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...
WP Engine employees are rarely hungry. Our office kitchens are fully stocked with cereal and snacks, and lunch is catered Monday through Thursday, every week, for the entire team. Unlike the 46,000 people who rely on Central Texas Food Bank for food assistance every week, our employees don’t have
With regards to Genesis, the good news is that it has no substantial backwards-compatibility issues with Gutenberg. The main focus of updates to the StudioPress themes are focused on adding styles for the new Gutenberg blocks. However, what we’re most excited about are the brand new features we
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
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
Sharing Economy 2.0: Technology is Removing the Need for Single Asset Ownership
One such company is IOTA, who is using a distributed ledger called Tangle to enable fast, secure, and zero fee payments. Soon these lightning transaction can be applied to any connected device. This is exactly what we will need to enable users to easily pay for goods and services. This action will
Blockchain in Retail: Changing the Shopping Experience
What has happened is that so much data is now available from so many locations that it is fragmented. This fragmentation makes it challenging to sift through and find the type of patterns that can direct how a retailer changes their customer experience to respond to specific needs and expectations
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
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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
Marking Required Fields in Forms
Both these sites used the asterisk to mark required fields: UPS (left) displayed the asterisk at the end of the label and USPS (right) showed it at the beginning, in red. Showing it at the beginning in a different color makes it slightly easier to identify the required fields, which may prove
10 Best Application UIs
When it comes to modal dialog boxes, our winners have very distinct ideologies. At one extreme is Seating Management. As a real-time application monitoring a physical environment, Seating Management didn't set out to interrupt hostess work in any way. If a hostess wants to seat 5 guests at a table
Slider Design: Rules of Thumb
Use a slider only when the precise value won’t matter to the user, but rather only the approximate range. Make sure that the users can select that range correctly without having to struggle too much to hit a precise value. In addition, any slider labels must be displayed above or beside the
The Need for Speed
Conservative use of graphics does not imply boring pages. Much can be done by colored table cells and creative (but restrained) use of different fonts. In particular, style sheets can be used to improve page design without incurring a download penalty. If you are using style sheets (and everybody
6 Rules for Persuasive Storytelling
For example, let’s say you’re working on a checkout workflow for a novelty gift shop’s website. You interview a user and he tells you about a recent experience he had when purchasing an item. Randy is a father who lives far away from his adult children but likes to send them gifts from time
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The Distribution of Users’ Computer Skills: Worse Than You Think
This is what level-2 people can do: “At this level, tasks typically require the use of both generic and more specific technology applications. For instance, the respondent may have to make use of a novel online form. Some navigation across pages and applications is required to solve the problem
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
UX Retrospectives 101
At regular, but rare, intervals (maybe once a year), you can conduct a retrospective of your retrospectives: a meta retrospective. Are you running your retrospectives right? Do they help make subsequent projects better? Most important, do you see regular improvements in your design process, or are
Brand Is Experience in the Digital Age
Before a siege, Blackbeard dressed himself in a dark heavy coat and captain’s hat to accentuate his domineering stature. He strapped pistols to his chest and tucked lit, smoking fuses under his hat and in his beard to create an image reminiscent of the devil himself having just emerged from some
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
How to Improve Cybersecurity in a Smart City
It’s easy to get seduced by the promise and potential of high-tech metropolises, so much so that we lose sight of the risks technology creates. As long as this blind spot persists, cities will get a lot smarter and a lot less secure in direct proportion. It’s incumbent upon city leaders to
The Positive Evolution of Your Business Depends on the Tech Revolution
There are more Millenials than Baby Boomers in the world today, and they have a looser hold on their wallets — coupled with a strong desire for near-instant gratification. They’re also the ones who’ve been raised on digital technology. Entering the world with a computer in their hands
The Evolution of Healthcare Data: 5 Little Known Facts
Before most people even knew what a computer was, Dr. Lawrence Weed developed the first rudimentary EHR system. Back then, storage and mainframes were extremely expensive, and hospitals had to share their technology. Dr. Weed’s system was call the Problem-Oriented Medical Information System
Passport Raises $3m to Build the Modern Shipping Carrier
The real difference maker for brands is how Passport handles customer support. There’s a large secret cost to shipping, says Schwartz, and it’s customer service. WISMO, or “Where is my order?!?” is such a common question that brands have templated answers. “A brand shouldn’t have to
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5 Tech Missteps That Are Killing Your Company’s Potential
David Wagner, CEO and president of cybersecurity company Zix, says cloud providers typically provide vigorous security, a priority for any organization that wants to remain competitive. When you move to the cloud, you can save money by kicking your dusty old servers to the curb while still
How Minnesota Became the Land of 10,000 Startups
Don Ball, Co-Founder and Chief Social Officer at Fueled Collective, has experienced Minnesota’s growth firsthand and has a finger on the pulse of what might be the clearest sign of Minnesota’s entrepreneurial prowess: “Since 2010, we’ve been practically the only coworking game in town
WP Engine All Hands Spring 2019: EMEA | Ad Placement for Mobile
Ad Placement for Mobile
When an ad is placed lower on the page amid content, consider adding additional cues to signal the user to scroll past the ad. This recommendation is especially important if the ad is large or otherwise consumes a lot of page real estate (includes extra whitespace above and below the ad, or is a
Why Frames Suck (Most of the Time)
In the long term, we will need a richer model for hypertext nodes on the web than can be supported by frames. For example, composite nodes, typed nodes, hierarchical nesting of nodes, nodes with different views, and nodes with actions that influence other nodes are all ideas that have been explored
Finally Progress in Internet Client Design
I also find it strange that there is little visual integration between the video area and the interaction area. The anchors could easily point over to the other area to draw the user's attention to things to click on or surveys to answer (in a personal email, one of the anchors told me that they
