Articles

Hoa Loranger

Hoa Loranger is a former NN/G employee and Distinguished Experience Specialist. She worked in user experience for more than 20 years. At NN/G she conducted research worldwide, and presented keynotes and training on best practices for interface design. Hoa has consulted for companies such as Microsoft, HP, Allstate, Samsung, Verizon, and Disney. She authored publications, including the book, Prioritizing Web Usability.

Articles and Videos

  • Beyond Blue Links: Making Clickable Elements Recognizable

    Whether you adopt a flat-design style or not, interactive components must retain sufficient cues to suggest clickability. Signaling clickability with cues such as borders, color, size, consistency, placement, and adherence to web standards can give interactive components the proper look.

  • Radical Redesign or Incremental Change?

    Before you throw out the old and bring in the new, make sure you have solid evidence that doing so is necessary to achieve user-centered goals.

  • Redesigning Your Website? Don’t Ditch Your Old Design So Soon

    Testing your site’s existing design along with a few competitor websites provides valuable insight for new designs. Competitive studies help you avoid developing unusable new features.

  • Related Content Boosts Pageviews, When Done Right

    Links that follow up on the user’s current interest encourage site exploration and reduce bounce rates. With the proper invitation, people will stay longer on your site.

  • UX Without User Research Is Not UX

    UX teams are responsible for creating desirable experiences for users. Yet many organizations fail to include users in the development process. Without customer input, organizations risk creating interfaces that fail.

  • Doing UX in an Agile World: Case Study Findings

    Agile teams are more proficient in executing the development process, but the compressed timescale forces some to abandon user research and degrade the resulting user experience.

  • Accordions Are Not Always the Answer for Complex Content on Desktops

    Longer pages can benefit users. Accordions shorten pages and reduce scrolling, but they increase the interaction cost by requiring people to decide on topic headings.

  • Break Grammar Rules on Websites for Clarity

    Web writing differs from print writing to emphasize scannability. Some grammar rules are worth breaking if they improve fast comprehension.

  • Infinite Scrolling Is Not for Every Website

    Endless scrolling saves people from having to attend to the mechanics of pagination in browsing tasks, but is not a good choice for websites that support goal-oriented finding tasks.

  • 5 Tips for Avoiding Confusing Category Names

    Category and link labels should tell users what will happen when they click on them.