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...
Last week, some of the most progressive marketers and innovative thinkers using WordPress came together at the 2018 WP Engine Summit. Attendees left exhilarated and inspired to push their brands and agencies forward faster. The theme of this year’s Summit was Breakthrough. Insight into the
When it comes to providing world-class digital experiences, less than a third of respondents (29 percent) thought their customers would rate their digital experience as superior. On mobile, a poor design or bad user experience is even more pronounced. With three billion smartphone users in the
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
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
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
Businesses Broke Ground on Blockchain. What Can Civic Groups Learn?
Although 84 percent of global companies are dabbling in the decentralized ledger technology, the truth is that 92 percent of blockchain projects have failed. Firms have found the technology’s promise to verify data in a decentralized way appealing, but they’ve struggled to implement it
Eartracking: A New UX-Research Method
The finding of gender differences in mammoth webpages was due to a lucky coincidence: we employed the new eartracking technology with a few of the users during our recent study of UX design for children, and happened to include the wooly-mammoth page on National Geographic Kids’ website
wp engine all hands spring 2019: emea
The Attention Economy
Advertising campaigns that entice or force users to dedicate their attention to the ad. Some free games offered on the iPhone’s GameCenter include advertisements. The close icon does not appear on the advertisement until the ad has displayed for a certain length of time. This design forces users
User Experience vs. Customer Experience: What’s the difference?
Whether you use the term “UX” or “CX” is not important, because they basically mean the same thing if you have the “correct” interpretation of the terms. What’s important is: (1) that you understand the different scopes of experience and strive to optimize the experience at all
Empathy Mapping: The First Step in Design Thinking
If you feel that you need more detail or you have unique needs, adapt the map by including additional quadrants (like Goals the example below) or by increasing specificity to existing quadrants. Depending on the purpose of your empathy map, polish and digitize the output accordingly. Be sure to
Best Application Designs
Several applications, however, enhanced an old idea: the tooltip. These "super" tooltips stretch far beyond their original intent and thus earned the spot as the year's most improved interaction design technique. Emerging in the 1990s, tooltips (or "bubble help") started off by providing small
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
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
wp engine all hands spring 2019: emea
Alternative Payment Methods Enable International Purchases
Walmart’s Brazil site tailored the payment options to fit what was expected in that country: credit card, debit card, and cash/bank ticket. (For the sake of clarity, this screenshot was translated from the original Portuguese using Google Translate.) In the Netherlands, the Van Gogh Museum
Adding an Item to a Shopping Cart: Provide Clear, Persistent Feedback
On ecommerce sites, the first step of purchasing a product is adding it to the shopping cart. Clear feedback that this step was completed successfully gives users a sense of control and allows them to confidently continue shopping or proceed with their checkout. (It also complies with two of the 10
Design Charrettes & Team Sketching: ½ Inspiration, ½ Buy-In
In an intranet design, the HR representative sketches a section page with 90% of the above-fold space dedicated to the benefits of the open-enrollment period. When explaining her design, she says that this year there will be no print mailings to employees, and that people already get so many
Fight Against “Right-Rail Blindness”
Users are extremely goal oriented. They look for information they care about and ignore anything others want to push on them. In fact, users have evolved an active system of self-defense against ads. That’s because on the web they are constantly barraged with attempts to capture their attention
Ideation in Practice: How Effective UX Teams Generate Ideas
Including more people in your ideation process can generate a much wider set of ideas than you could produce individually, because it allows you to draw on many diverse perspectives. Whenever possible, aim to include at least one other person in your ideation process to be more effective at
We get Smarter with the Internet of Things (IoT) and so do Cities
A major aspect of smart cities is how well they control their traffic flow within the town. All these additional enhancements of the transportation systems improves the overall traffic pattern flow within the city. With an increase in population, pollution, and traffic — economic problems
4 Things Spotify Can Teach You About Data Sharing
After Facebook’s Cambridge Analytica scandal broke this past May, the social network announced it would roll out a suite of new privacy tools. But while Facebook did debut a feature that allows users to access and download their data, it’s months behind on a “Clear History” tool. “That
13 Major Vulnerabilities Discovered in the Popular IoT OS FreeRTOS
Due to the need to alert a wide range of stakeholders who are using the vulnerable FreeRTOS open source components in their products’ software, the researchers have reserved CVEs with MITRE and the National Vulnerability Database (NVD), but are withholding details pertaining how to carry out the
Focusing On Debt Consolidation Helps Startups To Be More Organized
You will also have to consider the different criteria for eligibility of such loans and fulfill it to procure the loan from a leading consolidating firm. These criteria include having a credit score of around 500 or more and a business that is not less than six months old. Apart from that, your
wp engine all hands spring 2019: emea
3 Reasons Why Your Success Depends on More Than a Great Product
If you spend as much time focusing on meeting customers’ needs as you do on product development, you can turn customer service into a powerful differentiator for your company. That’s critical, as 88 percent of customers prioritize customer service over innovative products when deciding whether
Enterprises and AI Need to Connect Better – Here’s Why
The success of these tech giants helped create a ripple effect, inspiring other enterprise corporations to look into ways they can also integrate AI into their processes and/or product offering. But some things are easier said than done. In most cases, it isn’t advisable for the fresh new
WP Engine All Hands Spring 2019: EMEA | Help People Create Passwords That They Can Actually Remember
Help People Create Passwords That They Can Actually Remember
A classic memory study (Baddeley, Thompson, and Buchanan, 1975) looked at memory for a list of words in relation to the amount of time it takes to say the words in the list out loud. It turned out that it was easier for people to remember a list such as wit, sum, harm, bay, top than university
The Fold Manifesto: Why the Page Fold Still Matters
A second set of data comes from Google’s analysis of display advertising (PDF) across a huge number of websites. The study looked at how “viewable” an advertisement was, with viewability defined as 50% of the ad’s pixels being on-screen for one second. Advertisements just above the fold had
Maximize Content-to-Chrome Ratio, Not the Amount of Content on Screen
Eliminating the search box and replacing it with a magnifying-glass icon has become almost standard on mobile. It doesn’t work as well on the desktop: the space is simply too large and users don’t have the patience to hunt for a small search icon. If you consider using it on the desktop, keep
