Raluca Budiu is Senior Director, Data Strategy, at Nielsen Norman Group, where she uses her data-analysis expertise to drive strategic decisions. She also serves as editor for the articles published on NNgroup.com. Raluca has coauthored many NN/g reports, as well as the book Mobile Usability. She holds a Ph.D. from Carnegie Mellon University.
Form filling and other user input on mobile devices such as smartphones can be awkward and error prone, but by taking advantage of the strengths of the phone, designers can improve the usability of these tasks substantially.
Information foraging explains how users behave on the web and why they click certain links and not others. Information scent can be used to analyze how people assess a link and the page context surrounding the link to judge what's on the other end of the link.
Using a modal dialog to display an error message can cause usability problems on mobile devices. Error handling must respect human-memory constraints and remain visible as the user is fixing the problem.
On–off controls that switch between two different system states need to clearly communicate to users both the current state and the state the system will move to, should the user press that control.
Demanding that users create a new account before they are able to access a website or mobile app is only justified in rare cases. Usually, people go away, rather than scale a wall placed between them and your offerings.
Allow users to reserve delivery windows before they start shopping; clearly communicate delivery minimums and fees; allow users to specify substitutions for low-stock items as they shop.
In people with normal vision (or corrected-to-normal vision), visual performance tends to be better with light mode, whereas some people with cataract and related disorders may perform better with dark mode. On the flip side, long-term reading in light mode may be associated with myopia.
When deciding which links to click on the web, users choose those with the highest information scent — which is a mix of cues that they get from the link label, the context in which the link is shown, and their prior experiences.
