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 to worry about where to find their next meal. That contrast is not lost on us.
Based in part on our core value of Aspiring to Lead, Committed to Give Back, we have partnered with Central Texas Food Bank since 2014, volunteering nearly 700 hours and donating more than $20,000 to help fight hunger in our community.
Last week, our first hackathon of the year kicked off with more than a dozen teams and respective projects. After the 48-hour build period was up, those groups presented their cutting edge ideas to a packed audience of WP Engine employees. The presentations lasted an entire day, and only after all
When it comes to facilitating a truly enjoyable and productive workplace, it takes more than just the promise of perks and ping pong. Employees want their workplaces to reflect what they value and expect out of the company they work for: trustworthiness, morality, and the opportunity to grow both in
Despite concerns that Gutenberg would launch too early, that simply hasn’t been the case, and in recent months a herculean effort has gone into checking a considerable subset of the most-used plugins to make sure they’re Gutenberg-compatible. An equally heavy lift has been undertaken by
Is Crypto the Missing Ingredient for Universal Basic Income?
To deal with that problem, various refinements to the original blockchain have been proposed, such as the lightning network, which functions as a peer-to-peer side channel that helps keep transactions between parties off of the leading network until it’s time to reconcile the users’
Transparency In The Cryptocurrency Ecosystem with James Giancotti
For any entrepreneurs looking to start crypto or blockchain projects, Giancotti gives his advice which is to focus on solving a problem and building something people want, not making money. Blockchain project should be built with the startup mentality: build a great product, form a company around
5 Ways Blockchain Startups Can Appeal to Enterprises
The core value of blockchain is the ability to identify high-value problems and solve them by bringing together the right parties. In that same vein, blockchain-based startups shouldn’t hesitate to consider what areas of their operations can be handled by new types of service providers who can
Usability Testing with Minors: 16 Tips
In addition to no-shows, working with youths may also result in more interruptions throughout the study. More interruptions mean less time working on tasks and perhaps fewer research findings in the long run. Interruptions can be due to environmental distractions (discussed later), water or
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10 Usability Heuristics Applied to Video Games
PlayerUnknown’s Battleground Mobile (PUBG Mobile) on iOS keeps Help documentation accessible and visible in the top right corner of the game homepage. However, simply having a Help section doesn’t make finding what you need any easier; it’s also important that the help content is clear and
Brand Is Experience in the Digital Age
In digital systems, customers interact with the representation of the brand in the form of websites and other interactive services, making behavior a crucial attribute of brand. The granularity of behavior as a brand attribute can and does vary and can be expressed holistically at the level of
Defeated By a Dialog Box
Upon further experimentation, I discovered another way of getting rid of the options box: uncheck the checkbox marked "Show options dialog." This, of course, completely violates the design rules for checkboxes and radio buttons , which are not supposed to have any immediate effect when they are
Tooltip Guidelines
The Business Insider website used tooltips for 2 of 3 icons in its navigation menu. (Note: on the homepage of the Business Insider website, the globe icon did have a tooltip that read Globe Icon. However, the label was not helpful, nor indicative of its functionality: a language selector.) In
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
Instilling Confidence in Online Shoppers: I Bought a Sofa Online and Good UX Sealed the Deal
Most importantly, Joybird succeeded at making me comfortable to pull the trigger on an expensive item that is traditionally purchased in person. Every small thing it did leveled up to this mission-critical factor. It broke down difficult tasks and explained complex concepts thoughtfully. It
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How to use Screening Questions to Select the Right Participants for User Research
But screening questions that make the purpose of the study obvious can backfire. If people can easily guess what the study is about, some will be tempted to exaggerate their responses just so they can participate (and receive the incentive, if the study offers one). When part of the screening
Does User Annoyance Matter?
Knowing a better design exists made it painful to sit, day after day, and watch users fight with the mouse to scroll through the huge menu. Sometimes users selected the wrong menu option and then had to waste even more time with the drop-down. And, in this study, we mainly tested young, able-bodied
Parallel Design and Testing by Jakob Nielsen and Jan Maurits Faber
Optimal usability is in Figure 5's lower left corner, and most of the arrows point there, indicating task time and error rate improvements. The main exception is version 2.d, where the error rate dropped substantially but the task time increased slightly, because the design's help system was too
Augmented Reality: What Does It Mean for UX?
Note that we assumed a well-designed user interface in our example of aircraft repair: we said that the mechanic would see “useful information” displayed next to each part. It’s easy to imagine a poorly designed system that would overwhelm the mechanic with too much information, or with a
Narrative Biases: When Storytelling HURTS User Experience
The percentage of Ph.D. holders might be higher among New York Times readers than among the general population, but statistically speaking, the probability that any given individual reading the New York Times holds a Ph.D. is still low. After all there are only 3.6 million Ph.D. holders in the
What to Consider When Leveraging File Sharing
For example, you may want to see who has looked at the file to ensure everyone is staying current on their responsibilities. If there is an issue related to the changes, it helps to see a version history so you know who made what changes and when in order to resolve those disputes. Or, you can make
The Evolution of Healthcare Data: 5 Little Known Facts
With more hospitals using EHR, HITECH and HIPAA were revised and expanded in 2013. Fixes included increased protection and control for patients over their own data. Today, hospitals must adhere to strict data security guidelines or face non-compliance consequences. HIPAA audits look at about 180
13 Major Vulnerabilities Discovered in the Popular IoT OS FreeRTOS
Due to the need to alert a wide range of stakeholders who are using the vulnerable FreeRTOS open source components in their products’ software, the researchers have reserved CVEs with MITRE and the National Vulnerability Database (NVD), but are withholding details pertaining how to carry out the
5 Key Metrics You Should Be Tracking in Your Business
If your business has significantly more liabilities than assets, you will have a difficult time securing further lines of credit. Furthermore, assuming that at least some of your liabilities are actively accruing interest, a weak current ratio can also have a negative impact on your profit margins
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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
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
WP Engine Raises $30K for Central Texas Food Bank | TV Meets the Web
TV Meets the Web
Note how my example of selecting stories for a customized evening news show relies on a fairly passive user interface: click a button as a fixed set of choices are read. In general, I think that the amount of initiative and activity required of the user will be the major defining difference between
When to Use Which User-Experience Research Methods
Most of the methods in the chart can move along one or more dimensions, and some do so even in the same study, usually to satisfy multiple goals. For example, field studies can focus on what people say (ethnographic interviews) or what they do (extended observations); desirability studies and card
Instilling Confidence in Online Shoppers: I Bought a Sofa Online and Good UX Sealed the Deal
As I shopped for a sofa across a lot of other websites, I always had unanswered questions and there were many times when there wasn’t enough detail to help me make a purchase decision. Joybird seemed to know what questions I had and what I needed to understand clearly before purchasing. They
