Nielsen Preventing User Errors: Avoiding Conscious Mistakes
September 7, 2015
Thoughtful design is transparent and easy to understand, provides a preview, and helps users to easily correct their errors.
Thoughtful design is transparent and easy to understand, provides a preview, and helps users to easily correct their errors.
Role-based IAs increase cognitive effort and user anxiety. Clear language and mutually exclusive categories reduce the chance of harming the user experience.
Low-fidelity user testing of several iterations of Mozilla’s Support website quickly showed which user-interface elements worked best for Firefox users.
People who are blind or have low vision must rely on their memory and on a rich vocabulary of gestures to interact with touchscreen phones and tablets. Designers should strive to minimize the cognitive load for users of screen readers.
Users are often distracted from the task at hand, so prevent unconscious errors by offering suggestions, utilizing constraints, and being flexible.
Only a few mobile-design skills and design recommendations translate well to designing for very large touchscreens, as found in kiosks and other nonmobile use cases. Users’ field of vision, arm motion, affordance, and privacy are a few of the different considerations for such screens with up to 380 times the area of a smartphone.
Mobile sites using a hamburger or three-line menu need to support navigation activities throughout the site, in case users don't locate or use the main navigation.
Today, the products are beautiful, but for many of us, confusing. The fonts are pleasant to the eye, but difficult to read. The principle of "discoverability" has been lost. The only way to know what to do in many situations is to have memorized the action.
Attractive headlines and titles are critical in making the right first impression. Concise titles that sound authentic and relevant get noticed.
User research with data mining and paper prototyping quickly led to measurable success for one of the busiest support websites in the world.