WP Engine Named the 4 Best Place to Work in Texas

A practical tip: links to a directory should include the final slash in the URL when embedded in webpages. The slash should be left out when writing the URL for human consumption. For example, the link to the list of Alertbox columns should be written as http://www.useit.com/alertbox in a (printed) magazine article but coded as

Infographics are a hybrid medium, however, and there is room for creative license here. Elements of visual interest such as illustrations, photos, and icons are acceptable and even expected in the medium. Using a visual theme may ground your piece in a metaphor that makes abstract concepts easy to understand. Elements that do not distract from the

Prevent users from selecting illogical dates. Obviously, what’s reasonable will depend from case to case: for example, dates older than 130 years will be unlikely for birthdates, but quite acceptable for document dates. Users should be prevented from entering a return date that takes place before the departure date or that is in the past. Make

As you heard many times before, blockchain technology is going to change the whole IoT industry. What you have not heard is how this is going to happen. Here is the answer to three questions and how blockchain is a platform for IoT solutions. What is a blockchain? Which blockchain is a better choice for IoT solutions? How to design IoT based

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

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

For example, maybe the intranet at an acquired organization was highly collaborative, with social features and lively usage, but the intranet of the parent company has no social features. Making employees switch to the parent intranet takes away the possibility to collaborate, share, learn, and have a voice of their own at the company. Think hard

UX design often requires collaboration to generate ideas. In-person ideation workshops are much easier than the remote equivalent. When ideation participants are in the same room together, they have a shared context — it’s easy to see what they’re sketching on a sheet of paper and what sticky notes they’re posting on the walls. Also, when

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

When clicked, the tooltip launches a modal with more information. This particular explanation works well because it uses a metaphor (“Your computer’s brain”) to explain a complicated concept. It also outlines what this particular attribute means to the user: “determines the complexity of the software you can run.” However, there’s

The distinction here is an important one, and goes well beyond the narrow view of qualitative as “open ended” as in an open-ended survey question. Rather, studies that are qualitative in nature generate data about behaviors or attitudes based on observing them directly, whereas in quantitative studies, the data about the behavior or attitudes

This method uses a large, easel-size sticky note or whiteboard as the parking lot. As non-agenda items come up, they are added on smaller sticky notes, either by the facilitator or by the person who generated that item. As the meeting progresses, items can be clustered (using, for example, affinity diagramming), based on their similarities. This

On the whole, countries like China, the Philippines, Singapore and Malaysia face increasing competition from Eastern European dedicated service providers. Regardless of India still being preferred for its inexpensive price rates and a huge labor force, European IT outsourcing destinations such as Ukraine can easily compete in terms of service

Companies which perform cross-border b2b payments or digital lending money must understand that in some time people will start transferring or lending digital money like Bitcoin on a regular basis. Though now the ICO market is a Wild West and faces many regulation and security issues, it is predicted to get regulated and will get incorporated

Due to the lack of Python expertise in house, many international businesses tap into offshore tech talent pools. When it comes to hiring Python developers in Ukraine, a lot of companies face the challenge of finding a vendor they can trust. For any business that wants to outsource Python development, it is important to establish clear criteria for

If you feel that you need more detail or you have unique needs, adapt the map by including additional quadrants (like Goals the example below) or by increasing specificity to existing quadrants. Depending on the purpose of your empathy map, polish and digitize the output accordingly. Be sure to include the user, any outstanding questions, the date

It’s easy to overlook sample size and instead look for a story that provides some reasonable explanation for why events happened. But a few instances should not be presumed to represent meaningful behavior patterns, unless there is specific contextual information to the contrary. (For example, if you conducted a usability test and 4 out of 5

If you’ve ever used a task-management tool, you probably know that there are a lot of options to choose from — Asana, Jira, Trello, or Wrike, to name a few. These products have a lot in common. They share features like the ability to assign tasks to team members, create boards, or integrate with other products. However, the differences between

In addition to the security-in-depth strategy on their platform, GE Ventures is always on the lookout for startups that are advancing the industrial cybersecurity art. According to them, there are some very talented ones out there. Of course, IIoT is not an easy market to break into for startups. Industrial networks are different than enterprise

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

Fortunately, the world as we know it is not going to end for now, but the Izrael notes that KRACK is a proof-of-concept. As patches are now being released, the hope is that it will not be exploited in the wild, but it’s likely that criminals will try. He suggests that for protection,  businesses must ensure that all their corporate and

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

Anyone who pays attention to the world of search engine optimization knows that maximizing your company’s search results on Google and other search engines is not something you can do with a quick pin here and a hasty status update there. It’s a full-time job. But if you’re working to build a startup, you’ve already got a

Currently, we consider ourselves lucky if we don’t get stuck in traffic while driving to the office. The struggle of even finding a parking spot for your car is real. The smart city industry is projected to reach the $400 billion mark by 2020. The urban population is increasing at an alarming rate. According to one survey, 65% of the world’s

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

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

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

Another example of priming in usability testing is when the moderator inadvertently makes users behave in a certain way. Sometimes simply being overly friendly can make participants feel that they must live up to that friendship and must reciprocate either by being too positive about the design or by trying too hard to complete the tasks. In other

While satisfying these user scenarios may not be the absolutely highest-priority goal for a website, designing a good footer is still a worthy endeavor, because footers have a particularly wonderful usability characteristic: they will never get in the way of users who get their needs satisfied higher up on the page. Thus, except for overly bloated

The second situation deserves a discussion. Most people had clear expectations about what the assistants could do, and often said that they would not use an assistant for complex information needs. They felt that a query with one clear answer had a good chance of being answered correctly by the assistant, and two participants explicitly mentioned

Additionally, two unique awards are also handed out. For this hackathon, they were Customer Inspired, which recognized a project that has real potential to impact our customers in a positive way and was decided on by WP Engine’s Chief Customer Officer, Tina Dobie; and Warp Speed, a Star Trek-themed award, which focused on a project that may

In addition to the work we’re doing with new Genesis themes, we’re also creating ways to make content blocks more efficient, performant, and portable across child themes as part of the core Genesis framework. Part of this effort includes looking at how to leverage the block options that Gutenberg offers (suggesting theme colors, fonts, etc. in

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