We asked over 200 hiring managers who hire for UX jobs what they look for in candidates' portfolios. The expectations are different for people looking to be hired as designers vs. as researchers, and also different for junior vs. senior positions.
The practice of Research Operations (ResearchOps) focuses on processes and measures that support researchers in planning, conducting, and applying quality research at scale.
Various contexts of complexity should be considered by UX designers and researchers designing complex applications, including complexities of integration, information, intention, environment, and institution.
Research spanning 20 years proves PDFs are problematic for online reading. Yet they’re still prevalent and users continue to get lost in them. They’re unpleasant to read and navigate and remain unfit for digital-content display.
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.
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.
Visualizing user attitudes and behaviors in an empathy map helps UX teams align on a deep understanding of end users. The mapping process also reveals any holes in existing user data.
Empathy maps, customer journey maps, experience maps, and service blueprints depict different processes and have different goals, yet they all build common ground within an organization.
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.
Open-ended questions prompt people to answer with sentences, lists, and stories, giving deeper and new insights. Closed-ended questions limit the answers but give tighter stats.
What is design thinking and why should you care? History and background plus a quick overview and visualization of 6 phases of the design thinking process. Approaching problem solving with a hands-on, user-centric mindset leads to innovation, and innovation can lead to differentiation and a competitive advantage.
Eyetracking research shows that people scan webpages and phone screens in various patterns, one of them being the shape of the letter F. Eleven years after discovering this pattern, we revisit what it means today.
User interviews have become a popular technique for getting user feedback, mainly because they are fast and easy. Use them to learn about users’ perceptions of your design, not about its usability.
Use this versatile GUI tool to support users when they need to make a decision that involves considering multiple attributes of a small number of items.
Showing users things they can recognize improves usability over needing to recall items from scratch because the extra context helps users retrieve information from memory.
We asked over 200 hiring managers who hire for UX jobs what they look for in candidates' portfolios. The expectations are different for people looking to be hired as designers vs. as researchers, and also different for junior vs. senior positions.
In remote usability studies, it's hard to identify test participants who should not be in the study because they don't fit the profile or don't attempt the task seriously. This is even harder in unmoderated studies, but it can (and should) be done.
Two of the most fundamental usability metrics are learnability (the user's ability to use a new design they have not seen before) and efficiency (the speed with which people do tasks after they have learned the interface).
We studied the most important activities users perform on the internet, repeating an old classic study. Users' most critical behaviors have shifted substantially over 22 years, due to more information available online and the constant presence of mobile devices.
At the virtual UX Conference, Jakob Nielsen was asked "What's the most interesting UX topic at the moment?" Answer: better support for remote lifestyles.
A simple method for visually identifying strong vs. weak themes in qualitative data from user research: by placing individual observations in a spreadsheet and color-coding them.
Can we make healthcare enjoyable for patients? Or at least less bad than now? Yes, at least as far as medical devices go, because they can be designed with more emphasis on user experience, and thus become easier and more pleasant to use.
The practice of Research Operations (ResearchOps) focuses on processes and measures that support researchers in planning, conducting, and applying quality research at scale.
Various contexts of complexity should be considered by UX designers and researchers designing complex applications, including complexities of integration, information, intention, environment, and institution.
Research spanning 20 years proves PDFs are problematic for online reading. Yet they’re still prevalent and users continue to get lost in them. They’re unpleasant to read and navigate and remain unfit for digital-content display.
Product design principles (or, in short, design principles) are value statements that frame design decisions and support consistency in decision making across teams working on the same product or service.
Policy pages often fail to follow basic usability guidelines: they are not readable, lack high-level summaries and inside-policy navigation, have poor formatting, and are not available in expected places.
Exact costs will vary, but an unmoderated 5-participant study may be 20–40% cheaper than a moderated study, and may save around 20 hours of researcher time.
