Page Laubheimeris a former NN/G employee who worked on research, teaching, leadership, and design thought leadership. His expertise focused on web applications, AI, and projects in complex domains. His many research findings and recommendations were also informed by his background in library and information science, and his work often involved information architecture, navigation design, taxonomy construction, and ontology management.
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.
Vague call-to-action verbs, unnecessary parallel language, and conversational tone of voice used in links and navigation labels are confusing. Use labels with strong information scent instead.
Navigation, taxonomies, and the full IA structure are different ways of modeling a product's structure. We review the differences and similarities between these three different IA models.
Tutorials interrupt users, don’t necessarily improve task performance, and are quickly forgotten. Contextual help signals can avoid these pitfalls but require unintrusive ways to activate.
The HEART framework is great for B2C products but is lacking for workplace applications where users cannot choose the product. CASTLE offers a complementary assessment framework for UX that focuses on the needs of internal product teams.
Dashboards that monitor vast masses of data should guide users' attention to critical values but not by flashing endless alerts without prioritization.
While analytics cannot be the only source of data about user journeys, path reports can provide insights about potential issues, typical navigation routes, and the content that users interact with right before key actions.
