Articles & Videos

  • 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.

  • Error-Message Guidelines

    Design effective error messages by ensuring they are highly visible, provide constructive communication, and respect user effort.

  • Conducting Mobile Accessibility Research with Screen-Reader Users

    Use word of mouth to recruit research participants who rely on screen readers. Conduct the study in person to help participants feel comfortable, and plan to record the screen-reader output.

  • Running Workshops with Both Remote and In-Person Participants

    Hybrid workshops are the ultimate test of facilitation skills: you must bridge the gap between in-person and remote participants, not widen the divide. There are three types of hybrid workshops and each presents its own set of logistical nightmares.

  • Confounding Variables 101 (Part 1 of 2)

    Confounding variables can affect the validity of data collected during research studies. It's important for researchers to know what they are and how to identify them.

  • Onboarding New UX Hires: 3 Tips

    Improve your new UX hires' onboarding experience by auditing the current experience, making thoughtful interactions, and creating a 30/60/90-day plan.

  • Best Practices for Building and Maintaining Your Own Research-Participant Database

    Developing your own research-participant database allows you to be efficient in recruiting study participants, enabling you to run more studies with faster turnaround.

  • Documenting a UX-Benchmarking Study

    All the details of your benchmark study need to be stored in your research repository for further reference. They include the study methodology, the tasks, the screener, the definitions of the collected metrics, as well as the raw data obtained from the study.

  • Downsides of the Net Promoter Score

    The Net Promoter Score (NPS) can be gamed, and its definition loses information and precision by treating fairly dissimilar responses in the same way. It should be used together with other UX metrics rather than in isolation.

  • 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.