Articles & Videos

  • Acting on User Research

    User research offers a learning opportunity that can help you build an understanding of user behavior, but you must resolve discrepancies between research findings and your own beliefs.

  • User Education Is Not the Answer to Security Problems

    Internet scams cannot be thwarted by placing the burden on users to defend themselves at all times. Beleaguered users need protection, and the technology must change to provide this.

  • Newsletter Usability: Can a Professional Publisher Do Better?

    The Washington Post's email newsletter earns a high usability score. It's particularly good at setting users' expectations before they subscribe, though the unsubscribe interface has some problems.

  • Checkboxes vs. Radio Buttons

    User interface guidelines for when to use a checkbox control and when to use a radio button control. Twelve usability issues for checkboxes and radio buttons.

  • Bush vs. Kerry: Email Newsletters Rated

    Both candidates for president of the United States offer email newsletters with much good content to excite supporters, but miserable subscription interfaces and several other usability problems.

  • The Need for Web Design Standards

    Users expect 77% of the simpler Web design elements to behave in a certain way. Unfortunately, confusion reigns for many higher-level design issues.

  • 8 Steps to Prepare for the Holiday Shopping Season

    Reduce the bounce rate for organic landing pages, collect data to manage PPC for maximum ROI, and take 6 other steps to maximize your site's holiday sales potential before it's too late.

  • Mastery, Mystery, and Misery: The Ideologies of Web Design

    Simple, unobtrusive designs that support users are successful because they abide by the Web's nature -- and they make people feel good.

  • Informational Articles Must Ask For the Order

    Unless you have explicit links to product pages from article content, users who visit articles directly from search engines might never realize that you sell related products.

  • When Search Engines Become Answer Engines

    The website is becoming a less prominent locus of experience as people use search engines to bring up answers to their current questions. How can sites cope with masses of freeloaders?

  • 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.