Articles & Videos

  • International Usability Testing: Why You Need It

    User testing in different countries helps identify culturally specific usability issues. Testing correctly and at the right time will help you thrive in a new market.

  • Stakeholder Analysis for UX Projects

    UX professionals often work hard to convince stakeholders to support UX research and design efforts. Recognizing who your key stakeholders are and how they impact your work is the first step to building fruitful stakeholder relationships.

  • The Relationship Between Artificial Intelligence and User Experience

    Do AI products have good user experience? Only partly, and to get better, we need to focus AI more on human needs than on what's technically possible. But AI can also help UX professionals do their job better, which will improve usability more widely.

  • The Visual Principle of Contrast in UI Design

    When visual design elements appear clearly different (for example, have contrasting colors) users easily deduce that the contrasting item is different or special in some way. So if it actually is different, this enhances usability.

  • Design Systems 101

    A design system is a set of standards to manage design at scale by reducing redundancy while creating a shared language and visual consistency across pages and channels.

  • 10 Best Intranets of 2021: What Makes Them Great

    The 2021 Intranet Design Annual winning teams exhibited a capacity to swiftly pivot, as well as compassion and empathy for employees.

  • Usability Testing for Content

    Usability testing can yield valuable insights about your content. Make sure you test with the correct users, carefully craft the tasks, and ask the right follow-up questions.

  • Tips for Remote UX Design Collaboration

    With experience, UX teams have evolved techniques for better collaboration and design practices to involve and engage remote and distributed team members. With participants at the Virtual UX Conference.

  • Sticky Headers: 5 Ways to Make Them Better

    Persistent headers can be useful to users if they are unobtrusive, high-contrast, minimally animated, and fit user needs.

  • UXers and Product Managers Both Say Others Intrude on Their Work

    A survey of 372 UX and PM professionals shows that duplicative work is frequent and generates confusion and inefficiency.

  • 10 Usability Heuristics for User Interface Design

    Jakob Nielsen's 10 general principles for interaction design. They are called "heuristics" because they are broad rules of thumb for UX and not specific usability guidelines.

  • When to Use Which User-Experience Research Methods

    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.

  • Empathy Mapping: The First Step in Design Thinking

    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.

  • Service Blueprints: Definition

    Service blueprints visualize organizational processes in order to optimize how a business delivers a user experience.

  • Between-Subjects vs. Within-Subjects Study Design

    In user research, between-groups designs reduce learning effects; repeated-measures designs require fewer participants and minimize the random noise.

  • Usability 101: Introduction to Usability

    What is usability? How, when, and where to improve it? Why should you care? Overview answers basic questions + how to run fast user tests.

  • UX Research Cheat Sheet

    User research can be done at any point in the design cycle. This list of methods and activities can help you decide which to use when.

  • UX Mapping Methods Compared: A Cheat Sheet

    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.

  • Journey Mapping 101

    A journey map is a visualization of the process that a person goes through in order to accomplish a goal.

  • Why You Only Need to Test with 5 Users

    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.

  • When and How to Create Customer Journey Maps

    Journey maps combine two powerful instruments—storytelling and visualization—in order to help teams understand and address customer needs.

  • Top 10 Application-Design Mistakes

    Application usability is enhanced when the UI guides and supports users through the workflow.

  • Open-Ended vs. Closed-Ended Questions in User Research

    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.

  • Design Thinking 101

    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.

  • F-Shaped Pattern of Reading on the Web: Misunderstood, But Still Relevant (Even on Mobile)

    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: How, When, and Why to Conduct Them

    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.

  • Comparison Tables for Products, Services, and Features

    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.

  • Memory Recognition and Recall in User Interfaces

    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.

  • User-Experience Quiz: 2019 UX Year in Review

    Test your usability knowledge by taking our quiz. All questions and answers are based on articles that we published last year.

  • The Relationship Between Artificial Intelligence and User Experience

    Do AI products have good user experience? Only partly, and to get better, we need to focus AI more on human needs than on what's technically possible. But AI can also help UX professionals do their job better, which will improve usability more widely.

  • The Visual Principle of Contrast in UI Design

    When visual design elements appear clearly different (for example, have contrasting colors) users easily deduce that the contrasting item is different or special in some way. So if it actually is different, this enhances usability.

  • Usability Testing for Content

    Usability testing can yield valuable insights about your content. Make sure you test with the correct users, carefully craft the tasks, and ask the right follow-up questions.

  • Tips for Remote UX Design Collaboration

    With experience, UX teams have evolved techniques for better collaboration and design practices to involve and engage remote and distributed team members. With participants at the Virtual UX Conference.

  • Product Redesigns: Incremental or Overhaul

    Redesigning a user interface can be done in many smaller incremental releases, or as one big complete redo. Big change is risky, but necessary in 3 cases.

  • Workplace Application Usability

    Enterprise applications that support work often do so poorly and have bad user experience. The usability requirements and tradeoffs for workplace app design are different from consumer apps.

  • Net Promoter Score in User Experience

    Net Promoter Score (NPS) is a simple satisfaction metric that's collected in a single question. While easy to understand, it's insufficiently nuanced to help with detailed UX design decisions.

  • Starting a New UX Project

    At the beginning of a new project, identify the level of UX effort needed, and the key deliverables you aim to produce. Identify known and missing knowledge about users and tasks to uncover gaps before they bite you.

  • Can UX Help in Procurement of Enterprise Solutions?

    Will enterprise solutions ever get good usability? Jakob Nielsen is skeptical in the short term, but cautiously optimistic in the long term.

  • When is It OK to Be Inconsistent in User Interface Design?

    Consistent design enhances learnability and is usually best for usability. But if the problem you're solving is sufficiently different, then inconsistency may be better.