even
wp engine all hands spring 2019: emea
The Impact of Tone of Voice on Users' Brand Perception (Nielsen Norman Group UX research)
Participants in both phases of the study agreed that Alpha (the auto-insurance sample whose tone profile was playful and informal – see Table 1) was friendlier than the more serious sample, Beta. (In the online survey, Alpha was rated as friendlier by a difference of 0.3 points ± 0.2 on a
Beyond Usability: 3 User Experiences Reshaping Their Industries
When they call a regular cab, riders have no control — hence, all the anxieties listed above. With Uber, they suddenly get all the control they need: once they order an “uber”, they see how far away the car is and how much they have to wait, they know in advance how much the ride will cost
Confirmation Dialogs Can Prevent User Errors (If Not Overused)
MailChimp: Confirmation dialog to delete a mailing list follows several of our confirmation-dialog guidelines: (1) specificity through the name of the list and (probably more important) the number of subscribers; (2) extra protection against automated behavior by forcing the user to explicitly type
Top 10 Application-Design Mistakes of 2008
The opposite problem — having something that looks like a GUI control when it isn't one — can reduce usability even more. We often see text and headlines that look like links (by being colored or underlined, for example) but aren't clickable. When users click these look-alikes and nothing
Instructional Overlays and Coach Marks for Mobile Apps
Minimizing the amount of instructions focuses the users’ attention on a single, primary action. The less text overall, the more likely it is that users will read it and then actually follow that instruction. This idea of deferring secondary content is not unique to coach marks, but applying it to
The State of Transactional Email
In preparation for the fourth edition of our report on transactional email and confirmation messages (part of our Ecommerce User Experience report series), we conducted two user research studies: in-person usability testing, and a longitudinal diary study. The main types of transactional email
wp engine all hands spring 2019: emea
Usability 101: Introduction to Usability
Usability and utility are equally important and together determine whether something is useful: It matters little that something is easy if it's not what you want. It's also no good if the system can hypothetically do what you want, but you can't make it happen because the user interface is too
Users' Pagination Preferences and "View All"
Pagination is a necessary evil when you have too many items to easily show them all on one screen. Linear content flows — such as articles like this — should almost never be broken up into multiple screens. It’s better to show the full article on one long screen than to inflict the pain of
6 Tips for Successful Personalization
Remember that for personalization to work, you must have the content to deliver to those roles. Content creators can struggle to select the right target audience(s) for content when the divisions of users are too fine grained. Personalizing by broader characteristics, such as location, department
Design Thinking 101
We live in an era of experiences, be they services or products, and we’ve come to have high expectations for these experiences. They are becoming more complex in nature as information and technology continues to evolve. With each evolution comes a new set of unmet needs. While design thinking is
Service Blueprints: Definition
Think of service blueprints as a part two to customer journey maps. Similar to customer-journey maps, blueprints are instrumental in complex scenarios spanning many service-related offerings. Blueprinting is an ideal approach to experiences that are omnichannel, involve multiple touchpoints, or
What Does the Repeal of Net Neutrality Mean for Your Data Security?
Repealing net neutrality is part of a larger ongoing shift that includes new technology and revolutionary ways to use the Internet. With this shift, decisions need to be made about data privacy, human rights and personal freedoms. For the time being, it is important to protect personal data by
Why the Free Market is our Last Best Hope for Industrial Cybersecurity
Everything in our world is connected to a network. That’s not news to consumers or observers of the emergence of IoT, however today’s ubiquitous connectivity now also applies to all things industrial. Everything from the operational systems that run power plants and factories to elements of
6 technologies you need to know to secure your IoT network
Encrypting data in rest and data in motion will help you to maintain the integrity of your data and reduce the risk of data sniffing by hackers. Due to varying hardware profiles of different devices, no standard protocol and encryption that can be implemented across all IoT devices. This pose a big
5 Real Life Blockchain Implementations Outside of Cryptocurrency
Arcade City is a new peer-to-peer rideshare startup whose goal is to disrupt the disruptor. They’re taking on Uber and Lyft to cut out the middleman and protect driver rights, and they’re basing their platform on the Ethereum blockchain. Many drivers have had negative experiences using Uber
wp engine all hands spring 2019: emea
7 Benefits Startups get From HR in the Early Stages
In every start-up, the workload is comparatively higher. People have to work beyond their working hours with complete dedication. Even the monetary remuneration rewarded to the employees and other perks are also relatively less than established companies. There are chances that an employee feels
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
WP Engine All Hands Spring 2019: EMEA | Website Forms Usability: Top 10 Recommendations
Website Forms Usability: Top 10 Recommendations
As a taxpayer, it’s comforting to think that my government agency isn’t deliberately using bad design to avoid hearing my comments. But from a UX perspective it’s a painful reminder that despite the buzz and popularity of “UX” in recent years, basic understanding of usability is often
Nielsen's Law of Internet Bandwidth
The dots in the diagram show the various speeds with which I have connected to the net, from an early acoustic 300 bps modem in 1984 to an ISDN line when I first wrote this article (and updated to show the 300 Mbps upgrade I got in 2018). It is amazing how closely the empirical data fits the
Why Country Sites Are So Bad
When they're fed substandard websites, local customers notice. In our testing of B2B websites, we often hear business customers express contempt for international vendors' localized sites. Users suspect that these sites have impoverished product information that's been translated without an
