As people consider whether to use the new "creepy" technologies, they do a type of cost-benefit analysis weighing the loss of privacy against the benefits they will receive in return.
Gamification brings the visual design and the mechanics of games to other products. As we examine our ethical responsibilities as UX professionals, social media deserves special consideration. Gamification in social media can make people feel as though their social lives are being scored.
Grids are a great framework to help designers quickly put together a clean, well-aligned interface, and help users to easily scan, read, and use those interfaces.
Users expect About Us sections to be clear, authentic, and transparent. They compare corporate content with third-party reviews to form a holistic opinion of a company before initiating business or applying for jobs.
A key question in information architecture (IA) is to decide the number of items in navigation menus (including global menus and local menus). 4 main factors determine the answer, but it's not 7, despite a common myth.
The most desired user actions (macroconversions) may be too rare to generate enough analytics data for fast design iteration, so we can also analyze smaller user actions (microconversions) that are more frequent and are connected to bigger goals.
Vehicle controls should be easily accessible and require minimum attention from drivers, while driving-related information should be displayed clearly and understandably.
When conducting research for customer-journey maps, use qualitative methods that allow direct interaction with or observation of users, such as interviews, field studies, and diary studies.
Trade-off scales are a tool that UX practitioners can use to visually prioritize user needs and project dimensions to focus resources on the most important ones.
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.
