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...
Diversity has long been an important topic for WP Engine. CEO Heather Brunner often says “diversity attracts diversity.” This means that as a company naturally attracts and retains diverse talent, that diversity is sustained from the inside by employee referrals. Ultimately, the
In 2015, WP Engine opened our first global office in London as a physical representation of our desire to expand our team of WordPress specialists and better serve our customers globally. Since then, we’ve worked hard to create a workplace that is collaborative, productive, and fun. Today, we
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
Banking is the Next Personal Assistant
Technology can be the catalyst to kick off this shift, but banking decision makers must reconstruct the roles they play if they want to bring this tech-reality to life. Instead of cold, numbers-driven institutions, consumers wish to have banks that offer friendly, knowledgable and familiar faces. A
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
Developers Set to Use Bear Market as an Opportunity to Accelerate Ethereum Upgrades
November 2018 will not go down in history as a glorious month in the evolution of cryptocurrency, with all the major digital currencies taking a dive in value, largely as a result of the furore surrounding the Bitcoin Cash hard fork. It prompted even more media drama than usual, partly because it
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
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Intranet Design After a Merger or Acquisition
Keeping multiple intranets up implicitly tells employees that either one is valid and leads to duplication of processes, applications, policies, and other types of content. If people followed the wrong process or act on the wrong information, the consequences could be catastrophic. Instead, do a
The Impact of Tone of Voice on Users' Brand Perception (Nielsen Norman Group UX research)
Quantitative data is useful for measuring whether users can perceive your intended tone, and comparing such numbers between alternate proposed pieces of writing. Qualitative research is much better for understanding why users like certain forms of communication, as well as getting deeper insights
Scrolling and Scrollbars
If you must make your own scrollbars, stay as close to user expectations as possible. Unless your scrollbars look like scrollbars, users might not notice them. Unless your scrollbars behave like scrollbars, users might not be able to bring the desired content into view. In either case, your
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
Toggle-Switch Guidelines
Toggles help users update preferences, settings, and other types of information. When using toggles, provide direct labels, use standard visual design, and deliver immediate results. Keep in mind that toggle switches should only be used when the user needs to decide between two opposing states. As
Decision Making in the Ecommerce Shopping Cart: 4 Tips For Supporting Users
Users need to know that they can click on a product in the cart to see more information. Indicate that product names are links. Many sites rely on a response to a hover to indicate that the product name can be clicked, but this requires that the user guess that the item can be clicked in the first
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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
Empathy Mapping: The First Step in Design Thinking
Aggregated empathy maps represent a user segment, rather than one particular user. They are usually created by combining multiple individual empathy maps from users who exhibit similar behaviors and can be grouped into one segment. The aggregated empathy map synthesizes themes seen throughout that
iOS Design Rules to Break
Calendar for iOS (left): The Add button that submits the form is placed in the top right corner, in the navigation bar. Todoist (a to-do–list app) for Android (right) borrows the iOS pattern and places the Submit button (the checkmark icon) in the top right corner. (Note also that the form fields
The structure of the service plays a large role in whether users expect content to be tailored to them. A user of the Hello Fresh meal service didn’t believe that the meal options for each shipment were specific to him, even if he marked certain recipes as interesting, because the company would
Which UX Deliverables Are Most Commonly Created and Shared?
Only 25% of our respondents found pixel-perfect visual mockups to be a useful tool to communicate ideas to their managerial audiences. Considering how frequently we hear from UX professionals that they feel pressure to present high-fidelity visual designs to their stakeholder audiences, it’s
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
The Top Futurist Speakers to Have at Your Conference
Calum Chace spent 30 years in the industry and now speaks about artificial intelligence and its effect on society. His significant interest is on the relationship between machine and human cognition, and how it may make most people unemployable. Calum Chace has spoken at events organized or
8 predictions for the future of IoT in 2017
With higher value and higher consequence devices, like those found in an automobile, automakers will start to pay closer attention to security in a number of ways, from encrypting and securing control planes like CANbus–which previously were assumed to be secure via obscurity–as
9 Steps to Assess Whether a Startup is Suitable for Investment
Also, keep in mind the presence of earning potential, sustainable competitive advantage and potential market share. Finally, the “what” is focusing on the questions regarding the list of top customers, strategic relationships. Suppliers need to be considered, as well as on the thorough analysis
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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
How New Tech Startups Can Differentiate Themselves
Differentiation is also important for your early-stage marketing and advertising strategies. Customers may not be interested in your profitability model, but they’ll definitely be interested to know why they should choose you over a competitor. Having some sticking point that sets you apart from
WP Engine All Hands Spring 2019: US | Official Olympic Website: UI Silver - but UX DQ
Official Olympic Website: UI Silver - but UX DQ
Another example is even more grotesque: The site's homepage features a promotion to buy the official souvenir program for £10. So if you click this link, what would you expect? A page about the souvenir program, with a button to add it to your cart. After all, the web's one fundamental rule is
The Roots of Minimalism in Web Design
To better grasp and apply minimalist principles, we need to understand the origins of minimalism and its fundamental characteristics. We explore these topics in a series of two articles: In this first article we define minimalism and look at its history; in a second article we analyze in depth the
Usability Testing of Advanced Homepage Concepts (by Jakob Nielsen)
Almost all users disliked the scrolling tickers (marquees) in some of the prototypes. Users complained that they were hard to read and time-consuming to interpret. One user kept missing the beginning of the text and thus had difficulty understanding what the message was about. One user said that he
