Katie Sherwin is a Senior User Experience Specialist with Nielsen Norman Group. She specializes in helping organizations utilize principles of user-centered design and strategic communication to achieve their goals.
Results pages that refresh too soon or shift the page position disrupt the filtering process. Design filters and facets to offer a smooth user experience.
The phrase ‘Learn More’ is increasingly used as a crutch for link labels. But the text has poor information scent and is bad for accessibility. With a little effort, transform this filler copy into descriptive labels that help users confidently predict what the next page will be.
Designers must aim to understand and accommodate different user goals. When accommodations aren’t feasible, choose designs that support the most common user scenarios. For example, subscribers to online TV streaming services have different viewing preferences, and designs need to take those into consideration.
Role-based IAs increase cognitive effort and user anxiety. Clear language and mutually exclusive categories reduce the chance of harming the user experience.
People who are blind or have low vision must rely on their memory and on a rich vocabulary of gestures to interact with touchscreen phones and tablets. Designers should strive to minimize the cognitive load for users of screen readers.
By making password requirements visible upfront, allowing users to unmask the password, and showing a strength meter, designers can improve the frustrating user experience of creating a password.
Presenting adaptive help in a small overlay can make it faster to find answers to simple questions, but the tradeoffs of obscuring the page and failing to predict user needs may not be worthwhile.
Restricting search to a specific area of a website can provide better results, faster. But users overlook, misunderstand, and forget about the search scope.
The experience of researching and purchasing a mobile plan online is marred by hard-to-access cost information, site-specific jargon, and disruptive pop-ups.
