Articles & Videos

  • Overuse of Overlays: How to Avoid Misusing Lightboxes

    Poorly implemented overlays and lightboxes are not only frustrating for users, but can also be disastrous for conversion and task completion. Use the five W’s – Who, What, When, Where, and Why – to determine whether an overlay is truly the most appropriate design solution, and how you should implement it.

  • The Apple Watch: User-Experience Appraisal

    Smartwatch apps should rely on gestures more than on navigation elements, prioritize the essential, support handoff, and create tailored, standalone content.

  • Don’t Prioritize Efficiency Over Expectations: The Case of Autosave

    Features meant to increase user efficiency by reducing steps can end up hurting users if they do not conform to existing mental models and expectations based on past experiences.

  • Large Touchscreens: What's Different?

    Designing for larger-scale touchscreens requires particular attention to input, screen focus, and privacy.

  • Password Creation: 3 Ways To Make It Easier

    By making password requirements visible upfront, allowing users to unmask the password, and showing a strength meter, designers can improve the frustrating user experience of creating a password.

  • Mobile User Experience: Limitations and Strengths

    Mobile design must reflect smartphone constraints and strengths: small screen, short sessions, single window, touch interaction, GPS and other phone features.

  • No More Pogo Sticking: Protect Users from Wasted Clicks

    Misleading links and omitted information force users to bounce back and forth in a hub-and-spoke pattern between a routing page and subpages linked from it, increasing the interaction cost and decreasing engagement over time. Use web analytics tools to identify and monitor pogo-stick behavior on your site.

  • Content Migration Alone Is Not An Effective Content Strategy

    While fairly popular, “lift and shift” is not a viable content strategy. It is a folly fueled by fear, limited resources, inexperience, and politics. There are better ways to ensure high-quality intranet content, and two award-winning designers offer their insights, proving that a bright attitude makes all the difference.

  • Pilot Testing: Getting It Right (Before) the First Time

    Pilot testing (a session or two before the real test) helps fine-tune usability studies, leading to more reliable results.

  • Banish the Hamburger Menu, Adopt Pizza Menus

    Today we announce a vastly superior menu design that scales to both mobile devices and desktops and supports faster access to custom menu elements, thus overcoming two key deficiencies of current hamburger-menu designs.

  • 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.

  • Empathy Mapping: The First Step in Design Thinking

    Empathy maps help UX teams visualize user attitudes and behaviors, building a shared understanding of end users while highlighting gaps in existing user data.

  • Journey Mapping 101

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

  • How to Conduct a Heuristic Evaluation

    Step-by-step instructions to review your product to find potential usability and experience problems. Download a free heuristic evaluation template.

  • 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.

  • Service Blueprints: Definition

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

  • Design Thinking 101

    Design thinking is a user-centered process that helps teams understand needs, generate ideas, test solutions, and drive innovation.

  • Usability (User) Testing 101

    UX researchers use this popular observational methodology to uncover problems and opportunities in designs.

  • 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.

  • Usability 101: Introduction to Usability

    Usability makes designs easy, efficient, and satisfying to use. Improve it through early, repeated user testing with real users

  • User Journeys vs. User Flows

    User journeys and user flows both describe processes users go through in order to accomplish their goals, but they differ in scope, purpose, and format.

  • Affinity Diagramming for Collaboratively Sorting UX Findings and Design Ideas

    Use affinity diagramming to cluster and organize research findings or to sort design ideas in ideation workshops.

  • 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.

  • Using “How Might We” Questions to Ideate on the Right Problems

    Constructing how-might-we questions generates creative solutions while keeping teams focused on the right problems to solve.

  • Liquid Glass Is Cracked, and Usability Suffers in iOS 26

    iOS 26’s visual language obscures content instead of letting it take the spotlight. New (but not always better) design patterns replace established conventions.

  • User-Interface Elements: Glossary

    Use this glossary to quickly clarify definitions for key graphical user-interface elements and controls.

  • 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.

  • Card Sorting: Uncover Users' Mental Models for Better Information Architecture

    In a card-sorting study, users organize topics into groups. Use this research method to create an information architecture that suits your users' expectations.

  • Open-Ended vs. Closed Questions in User Research

    Open-ended questions result in deeper insights. Closed questions provide clarification and detail, but no unexpected insights.

  • The Definition of User Experience (UX)

    "User experience" encompasses all aspects of the end-user's interaction with the company, its services, and its products.