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...
We are proud to announce that our Chief Marketing Officer Mary Ellen Dugan was recognized for her leadership in marketing and across the organization. Since starting at WP Engine in 2016, Mary Ellen has spearheaded many successful marketing initiatives. Some noteworthy achievements include
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
Many of those abandoned carts are probably lost for good because you don’t have any contact information from the shopper to try to win them back to checkout. But for a percentage of the carts, your shopper will have gotten far enough along in the process that you’ll have an email address (or
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
Blockchain Supercharged with AI: The Next Revolution
This corporate agenda would have been impossible today without the rise of social media platforms and the internet. On top of having access to the social media activity of users, companies often have access to shopping behavior, geographical information and even political preference for at least
RW Q&A: Monisha Perkash, founder of Lumo Bodytech
Lumo’s wearable products are characteristically small with intelligent sensors. Perkash described the Lumo Lift, a small lapel pin that attaches to your shirt with magnets, and the Lumo Run, a tiny clip that could be attached to the waistband of your shorts. “When you slouch, the Lumo Lift
Centered Logos Hurt Website Navigation
It appears that other factors (such as the contrast, padding, and legibility of the brand name) affect brand recall more than the position in the center of the page versus the top left corner. For example, the Nolitan hotel websites had a background image behind the logo, which may have
wp engine all hands spring 2019: emea
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
Tesla’s Touchscreen UI: A Case Study of Car-Dashboard User Interface
While touchscreen dashboards offer more flexibility than real dashboards, they have one big disadvantage: no haptic feedback. In order to reliably touch these buttons, people must look at them. Whereas with a physical button we can learn its location and acquire it without directing much, if any
A Checklist for Designing Mobile Input Fields
Whether you're designing web pages, web-based applications (e.g., SaaS), or native mobile apps, one of the basic building blocks is the humble text-input field: a box where the user can enter some text. Uses of this widget are plenty and not the topic of this article. We should point out that there
A Checklist for Designing Mobile Input Fields
Whether you're designing web pages, web-based applications (e.g., SaaS), or native mobile apps, one of the basic building blocks is the humble text-input field: a box where the user can enter some text. Uses of this widget are plenty and not the topic of this article. We should point out that there
Progress Indicators Make a Slow System Less Insufferable
Percent-done progress indicators are the most informative type of wait-animation feedback. They show the current progress, how much has already been accomplished, and how much is left. They convey important information about (approximately) how long the wait time is. This information gives users
Typography Terms Cheat Sheet
Before the digital age, serif fonts were deemed more legible, and easier to read than sans-serif ones, but in modern days, sans-serif fonts have comparable and sometimes better legibility, especially on digital screens. (The issue was that the serifs didn’t render nicely on low-resolution
wp engine all hands spring 2019: emea
Usability 101: Introduction to Usability
To identify a design's most important usability problems, testing 5 users is typically enough. Rather than run a big, expensive study, it's a better use of resources to run many small tests and revise the design between each one so you can fix the usability flaws as you identify them. Iterative
Maps and Location Finders on Mobile Devices
More guidelines regarding the usability of store finders and locators can be found in the full report available for download. The report contains 58 design guidelines for both desktop and mobile store locators, and is published as a volume of the e-commerce UX report series but can also be read as
Killing Off the Global Navigation: One Trend to Avoid | Nielsen Norman Group
On the WHSmith website, fitting all 12 product categories in a global navigation menu would be difficult, but pushing them all down into a drop-down menu is not the answer. For most sites, explaining the brand offerings is simply too important to be relegated to a secondary menu; even if visitors
UX Research Cheat Sheet
When deciding where to start or what to focus on first, use some of these top UX methods. Some methods may be more appropriate than others, depending on time constraints, system maturity, type of product or service, and the current top concerns. It’s a good idea to use different or alternating
Teenager’s UX: Designing for Teens
Despite usability improvements, we observed users struggling with the same issues as in previous years — as well as new issues created by emerging features and design approaches. Thus, both traditional and new guidelines must be considered as technology and people continually evolve; our new
CSS conversion of my Radio weblog
The hardest thing about the re-design was integrating the tableless CSS design into Radio Userland. I had to do some jiggery-pokery with the Radio Userland templates and macros, and the CSS implementation is not yet complete. I’ve had to temporarily remove my blogroll and topicroll, along
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
7 Companies Poised to Disrupt the Mobile Enterprise
Zenius took the top spot, winning three categories including best overall, most unique and best business model. Hive by Decode Solutions was right behind Zenius and won two categories for best design and best presentation. Zenius took home $20,000 and some hardware, one of the most substantial
Open Plan Offices Kill Productivity. Here’s What to Do Instead.
For years, the business world lived under the false pretense that open plan offices were a killer idea. I myself even bought into the hype. At Netconcepts, the digital agency I founded (and sold in 2010), only the executives had offices with doors that closed. Open plan offices were a win-win for
wp engine all hands spring 2019: emea
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
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
WP Engine All Hands Spring 2019: EMEA | Mastery, Mystery, and Misery: The Ideologies of Web Design
Mastery, Mystery, and Misery: The Ideologies of Web Design
Even designers who believe in user mastery can be tempted to taint their designs with shades of mystery. It's easy to delude yourself that an ornamental feature will attract users. For example, most users disliked the category name "lifestyle" on bbc.co.uk according to the British government's user
Top 10 Web Design Mistakes of 2002
Web pages that require horizontal scrolling in standard-sized windows, such as 800x600 pixels, are particularly annoying. For some reason, many websites seem to be optimized for 805-pixel-wide browser windows, even though this resolution is pretty rare and the extra five pixels offer little
Priming and User Interfaces
Elements in the interface can prime user behavior and expectations. For example, let’s assume users encounter a coupon field on the checkout page of an ecommerce website. Even though they may not have planned to use a coupon, the very presence of a coupon box primes users to leave the checkout
