Nielsen Ideation for Everyday Design Challenges
January 15, 2017
Improve your UI design solutions by considering many ideas before settling on any one of them. A solid ideation methodology broadens your idea-generation capacity.
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UX Stories Communicate Designs
January 15, 2017
Help internal audiences empathize with users and buy into your design goals with well-crafted stories that build insight and focus on users and their needs.
Planning Effective UX Workshop Agendas
January 8, 2017
Goals, questions, and processes are the 3 building blocks for creating UX-workshop agendas. A 6-step approach integrates them into an agenda.
10 Best Intranets of 2017
January 7, 2017
The winners of our 16th Intranet Design Annual came from diverse industries and relied on a combination of internal resources and external intranet help.
User-Experience Quiz: 2016 UX Year in Review
January 1, 2017
Test your UX knowledge by taking our quiz. All questions and answers are based on articles that we published last year.
27 Tips and Tricks for Conducting Successful User Research in the Field
January 1, 2017
Leave your office, already, and go where the users are. There are some common pitfalls, but they can be avoided if you learn from our experience.
UX Prototypes: Low Fidelity vs. High Fidelity
December 18, 2016
No matter which prototyping tools you use, the same tips apply to preparing a user interface prototype for the most effective user research.
Why Zen Mode Isn’t the Answer to Everything
December 18, 2016
Interfaces that temporarily hide the UI elements to emphasize content often increase the interaction cost, cognitive load, and the number of attention switches.
Reading Content on Mobile Devices
December 11, 2016
Readers can understand short, simple text content on mobile devices just as well as on computers, but they slow down when reading difficult text on mobile.
Decision Frames: How Cognitive Biases Affect UX Practitioners
December 11, 2016
Designers are vulnerable to the same cognitive biases as users. The context in which you present a problem can bias your design choices.
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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.
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.
10 Best Intranets of 2016
January 10, 2016
The winners of our 15th Intranet Design Annual impress us with their design prowess, content support, UX research, responsive design, modern visuals, and SharePoint pushed to its limits.
When to Use Which User-Experience Research Methods
October 12, 2014
Modern day UX research methods answer a wide range of questions. To know when to use which method, each of 20 methods is mapped across 3 dimensions and over time within a typical product-development process.
Response Times: The 3 Important Limits
January 1, 1993
How users react to delays in a user interface, whether website or application. The 3 main response time limits are determined by human perceptual abilities.
Why You Only Need to Test with 5 Users
March 19, 2000
Elaborate usability tests are a waste of resources. The best results come from testing no more than 5 users and running as many small tests as you can afford.
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.