Last week, WP Engine employees from all over the U.S. came together at our Austin headquarters for the first biannual All-Hands event of 2019. All Hands is a two-day event in which employees from other offices and teams around the country get the chance to collaborate and strategize with one another. This year’s theme was “Boldly Go” in honor of the famous sci-fi saga Star Trek. This event agenda was full of events to help nurture growth at both the individual level as well as company-wide. Not to mention, we got to have some fun!
Events on the agenda included team lunches, information sessions, inspirational speeches, a Hackathon, advice panels, trivia, and...
If you’re currently using a different platform to power your website, WP Engine’s platform offers a plethora of benefits to improve your agility, maximize your performance, provide insightful intelligence, and incorporate top-notch integrations. Our platform will help you create scalable
During Web Week, we encourage our customers to take advantage of this low-stress time of year to create more personalized, dynamic, and better-performing digital experiences. For brands and agencies, this is the perfect time to kick your feet up, re-access, and get creative. It’s the ideal time
In an effort to help the WordPress community grow and prosper as well as expand and add value to the WP Engine Digital Experience platform, WP Engine recently acquired StudioPress. For our customers, this means, in addition to the Genesis framework, they’ll have access to 35 premium themes. All
Freewheeling Freelancers will Dominate the Future Jobs Market
Freelancers are at particular risk of exploitation from employers. In some cases, the scope of their work can be increased with no new pricing negotiations, they could be left waiting for weeks to be paid, and they typically don’t enjoy the same health or retirement benefits that in-house
Businesses Broke Ground on Blockchain. What Can Civic Groups Learn?
Such attacks have made security experts skeptical of blockchain-based voting initiatives. To prevent vote manipulation and data breaches, West Virginia will use a three-tier security system for its blockchain voting app. Users will first submit a photo of their government-issued identification
Optimizing Business Decisions With Blockchain Technology
Decentralized Autonomous Organizations (DAO) is the name given to the organizations where decisions are made electronically through the blockchain and smart contracts system.When a business operates in such a system, it is governed by rules established through open voting with the weight of each
Brand Is Experience in the Digital Age
In their definition of user experience, Don Norman and Jakob Nielsen claim that “the first requirement for an exemplary user experience is to meet the exact needs of the customer, without fuss or bother.” Brands that choose to address an unmet user need at the core of their business are
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Brand Is Experience in the Digital Age
Though interaction has always been important for forming customer impressions in service industries — customers would quit going to McDonalds if they were consistently treated rudely by staff no matter how highly they rate the fries — what’s new is that interaction and user experience have
Remote UX Work: The NN/g Case Study
UX design often requires collaboration to generate ideas. In-person ideation workshops are much easier than the remote equivalent. When ideation participants are in the same room together, they have a shared context — it’s easy to see what they’re sketching on a sheet of paper and what
Mobile: Native Apps, Web Apps, and Hybrid Apps
As you can see, all these pages are the same, except for the top header, which is platform specific. The Back button on iOS is translated into a caret on Android; the logo is present on the web page, but not in the app. (The designers have correctly assumed that on the web people need the logo to
Tabs, Used Right
Simplest GUI widgets are the building blocks for most functionality on the web, but it's rare to find sites that use all the dialog controls correctly. Even something as simple as radio buttons and checkboxes are incorrectly used half the time. And let's not even get started on drop-down menus
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
Modes in User Interfaces: When They Help and When They Hurt Users
For example, I have a pair of Bluetooth earphones that block out most outside sound when I’m wearing them. They have a useful toggle that allows me to selectively pass through some outside sound for situational awareness when I need it, such as when I am walking down a busy street. I toggle
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M-Commerce: Terrible UX
As an example of this latter point, consider the display of a product list. On a typical desktop screen, the user might be able to see 6 products at a glance (above the fold), whereas a mobile-phone user might only see 3 products. (The actual numbers obviously depending on the specific design and
The Distribution of Users’ Computer Skills: Worse Than You Think
The OECD project looked at a broad range of job-related skills, but of most interest to us is the test of technology skills. For this part of the study, participants were asked to perform 14 computer-based tasks. Instead of using live websites, the participants attempted the tasks on simulated
Consistency in the Omnichannel Experience
One study participant was a member of a meal-delivery subscription service. When she received the wrong ingredient in her most recent delivery, she called customer service to complain and also update her delivery schedule over the phone. The representative gave her a credit and adjusted her
Decision Frames: How Cognitive Biases Affect UX Practitioners
In the real world, there's no single 'right' answer to this question. It’s a judgment call, and the best answer could be influenced by a variety of factors, such as the type of website, the overall importance of the search function, and any implementation costs. Since none of this information was
Beware Horizontal Scrolling and Mimicking Swipe on Desktop
Dennys.com: This design offers obvious global navigation in addition to arrows to advance through content. In testing this site, a user never used the arrows to swipe between pages. Instead, he relied entirely on the global navigation and was able to complete all the tasks successfully. Note, too
Past Bitcoin to Making Money from the Blockchain
People who got in on the ground floor of Bitcoin are sitting pretty. In January of 2011, you could buy over 300 BTC at $100USD. If you held onto it until today, it would be worth $1.7 million. If you held it until Bitcoin was close to $20,000 in December of 2018 it would have been worth nearly $6
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
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
9 Warning Signs Perfectionism is Killing Your Digital Productivity
We believe: the more productive we are, the more others will respect us and consider us professionals, able to balance work and life and, for all that, stay sane and happy. So we crave for stellar productivity. We want to join those “perfect” people, who’ve conquered the digital
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You Have a Great Tech Idea. Now What?
After you have sufficient information to feel confident in the feasibility of your idea, you can start creating a business plan. Your business plan will cover several areas, including the unique value proposition of your business, your vision and mission, your market analysis, your competitive
7 Essentials Your Online Startup Needs to Follow
Starting an online business requires you to be extremely smart because 9 out of 10 startups fail and just 10 percent are lucky to enjoy the sweet taste of success. But there are essentials your online startup needs to follow. There are certain things that most of the startups fail to recognize
WP Engine All Hands Spring 2019: US | Tunnel Vision and Selective Attention
Tunnel Vision and Selective Attention
Westfield was reasonably compliant with guidelines for presenting a corporation's image on the Web in an "About Us" area, and the user had little trouble finding relevant information. Each event in the company's history was shown in a lightbox-style pop-up. Although this was perhaps an overly
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
Zigzag Image–Text Layouts Make Scanning Less Efficient
After users are finished reading the text from one row, they scroll down. The page moves down while the eye stays in the same place, fixating on whatever replaces the content it was looking at before the scroll. For zigzag layouts, images replace the text as the user scrolls the page down. This
