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 Stevie Awards are a set of hundreds of business awards given annually by the American Business Awards organization. They were created in 2002 to recognize the accomplishments and contributions of companies and business people worldwide. Gold, Silver, and Bronze Stevie Awards are given to companies who exhibit excellence in the following
Texas’ economy is the second largest in the United States, a measure of success that’s only expected to continue; Texas ranks first for its growth prospects due to impressive growth forecasts and competitive employment rates across the state. To tap into this statewide success, however, Texas-based companies still need to provide a fulfilling
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
Layered Interaction Analysis of Direct Manipulation (Jakob Nielsen)
The principle of direct mappings between dialogue levels seems to provide a better way to conceptualize directness in interactive systems. As shown in Figure 4, the layered protocol model involves several transformations between different units of information and we would want those transformations to be as direct mappings as possible to make it
Instructional Overlays and Coach Marks for Mobile Apps
The Makr iPad app uses a series of tips each time the user reaches a new section of the app. Unfortunately, these tips are overly wordy, and present a multi-step workflow before the user has been able to do anything. Rather than learning-by-doing, users must memorize all of the steps before being allowed to interact with the UI. With no indication
Design Thinking 101
This is the most important part of design thinking, but it is the one most often forgotten. As Don Norman preaches, “we need more design doing.” Design thinking does not free you from the actual design doing. It’s not magic. Milton Glaser’s words resonate: “There’s no such thing as a creative type. As if creativity is a verb, a very
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 to damage portions of our internal infrastructure
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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 that Hathaway was involved in developing. The
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 to damage portions of our internal infrastructure
DesignOps 101
Couple this reality with the fact that designers are wrangling more complex contexts than ever before: As many organizations embrace embedded product- or project-specific team models, there is a growing lack of connection among designers who are spread across those teams. The products and experiences we design continue to become more elaborate
Mobile Microsessions
Android widgets: Widgets can have different shapes and display different types of content. The Gmail widget is a collection widget, that shows several emails and the CNN widget is an information widget. Note that the user can resize the widgets, as noticed by the two sizes of the CNN widget in the two screenshots. (However, even when the CNN
Beyond Usability: 3 User Experiences Reshaping Their Industries
At first, you might think that such an innovation in the field of reverse logistics should not be discussed in a UX article, but many pieces of the user experience are improved by optimizing this backend operation. A traditional UI-only solution to the problem of high demand would be to clearly indicate in the interface what items are in stock and
The State of Ecommerce Search
These improvements are encouraging, and are likely due to a variety of factors. Some of the influencing factors responsible for these improvements are not directly related to search — advances in devices, displays, hardware, and connection speeds are helpful in improving online experiences overall. However, some positive trends in ecommerce
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When and How to Create Customer Journey Maps
Journey maps should always be created to support a known business goal. Maps that do not align to a business goal will not result in applicable insight. The goal could be an external issue, such as learning about a specific persona’s purchasing behaviors, or an internal issue, such as addressing lack of ownership over certain parts of the
Text Scanning Patterns: Eyetracking Evidence
The layer-cake scanning pattern consists of fixations placed mostly on the page’s headings and subheadings. There are few other fixations on the text in between — that is, until users locate the heading they are interested in; at that point, they usually read the accompanying body text below. In an eyetracking heatmap or gaze plot, the
How to choose financial software developers in Europe: 15 trusted companies
This custom software development company specializes in online trading, electronic data exchange, and cloud‐based technologies. Around 30% of the company’s projects are related to the financial sector. The vendor has developed solutions for advanced monitoring, wealth and asset management, trading signals, and pattern recognition. Moreover, it
15+ fundamental rules of fintech app development. Part One
Fintechs currently face the challenges of growing and scaling. And to overcome those hurdles, they, first of all, need a reliable and robust platform built in compliance with the best industry practices. We’ve collected top 20 rules of efficient fintech app development and grouped them according to 4 underlying principles. In Part 1, we are
How to Tackle the Shortage of Machine Learning Engineers? Think Nearshore
Basic implementations of ML algorithms are widely available through different libraries, packages, and APIs (e.g., scikit-learn, Theano, Spark MLlib, H2O, TensorFlow). However, to apply them effectively, a machine learning engineer should choose a suitable model (decision tree, nearest neighbor, neural net, support vector machine, etc.) and an
Which UX Deliverables Are Most Commonly Created and Shared?
Figure 6. This diagram shows the five most effective types of deliverables for each of the three audience types. Intersections of different circles represent deliverables considered appropriate for multiple audiences. Only one type of deliverable was considered equally effective with all three audiences (interactive prototypes). Developers had the
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, that the partial visibility of the content on
Wireflows: A UX Deliverable for Workflows and Apps
A simplified high-fidelity desktop wireflow for a configurator webapp demonstrates that not all parts of the screen design must be represented in each step. Due to the larger size of desktop screen designs, showing the full page for each step is not necessary if the majority of the information visible does not change. Using a tactical approach to
The 3 Biggest Threats Healthcare Data Security is Facing Right Now
The supply chain is no longer a stranger to cyber threats. As the healthcare industry heavily relies on cloud-based systems, third-party service providers, and vendors in the supply chain. The organizations also realize the risk of supply chain attacks. Hackers can compromise third party goods and services to steal private data, install malicious
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The future of tokenization and blockchain is not just ICOs
Voting and governance through tokenization has been done through Distributed Autonomous Organizations (DAOs). While in an ideal world the voting rights would work very similar to standard governance in companies, but there are again no regulations. This may prove to be an issue in specific scenarios. Yet, many VCs point to tokenization as the
Data Privacy Attitudes and Connected Cars: A Deeper Look
Demand for apps and services is still red hot even as consumers’ data privacy concerns have gotten warmer. This is borne out by our findings with respect to connected car data: Approximately 80% of those connected car owners and new car buyers who expressed interest in new services based on connected car data (including real-time alerts of
StudioPress Theme Spotlight: Altitude Pro . | A 60-Second Trailer of the 60-Day Report on Cybersecurity
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 to damage portions of our internal infrastructure
How do IoT Sensors Work?
lok
However, every IoT system is not the same and is not necessarily apt for all applications. As a matter of fact, they are akin to us humans. Every individual is great at something. You cannot expect an actor to fly an aircraft and a pilot to act in a film. Similarly, you cannot expect a single IoT system (and device) to do everything. Hence
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 to damage portions of our internal infrastructure
5 Real Life Blockchain Implementations Outside of Cryptocurrency
koshkina
What do Pied Piper and blockchain tools have in common? Both are always “coming soon.” By now most of us are familiar with blockchain, the technology underpinning cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin and Ethereum. Outside of cryptocurrency, blockchain has many purported use cases in scenarios that require an immutable ledger. Rhetoric has elevated
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A 60-Second Trailer of the 60-Day Report on Cybersecurity
Evgen777
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
JS-Kit Score: Turn Your Site into a Localized Digg
egor
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
Why Frames Suck (Most of the Time)
The main issue in using frames is to ensure that URLs keep working. To do so, all hypertext links must have a TARGET="_top" attribute in their anchor tag (e.g., <A HREF=foo.html TARGET="_top"> ). Adding the _top makes the browser clear out all the frames and replace the entire window with a new frameset. The destination frameset may well
UX Guidelines for Ecommerce Homepages, Category Pages, and Product Listing Pages
The most successful mergers of category and listing pages were those that highlighted available subcategories separately from other filters, most often above the product listings. This practice increased the discoverability of the subcategories and encouraged users to navigate to a more specific group of products to reduce the number of items
We recently ran a usability study in the U.K. where one user was attempting the following task: "Does Siemens have any special deals on washing machines?" Without much trouble, the user arrived at this homepage for Siemens Appliances in the U.K.: User task: "Does Siemens have any special deals on washing machines?" What do you think? Could the
WP Engine All Hands Spring 2019: US
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
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Recapping the State of the Word 2018
Navigation menus help add organization to your website. Transitioning menus to have Gutenberg functionality will allow users to edit menus inline. Mullenweg said that experimentation would be required to master this but an idea would be a restricted number of blocks that could be arranged into a customized menu that are previewable on the
WP Engine Sales and Customer Service Teams Recognized at The Stevie Awards
The Stevie Awards are a set of hundreds of business awards given annually by the American Business Awards organization. They were created in 2002 to recognize the accomplishments and contributions of companies and business people worldwide. Gold, Silver, and Bronze Stevie Awards are given to companies who exhibit excellence in the following