Articles & Videos

  • Help Users Think Aloud

    Help users think aloud by explaining what it is and why it's useful, reinforcing the behavior, and prompting along the way.

  • Confounding Variables: How to Deal with Them (Part 2 of 2)

    Confounding variables can be the result of a variety of factors, but following best practices can help avoid most of them.

  • Design Risks: How to Assess, Mitigate, and Manage Them

    The risk-management process enables teams to assess risks during the design process in order to reduce harm to users and to the organization. Risk mitigation involves systematically reducing the likelihood or the impact of a risk.

  • How Screen-Reader Users Type on and Control Mobile Devices

    Users who are blind or have low vision prefer dictation over typing with a keyboard whenever possible. Screen readers on touchscreen devices are restricted to a well-defined set of gestures which makes interaction more challenging than on computers.

  • Problem Space and Solution Space Research

    Both problem-space and solution-space research are needed to design products that are useful and usable.

  • Product-Led Growth and UX

    Product-led growth is a try-before-you-buy business strategy. Successful product-led growth relies on strong product utility and usability.

  • The Hawthorne Effect or Observer Bias in User Research

    Individuals often modify their behavior if they know they are being observed. That phenomenon became known as the Hawthorne effect or the observer bias. We can mitigate this effect by building rapport, designing natural tasks, and spending more time with study participants.

  • Collaborating with Product Partners: 3 Tips

    Team up with product partners more effectively by making research accessible, framing the context and value of analytics, and establishing a regular communication cadence.

  • 6 Tips for Improving Language Switchers on Ecommerce Sites

    International purchasers are more comfortable shopping in their own language. Follow these tips to make the language switcher on your site more discoverable and usable.

  • How To: Content Inventory and Audit

    Content inventories and audits shift a team's mindset from content quantity to content quality. They reveal relationships between content to resolve problems and support new content creation.

  • 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.