Articles & Videos

  • Are Your Personas Outdated? Know When It’s Right To Revise

    Up-to-date personas result in a better UX design process. Data from 156 companies provide a baseline to understand how often to revise personas. Knowing when and how frequently to make updates will help you craft personas that are both accurate and effective.

  • Mobile Websites: Mobile-Dedicated, Responsive, Adaptive, or Desktop Site?

    Different approaches to implementing mobile websites have each their advantages and disadvantages. All should follow the same mobile user-experience principles.

  • Usability Testing of Icons

    To ensure that people understand the meaning and purpose of icons, conduct multiple types of tests at various stages of the product-development cycle.

  • User Intent Affects Filter Design

    Results pages that refresh too soon or shift the page position disrupt the filtering process. Design filters and facets to offer a smooth user experience.

  • Voice Interaction UX: Brave New World...Same Old Story

    Although voice interaction is markedly different from graphical user interfaces, classic usability principles are still critical to the quality of the user experience.

  • Conducting Usability Testing with Real Users' Real Data

    Qualitative user studies benefit from using participants’ personal information, but asking for sensitive information requires preparation and consideration.

  • Priming and User Interfaces

    Exposure to a stimulus influences behavior in subsequent, possibly unrelated tasks. This is called priming; priming effects abound in usability and web design.

  • Cringeworthy Words to Cut from Online Copy

    The right words can make or break trust; they affect your tone of voice and how people perceive your site.

  • The Illusion of Completeness: What It Is and How to Avoid It

    Users can think they see the entire web page, although additional content exists off-screen. Designers must help users discover all relevant information.

  • 10 Best Intranets of 2016

    The winners of our 15th Intranet Design Annual impress us with their design prowess, content support, UX research, responsive design, modern visuals, and SharePoint pushed to its limits.

  • 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.