Articles & Videos

  • Confounding Variables in Quantitative Studies

    Confounding variables interfere with quantitative studies, leading to inaccurate results. Avoid introducing such variables by randomizing your study’s conditions and keeping your research questions focused.

  • Information Foraging with Generative AI: A Study of 3 Chatbots

    In a study of ChatGPT, Bard, and Bing Chat, users found these tools helpful and trustworthy. They expected these AI chatbots to aggregate information in a concise and specific manner, while fully considering contextual cues.

  • Accordions on Mobile

    Accordions provide an overview of the whole page and mitigate the problem of long mobile pages, allowing users to directly access the content of interest.

  • Designer Gatherings

    Designer gatherings enable designers to share knowledge and helpful resources across an organization. Set up recurring designer gatherings to empower your design team.

  • Engagement Metrics in UX

    Engagement is an abstract, complex concept used to understand how much people interact with our products. Choosing the right engagement metrics goes beyond time spent.

  • Accessibility and Inclusivity: Study Guide

    Unsure where to start? Use this collection of links to our articles and videos to learn more about accessible and inclusive design.

  • User Interviews 101

    User interviews help you learn who your users are, what their experiences are like, and what they need, value, and desire.

  • Gain-Loss Framing

    Gain-loss framing in UX storytelling tailors arguments by emphasizing advantages or disadvantages of viewpoints.

  • Primacy Effect: Put Important Things First

    The primacy effect influences how user perceive and remember your designs. Learn how to work with it to create more effective experiences.

  • Rewriting Digital Content for Brevity

    Writers always get the advice to be concise, but doing so is easier said than done. These tips and tricks help reduce your word count.

  • 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.