Garrett Goldfield is a Guest Speaker at Nielsen Norman Group with 20 years of practical experience. At Nielsen Norman Group, Goldfield has consulted for clients in a broad range of industries, including e-commerce, automotive, health care, financial, media, telecommunications, education, art and non-profits, as well as highly specialized B2B sites.
Complex content slows down users and distracts from task performance, thus degrading the user experience. Clear language facilitates comprehension. It's that simple.
People can only hold a small amount of information in their short-term memory, which fades fast. These facts impact most aspects of screen design and dictate many usability guidelines.
For each research or design method you employ, create a document that defines this method and can be used to educate other team members on UX activities.
To gain a holistic picture of your users, exchange data with the non-UX teams in your company who are collecting other forms of customer data, besides the user research you do yourself. You gain; they gain.
At the beginning of a new project, identify the level of UX effort needed, and the key deliverables you aim to produce. Identify known and missing knowledge about users and tasks to uncover gaps before they bite you.
Benchmark studies measure one or more KPIs (key performance indicators) of a user interface so that you can tell whether a redesign has measurably better (or worse) usability.
When the organization and your coworkers don't understand UX, we have to apply our own methods to communicate more clearly with the target audience for our work.
Field studies observe how people interact with interfaces in their own environment. Real-world contexts reveal behaviors for which you might not be aware.
UX professionals often receive poorly defined design requests. When saying no is not an option, a more productive way of addressing the request is to focus on the outcome goals and the Return On Investment (ROI) of proper UX effort.
