Nielsen Norman GroupEvidence-Based User Experience Research, Training, and Consulting
Jakob Nielsen 's articles about interface usability and website design are available below. Subscribe to the Alertbox newsletter .
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Read Bruce "Tog" Tognazzini 's articles on interaction design at AskTog.com .
Users hunt for facts online, so factually rich content will attract readers and keep their attention.
Users aged 65 and older are 43% slower at using websites than users aged 21–55. This is an improvement over previous studies, but designs must change to better accommodate aging users.
Repetitive actions on websites often work well, but when users try something new, they frequently fail.
Long listings might need pagination by default, but if users customize the display to View All list items, respect that preference.
Usability findings derived from a broad base of diverse studies have higher credibility than those based on many users with a single stimulus.
Feline users require special considerations, including larger tap target zones for paws, continual animation, and audible vocalization.
Most users are unable to solve even halfway complicated problems with search. Better to redirect their efforts into more supportive user interfaces when possible.
Employee collaboration and open communication are now business drivers in many companies, but social enterprise features are often poorly integrated with the rest of the intranet.
Quality assurance impacts the user experience: when things don’t work, users question their understanding and develop superstitions and inefficient workarounds.
Teens are (over)confident in their web abilities, but they perform worse than adults. Lower reading levels, impatience, and undeveloped research skills reduce teens’ task success and require simple, relatable sites.
What is usability? How, when, and where to improve it? Why should you care? Overview answers basic questions + how to run fast user tests.
The ten most egregious offenses against users. Web design disasters and HTML horrors are legion, though many usability atrocities are less common than they used to be.
Users don't read Web pages, they scan. Highlighting and concise writing improved measured usability 47-58%. Marketese imposed a cognitive burden on users and was disliked.
Eyetracking visualizations show that users often read Web pages in an F-shaped pattern: two horizontal stripes followed by a vertical stripe.
Big, 2-dimensional drop-down panels group navigation options to eliminate scrolling and use typography, icons, and tooltips to explain users' choices.
Reasonably big monitors have finally become the most common class of desktop computer screen, dethroning the 1024×768 resolution that was long the target for web design.
The 10 most general principles for interaction design. They are called "heuristics" because they are more in the nature of rules of thumb than specific usability guidelines.
Application usability is enhanced when users know how to operate the UI and it guides them through the workflow. Violating common guidelines prevents both.
The user experience of mobile websites and apps has improved since our last research, but still has far to go. A dedicated mobile site is a must, and apps get even higher usability scores.
Web users spend 80% of their time looking at information above the page fold. Although users do scroll, they allocate only 20% of their attention below the fold.