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 maps help UX teams visualize user attitudes and behaviors, building a shared understanding of end users while highlighting gaps in existing user data.
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.
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.
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.
iOS 26’s visual language obscures content instead of letting it take the spotlight. New (but not always better) design patterns replace established conventions.
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.
In a card-sorting study, users organize topics into groups. Use this research method to create an information architecture that suits your users' expectations.
The design thinking project life-cycle has 6 well-defined stages. Mapping these stages onto a typical Agile development project shows when designers should conduct which UX activities.
No. 10 of the top 10 UX design heuristics is provide user assistance at appropriate times in the interaction, making sure that such information is easy to search, focused on the user's task, lists concrete steps to be carried out, and not too large.
No. 9 of the top 10 UX design heuristics is to write error messages that help users understand the problem and to provide information that constructively teaches users how to recover from the error.
For 30 years, the recommendations have remained the same for improving usability in a UX design project on a tight budget: simplified user testing with 5 users, early test of paper prototypes, and heuristic evaluation.
No. 8 of the top 10 UX design heuristics is to remove unnecessary elements from the user interface and to maximize the signal-to-noise ratio of the design.
No. 5 of the top 10 UX design heuristics is to prevent interaction problems from occurring in the first place: either eliminate error-prone conditions or check for them and present users with a confirmation dialog.
Change blindness is the tendency for people to overlook things that change outside their focus of attention. In user interface design, this explains why screen changes that seem striking to the designer can be completely ignored by users.
