Nielsen -
Beyond Blue Links: Making Clickable Elements Recognizable
March 8, 2015
Whether you adopt a flat-design style or not, interactive components must retain sufficient cues to suggest clickability. Signaling clickability with cues such as borders, color, size, consistency, placement, and adherence to web standards can give interactive components the proper look.
Multitasking on Mobile Devices
March 1, 2015
Mobile-phone users have difficulty combining information from multiple apps. Support for multitasking is inherently limited by the mobile-screen size.
Emotional Design Fail: I'm Divorcing My Nest Thermostat
February 22, 2015
In an emotional-design fail, the Nest thermostat let me down: behaviorally, reflectively, and finally viscerally.
Personas Make Users Memorable for Product Team Members
February 16, 2015
When based on user research, personas support user-centered design throughout a project’s lifecycle by making characteristics of key user segments more salient.
Radical Redesign or Incremental Change?
February 8, 2015
Before you throw out the old and bring in the new, make sure you have solid evidence that doing so is necessary to achieve user-centered goals.
The Fold Manifesto: Why the Page Fold Still Matters
February 1, 2015
What appears at the top of the page vs. what’s hidden will always influence the user experience—regardless of screen size.
Tablet UX Research From the Pioneer Days
January 25, 2015
The PenPoint tablet was ahead of its time and too expensive and heavy, but had gestural syntax and personal-productivity benefits that we can still learn from.
An FAQ’s User Experience Deconstructed
January 25, 2015
Good FAQ pages use legible typography, chunking, appropriate spacing, easy navigation to individual questions, and reflect the current questions of the site users.
Scoped Search: Dangerous, but Sometimes Useful
January 18, 2015
Restricting search to a specific area of a website can provide better results, faster. But users overlook, misunderstand, and forget about the search scope.
Timing Guidelines for Exposing Hidden Content
January 11, 2015
Events triggered via hover or click require distinct timing to avoid accidental activations and ensure that the user feels in control of the interface.
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Usability 101: Introduction to Usability
January 4, 2012
What is usability? How, when, and where to improve it? Why should you care? Overview answers basic questions + how to run fast user tests.
Top 10 Mistakes in Web Design
January 1, 2011
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.
How Users Read on the Web
October 1, 1997
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.
F-Shaped Pattern For Reading Web Content
April 17, 2006
Eyetracking visualizations show that users often read Web pages in an F-shaped pattern: two horizontal stripes followed by a vertical stripe.
Mega Menus Work Well for Site Navigation
March 23, 2009
A mega menu (a big, 2-dimensional drop-down panel) groups navigation options to eliminate scrolling and use typography, icons, and tooltips to explain users' choices.
Computer Screens Getting Bigger
May 7, 2012
Reasonably big monitors have finally become the most common class of desktop computer screen, dethroning the 1024x768 resolution that was long the target for web design.
10 Usability Heuristics for User Interface Design
January 1, 1995
Jakob Nielsen's 10 general principles for interaction design. They are called "heuristics" because they are broad rules of thumb and not specific usability guidelines.
Top 10 Application-Design Mistakes
February 19, 2008
Application usability is enhanced when users know how to operate the UI and it guides them through the workflow. Violating common guidelines prevents both.
Mobile Usability Update
September 26, 2011
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.
Scrolling and Attention
March 22, 2010
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.
Nielsen Norman Group
Evidence-Based User Experience Research, Training, and Consulting