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...
Matt Mullenweg delivered the State of the Word in Nashville, Tennessee this past weekend. The speech was almost immediately following the release of WordPress’ new editor, Gutenberg. The editor’s progress and release have been much anticipated by the WordPress community. This State of the Word
At the end of September, we held our 2018 WP Engine Summit in Austin, Texas. Last week, agencies, brands, and digital innovators from EMEA came together in London for the WP Engine EU Summit. Attendees discussed the future of digital experiences, Gen Z’s perception of the Internet, and the
We closed things out by hearing from WP Engine leaders on the WP Engine roadmap. We heard about exciting partnerships, like our recent partnership with Cloudflare, that add security and stability to the WP Engine Digital Experience Platform. We also heard about upcoming products and releases
The Top Futurist Speakers to Have at Your Conference
Mariana Mazzucato is a professor of Economics of Innovation and Public Value at University College London. She focuses on the relationship between innovation and growth, with an emphasis on the symbiotic partnerships that result from growth that is innovation-led, inclusive, and sustainable
9 Blockchains Transforming the Way We Pay, Play, and Work
DeBeers Group, the world’s largest diamond company, wants to shut down production of so-called blood diamonds. Diamond producers mine these diamonds under violent circumstances and often unstable conditions. Its sales continue to fund regional conflicts. In a 2018 pilot, De Beers digitally
9 Blockchains Transforming the Way We Pay, Play, and Work
Look past digital currencies’ nosebleed pricing volatility, and you’ll discover a robust, decentralized, secure database. Brands and technologists are quickly figuring out how to put this powerful ledger to good use. Here are several real-world examples that demonstrate cryptos’
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
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Text Scanning Patterns: Eyetracking Evidence
The commitment pattern demonstrates traditional reading, not scanning. In this pattern, users fixate on all or most content words in the text passage. This pattern usually occurs when users are very interested or very motivated to read the content (for example, because they are studying for a test
Why WSJ Mobile App Gets ** Customer Reviews
The 2-step workflow's obvious penalty is that users must pass through the 2nd screen each time they log in. However, because this is a low-security app, it should be possible to store the login credentials on the phone and log in users automatically upon subsequent uses. (A high-security app such
Customization vs. Personalization in the User Experience
Personalization and customization should enhance an already good experience, rather than try to fix a poor one. They should be used thoughtfully, with a clear purpose. Consider that both customization and personalization require work and maintenance over time. Personalization requires regular
The Anti-Mac User Interface (Don Gentner and Jakob Nielsen)
The richer internal representation of objects will allow more intelligent interpretation of user commands, but it will also be reflected in a more expressive interface with a richer external representation. The Macintosh interface was originally designed for a 9-inch display that contained less
Customization vs. Personalization in the User Experience
Customization works well under the assumption that users know best what their goals and needs are. Thus, it is based on natural intelligence (the users’) over artificial intelligence (the system’s). On the other hand, personalization is based on artificial intelligence (about a user or a group
UX Guidelines for Ecommerce Homepages, Category Pages, and Product Listing Pages
Navigational options and product categories need to be clear, with labels that make sense to users on their own, as well as in relation to other options on the site. Users must be able to quickly understand each category, and how it differs from the others in order to decide where to click. When
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Infinite Scrolling is Not for Every Website
The success of infinite scrolling on social media sites such as Twitter have made this technique popular, but that doesn’t mean you should do it too. Continuous scrolling is advantageous for content that streams constantly and has a relatively flat structure, where each unit of content belongs at
Usability Testing with Minors: 16 Tips
During our research with teenagers, we asked them to read a think-aloud document out loud. This document is an alternative to a demo video. Reading the document served as a warmup to the actual study and helped teens understand what was being asked of them. Although this method was generally
Test Paper Prototypes to Save Time and Money: The Mozilla Case Study
The final design started with the choice of products, then showed the task-based navigation after the first click, following good progressive-disclosure principles. In addition, a number of participation options were consolidated under one button, Volunteer for Mozilla Support, that allowed people
Decision Frames: How Cognitive Biases Affect UX Practitioners
Experiment with different frames. Try restating your question in reverse terms, or from a different point of view. Taking a few seconds to simply flip a data point from a success rate to a failure rate, or to consider not just a percentage of failure but the actual number of people affected, is a
5 Steps to Service Blueprinting
Add the process that employees rely on to effectively interact with the customer. These processes are the activities involving all employees within the company, including those who don’t typically interact directly with customers. These support processes need to happen in order to deliver the
Smart Hospitals: the Next Step in Healthcare IT
A Samsung division, Samsung Bioepis Co, are busy making a low-cost version of Roche Holding AG’s eye drug, Lucentis. At the same time, Apple is taking the iPhone beyond the collection of wellness and bio-health data. Apple is talking to hospitals, drug companies, and sitting in on IT procurement
4 Reasons Behind Slow Adoption of IoT
The best thing about it is that all these interconnected devices and beings are going to be able to communicate with one another. But when is this going to happen? Of course, some changes are already obvious and people are currently working in order to develop more of the IoT technology, but
Images of Fitbit next smartwatch reveal heart-rate improvements
Fitbit is on schedule, as its boss James Park keeps reminding us, to launch its next smartwatch by the end of the year. We don’t know what the smartwatch will be called, though Blaze 2 seems likely, but thanks to leaks we know its design and some of the hardware improvements. Images obtained by
Open Plan Offices Kill Productivity. Here’s What to Do Instead.
Researchers Ethan Bernstein and Stephen Turban summarized their findings by stating: “Consistent with the fundamental human desire for privacy and prior evidence that privacy may increase productivity, when office architecture makes everyone more observable or ‘transparent’, it can dampen
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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
4 Unique Growth Tactics for 2020
If you want to grow your business in 2020, repeating the same overused tactics isn’t your best bet. While you can still hammer home the fundamentals — there are plenty of unique growth tactics at your disposal. Implement these four unique growth tactics in the coming year for improved growth
WP Engine All Hands Spring 2019: US | Tesla’s Touchscreen UI: A Case Study of Car-Dashboard User Interface
Tesla’s Touchscreen UI: A Case Study of Car-Dashboard User Interface
Manuglick
When my generation learned to drive, the standard hand position was 2–10 (corresponding to numbers 2 and 10 on the clock). With airbags and smaller steering wheels becoming common, National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) has changed its recommendation and now 3–9 has become the
Users Interleave Sites and Genres
In our example case, the user also integrated offline information sources. For example, none of the sites helped her figure out how many lumens were needed to show presentations to her target audience size. Luckily, our user was an experienced projector-buyer and owned a reference book with this
Computer Screens Getting Bigger
The 1024×768 became the leading monitor size in 2004 and has only just been dethroned by a (slightly) larger screen resolution of 1366×768, according to StatCounter. The change over from 1024×768 to bigger screens actually occurred in 2009, but there were so many different larger-resolution
