Many new UX practitioners often put pressure on themselves to be perfect and feel disappointed when things don’t go their way. There’s a lot more to UX than being correct.
Universal icons are rare. To help overcome the ambiguity that almost all icons face, a text label must be present alongside an icon to clarify its meaning.
Coercive tactics like Manipulinks and Please-Don’t-Go try to shame customers into doing what the company wants. Sacrificing long-term customer loyalty for short-term gains is shortsighted.
UX constitutes many different specialties such as researcher, interaction designer, visual designer, copywriter, and information architect. Forcing one person to do it all is a prescription for mediocrity.
With every interaction, users must overcome the twin challenges of understanding the current state of a system and figuring out how to change it. Designers can support them by being aware of these gulfs and bridging them with a transparent conceptual model.
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.
