Articles & Videos

  • 10 Best Intranets of 2023: What Makes Them Great

    Winners of the 2023 Intranet Design Annual span 5 countries and 6 industries. Average team sizes were larger this year compared to those of years past, while collaboration with external agencies played a significant role in executing successful intranet redesigns.

  • Virtual Queues: 13 Best Practices for Managing the Wait

    Well-designed virtual queues help manage the wait to free up users to do other things.

  • Why Prioritize Personas?

    Prioritizing your personas helps you make strategic design tradeoffs to ensure designs bring the most value to the business.

  • User Experience vs. Customer Experience: What’s The Difference?

    Customer experience (CX) is a term commonly used to define UX over long periods of time.

  • Pilot Testing in UX Research

    Pilot testing involves conducting one or two test sessions to evaluate the design of a usability study. It checks for any issues before the actual testing phase, leading to more reliable results.

  • AI-Powered Tools for UX Research in 2023: Issues and Limitations

    Be skeptical of the marketing claims being made by AI tools designed for UX researchers. Many of these systems are not able to do everything they claim.

  • Quantitative UX: Glossary

    Use this glossary to quickly clarify key terms and concepts related to quantitative user studies.

  • Long-Tail Data in UX

    The long tail refers to the data points at the trailing end of a power-law distribution. A long-tail strategy involves efficiently exploiting these low-impact data points for an aggregated benefit.

  • Choosing Chart Types

    Pick a chart type that will help you make your point. In the vast majority of cases, use bar charts, line charts, or scatterplots.

  • 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.

  • 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.