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.
Testing a small number of participants gives qualitative insights, which are great. But if 4 out of 5 test users do something, don't conclude that 80% of all users will do the same.
Do you need to mark fields as "required" in forms on your website or in apps? What if all fields are required? And what is the best way to show that a form field is required?
Users have a rudimentary understanding of cloud services and attempt to fit them into their existent, simpler mental models that they had formed for similar, more-traditional services.
To decide whether to visit a page, people take into account how much relevant information they are likely to find on that page relative to the effort involved in extracting that info.
Having to register for websites, services, or apps is already annoying enough for users. But complications compound when they are faced with hidden requirements for what constitutes an acceptable password.
Notifications, widgets, quick actions, and Siri shortcuts or Google Assistant routines are all ways to support mobile sessions shorter than 15 seconds, with minimal interaction to complete a user goal.
There are two ways to structure a UX research study when we're testing two (or more) designs: we can have each design tested by different people, or we can reuse the same users for all conditions. Each approach has some advantages and problems.
Simplicity depends on the capacity of the information channel and what's simple for one device, can be primitive or intricate for another, since screens are information channels with a limited capacity. When you're designing for multiple devices, don't go by common cliches like "simple is good."
