Articles & Videos

  • UX Documentation in Agile

    Documenting UX processes and design decisions are organizational memory, so even Agile projects that emphasize minimal documentation benefit from two cases of lightweight UX documentation.

  • Service Design: Study Guide

    Unsure where to start? Use this collection of links to our articles and videos to learn about service design and blueprinting.

  • Traditional and Hybrid Category Pages

    Use ecommerce category pages for complex products or subcategory navigation. For other situations, consider a hybrid category page approach.

  • Prioritize UX Findings by Severity

    When reporting design issues after usability studies or heuristic evaluation, assign severity ratings based on a small set of criteria.

  • Probing in User Interviews

    Follow-up questions in user interviews gather more detailed information from participants than they provided in their initial answers to our planned questions. This video provides examples of two main forms of probing questions.

  • The State of UX Maturity: Data from Our Self-Assessment Quiz

    Half of 5,371 UX professionals were in stage 3 (emergent maturity) out of the 6-stage UX maturity model, and very few scored at the highest end. The lowest-maturity organizations are likely not captured.

  • Why Map in Discovery: 3 Mapping Methods

    In the discovery phase of a UX project, mapping provides a high-level view of the problem space and makes opportunities obvious. Maps ensure buy-in and alignment around discovery findings.

  • Content Management Models

    There are 3 ways to structure digital content production in an organization: centralized (a single team owns creation, management, and publication) or decentralized (domain experts manage their own content), as well as hybrids between these two.

  • The Design Tool Does Not Make the Designer

    There are many design tools, and new ones come out all the time. Finding a single tool to do the job is not likely, so focus instead on understanding core design principles and adapting your process to best fit a particular task.

  • Autonomy, Relatedness, and Competence in UX Design

    Addressing these 3 fundamental psychological needs in our products increases user motivation and well-being. Users will be more engaged and more likely to use our 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.