10 Years After Bitcoin Began are We Underestimating Crypto

Some designers fear that people won’t see a default selection option. Or an organization’s attorneys or federal agencies mandate that users actively click and accept a choice. In some of these situations designs offer radios with no default selection. The user may be unable to submit a form, for example, until he has selected a radio button

User interface standards have become the object of increasingly intense activities in recent years [Abernethy 1988; Holdaway and Bevan 1989], including work in the International Standards Organization (ISO) [Brooke et al. 1990] and the European Community [Stewart 1990]. Work is also going on in national standards organizations [Dzida 1989] and in

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 customers are limited to doing business with you on the

Our users are complex humans. It is natural (and extremely beneficial) to see juxtaposition between quadrants. You will also encounter inconsistencies — for example, seemingly positive actions but negative quotes or emotions coming from the same user.  This is when empathy maps become treasure maps that can uncover nuggets of understanding

Why are we willing to sleep in strangers’ beds, or conversely, let strangers into our homes? We do so because Airbnb has established a trusted, secure, and easy to use customer experience. Similar to Rent the Runway, Airbnb is a player in the growing “sharing” economy. The peer-to-peer online marketplace for accommodations enables users to

Not everybody knows why they’re useful and how to reference them. It is up to you to educate your stakeholders, illustrate their effectiveness, and solidify their use on projects.  Lead by example: don’t let the personas fizzle out, continue to bring them into meetings to set the stage for discussion. After all, having personas and believing

Asynchronous ideation avoids the tricky scheduling issues that synchronous sessions suffer from. People can share their ideas whenever they have time. That means each teammate can work around their own scheduling conflicts and deadlines, while still being able to contribute. Asynchronous ideation can be particularly useful if your company has only

We no longer recommend supporting complex-search operators, because few users know or use them these days. And they shouldn’t have to know them — the search engine should be smart enough to return good results without forcing people to use unnatural language. Perhaps the one exception here is using quotation marks to force the search engine to

Sometimes users leave a page because they want to finish their task at another time — for example, if the process is too time-consuming and they’re not able to complete it in that moment. Any time users leave a process, there’s a risk that they won’t come back to finish it later, even if they intend to do so.  Help them continue their

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

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 StudioPress themes are built using the Genesis

At a gala dinner in San Francisco last night, WP Engine CEO Heather Brunner was named as one of the 2019 Great Place to Work For All Leadership Award honorees. The award celebrates top innovators from companies on Fortune’s annual list of the 100 Best Companies to Work For, 100 Best Workplaces for Women, 100 Best Workplaces for Diversity, and 150

When banks and financial incumbents build a platform, they already have a customer base and know what loads they should expect. Whereas, all fintechs are born as tech startups and start small. Some of them die off. However, those ones that managed to survive, start growing, maturing, and scaling up. At least, they attempt to.That’s when software

The contracts are validated by computers that are called miners. We pay these miners gas. This is the unit by which the degree of difficulty of computational efforts is calculated, and which defines the cost of running a contract. Different contract’s operations might require a different amount of gas which then is transferred in ether. This may

Machine learning combines the principles of computer science and statistics. It focuses on solving real-world problems with neural networks designed to mimic our decision-making. Machine learning engineers create statistical models used for making predictions and identifying patterns in data. Its main objective is to build algorithms that can

However, keep in mind that when navigation is hidden under a menu, even though that menu as a whole may be salient enough, users will have to make a decision to open it and check whether the individual navigation options are relevant. While the navigation menu is becoming standard and many mobile users are familiar with it, many people still

Storyboards are often used to describe a fragment of the user journey (and several of them may be needed to capture the different branches in the journey). They are an efficient way to establish context and common ground for all the team members working on a specific problem. In contrast to journey maps, which are often a big-picture, broad-use

Contextual swipe is popular in app development, but when used incorrectly it can cause confusion. Take caution when using it as a primary method of providing actions for content. Although more and more users have learned to associate swipe with delete, some apps still do not use it, while others use inconsistently or in nonstandard ways. Moreover

FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski is set to unveil a $9 million pilot program aimed at making sure students have access to mobile broadband not just when they’re in the classroom, but when they leave for home. At an event in New York City today, Genachowski will announce a list of 20 schools and libraries that the FCC plans to connect to the

There are many methods hackers use to test and identify vulnerabilities that let them get to the desired data. The first is a penetration test, which stimulates a cyber attack to see what might happen. A network penetration test focuses on potential vulnerabilities in firewalls, routers, and any other point in a network. Web application

GE Ventures, the venture capital subsidiary of General Electric, is one of the organizations that recognizes the large opportunities (and even greater responsibility) to lower costs and eliminate unplanned downtime for their customers. They have been working closely with industrial companies for decades. The company has also built longstanding

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 that Hathaway was involved in developing. The

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 with JS-Kit’s Navigator offering, which pulls

Amazon has presented a few weird ideas for delivery and its latest, a skyscraper beehive filled with drones, is no exception. The patent application is another look at how Amazon plans to integrate drones and improve ‘last mile’ delivery. Most of Amazon’s warehouses are located on the outskirts of cities and it would take too long for a drone

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 to damage portions of our internal infrastructure

For every startup business, the need to give customers the best customer service experience is the key priority. Customers are kings, and they determine business growth. Your company growth will largely depend on how you treat them. Here is how self-service technology can boost startup growth. Some startups are already making it big with

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 that Hathaway was involved in developing. The

When you  embed content that is hosted by another site or service, aim to control what, if anything, the site feeds to users at the end of your video content. Make sure that users are not presented with inappropriate videos or with a list of your competitors’ videos at the end of your video.  Some sites and services have options for embedding

Netcraft's latest Web survey found 101,435,253 websites in November 2006. Not all of these sites are live: some are "parked" domains, while others are abandoned weblogs that haven't been updated in ages. But even if only half the sites are maintained, there are still more than 100 M sites that people pay to keep running. Surpassing 100 M is a big

When pages feature both vertical and horizontal scrolling, users have to move their viewport in two dimensions, which makes it hard to cover the entire space. For people with poor spatial visualization skills, it's especially challenging to plan movements along two axes across an invisible plane. (Typically, users score lower than designers on

Imagine this: You’ve spent months getting your new eCommerce shop up and running. You set up WooCommerce, installed a bunch of plugins, found a perfect theme, dotted all your i’s and crossed all your t’s on tax compliance, logistics, and customer service. You roll out your beautiful new shop, and your marketing plan is working as expected

Email marketing is still one of the most effective ways to get readers to take action, investigate a product, or change a behavior. The success of your email marketing, however, comes from your email list. If you need to generate more and better email leads, you need web design that specifically supports that goal. A smart and intuitive user

In addition to all of the above, the Genesis Framework will be further upgraded for Gutenberg with the release of version 2.8 in Q1 2019. 2.8 will include built-in features that allow you to easily and efficiently style and control Gutenberg blocks as well as auto-load demo content, which can arm Genesis themes with content blocks and make them