Now that people can easily find answers to their questions directly on results pages, content creators must rethink their role in providing information to their users.
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.
To measure learnability, determine your metric, gather your data, and plot the averages on a line curve. Analyze the learning curve by looking at its slope and its plateau.
Digital products are competing for users’ limited attention. The modern economy increasingly revolves around the human attention span and how products capture that attention.
Dropdowns, hierarchical menus, sliders, or scroll bars involve steering a pointer or a cursor through a tunnel; optimal design for these GUI elements should consider the Steering Law.
As people consider whether to use the new "creepy" technologies, they do a type of cost-benefit analysis weighing the loss of privacy against the benefits they will receive in return.
Vehicle controls should be easily accessible and require minimum attention from drivers, while driving-related information should be displayed clearly and understandably.
In a modal interface, the same user action can have different results depending on the state of the system. Poorly signaled modes can easily trigger user errors with disastrous consequences.
Many websites fail to provide the right information for research-based tasks, requiring unnecessary effort for users to piece together various information sources manually.
Users of Siri, Alexa, and Google Assistant conceptualize them in one of 3 ways: an interface, a personal assistant, or a brain. Frequent users are less likely to push the interaction limits of these AI systems than new users.
In a study of people interacting with systems using machine-learning algorithms for recommendations and personalization, users had weak mental models and difficulties making the UI do what they want.
Far from being ‘intelligent’, today’s chatbots guide users through simple linear flows, and our user research shows that they have a hard time whenever users deviate from such flows.
Designs that quickly convey relationships between the user input and the result often use natural mappings or have a high stimulus–response compatibility.
Frequent users of Siri, Alexa, and Google Assistant report attempting low-complexity tasks such as simple fact retrievals, weather forecast, navigation, playing music, setting timers.
Relevant information is “signal,” while irrelevant information is “noise”. A high signal–to–noise ratio is a key outcome for any UX professional’s work, in terms of both content and page design.
Communicating the current state allows users to feel in control of the system, take appropriate actions to reach their goal, and ultimately trust the brand.
Human working memory holds information relevant to the current task; a physical or virtual external memory can help in tasks with a high working-memory burden.