case studies Articles & Videos

  • Test Complex Interactions Earlier with AI Prototyping

    AI tools make it feasible to build fully interactive prototypes of complex interfaces so you can test them with users earlier in the design process.

  • How to Decide When an AI Tool Is Worth Keeping

    Pressure to adopt AI isn't evidence that a tool helps. The PROVE framework tests one tool against one task and produces a provisional decision you can defend.

  • How to Get UX Experience Without a Job

    Gain experience to build your UX portfolio outside of traditional jobs through freelancing, volunteering, hackathons, and personal projects.

  • A Lesson on Top Tasks from Hurricane Beryl

    Companies that do not support their users’ top tasks in a crisis fail their users and their reason for existence.

  • Prioritizing User Needs: Vanguard Mobile App

    This well-known global-investment company serves a user population with diverse needs. Its design team turned to user research to prioritize effort during a major redesign project.

  • The User Experience of Unmanned Restaurants in China

    Our Beijing-based user research team conducted a field study in automated restaurants that serve diners with no staff. Current designs have some advantages, but the UI is too complicated for customized ordering.

  • Exploring the Boundaries of Unmanned Restaurant Services: Irreplaceable Human Services Are Still Needed

    Unmanned restaurant services are gaining varying degrees of adoption in China. Still, there are glitches in the whole self-service flow and areas where human services cannot be replaced.

  • Better UX Deliverables

    Communicating UX work and findings to the full team, stakeholders, and leadership requires engaging deliverables. Amanda Gulley shared her experience improving the design and usability of UX deliverables at a UX Conference participant panel.

  • Breaking out of the Content Silo

    Coming from a traditional content/writing background, Michelle Blake presents her case study of broadening her remit to a fuller range of user-experience issues and improving the design of her organization's website.

  • Design Thinking in Practice

    Teams who don't know much about UX, often ask you "so when will you give us the design?" during the early design-thinking stages. Areej Aljarba used design thinking itself to overcome this misconception. (Video from 'Back in the Real World' panel with past UX Conference participants.)

  • Applying UX Principles to the Visual Design of Graphical Artifacts: The Case of the Heuristics Posters

    We made the 10 heuristics’ posters easy to read and understand by iterating through multiple versions and improving each based on user-centered principles and methods.

  • Livestream Ecommerce: What We Can Learn from China

    Livestreams allow users to see products in detail and get their questions answered in real time. They can be integrated in ecommerce websites and on social-networking apps.

  • Vote By Mail: Mistakes Are Too Easy

    The design of vote-by-mail materials (made imperative by the COVID-19 pandemic) have UX issues that make the voting process unnecessarily difficult and error prone.

  • Making Cutting-Edge Technology Approachable: A Case Study of Facial-Recognition Payment in China

    First-time users were concerned after using facial-recognition payment. Better onboarding experiences can relieve concerns and form factual mental models.

  • Creating a UX Design Portfolio Case Study

    A 7-step process to creating a case study for your portfolio: how to describe your design, the UX process that led to this specific user interface, and the business impact of the design.

  • Case Study: Iterative Design and Prototype Testing of the NN/g Homepage

    The NN/g homepage redesign relied on rapid iterative prototyping, and usability testing, to balance multiple design objectives.

  • Beyond Usability: 3 User Experiences Reshaping Their Industries

    Rent the Runway, Uber, and Airbnb challenge the traditional experiences of their industries through deep design, not just screen-UI design.

  • How Iterative Testing Decreased Support Calls By 70% on Mozilla's Support Website

    User research with data mining and paper prototyping quickly led to measurable success for one of the busiest support websites in the world.

  • Intranet Information Architecture (IA) Trends

    Intranets are improving findability and discoverability by organizing content by task, using mega-menus, offering wayfinding cues, and providing shortcuts.