Human Computer Interaction Articles & Videos

  • The Two UX Gulfs: Evaluation and Execution

    With every interaction, users must overcome the twin challenges of understanding the current state of a system and figuring out how to change it. Designers can support them by being aware of these gulfs and bridging them with a transparent conceptual model.

  • User-Experience Quiz: 2017 UX Year in Review

    Test your UX knowledge by taking our quiz. All questions and answers are based on articles that we published last year.

  • A 100-Year View of User Experience

    The UX profession has grown substantially since 1950 everywhere in the world. Even so, the expected growth until 2050 will dwarf anything we’ve seen so far.

  • Typography for Glanceable Reading: Bigger Is Better

    Fonts to support glancing at individual words should be larger, in noncondensed widths, and uppercase over lowercase.

  • Voice First: The Future of Interaction?

    Devices which include screens, but employ voice as the primary input method point the way towards a more integrated and useful holistic user experience.

  • First Impressions Matter: How Designers Can Support Humans’ Automatic Cognitive Processing

    The first visceral reaction to a site’s design influences how users perceive relevance, credibility, and even usability.

  • Audio Signifiers for Voice Interaction

    Provide explicit, implicit, and nonverbal signifiers to help users understand their options in voice-interaction interfaces.

  • Wizards: Definition and Design Recommendations

    A common application-design pattern for inputting information, wizards work well for processes that are performed only occasionally.

  • User-Experience Quiz: 2016 UX Year in Review

    Test your UX knowledge by taking our quiz. All questions and answers are based on articles that we published last year.

  • Direct Manipulation: Definition

    Direct-manipulation UIs support interaction with visible objects of interest via physical, reversible, incremental actions that receive immediate feedback.

  • Computer-Assisted Embarrassment

    Computer systems shouldn't make us feel bad. But they often do. Contextual usability methods can help discover social defects in user experience.

  • Expandable Menus: Pull-Down, Square, or Pie?

    Selecting an option inside a menu depends on how far away that option is from the menu icon. Drop-down menus, megamenus, pie or radial menus, and marking menus arrange items in different patterns to optimize the reach time.

  • The Role of Enhancement in Web Design

    An enhancement is a user-interface feature that speeds up or enriches the interaction on some platforms for some users. Enhancements take advantage of special user or device capabilities and need to be backed up by more traditional ways of implementing the same interaction.

  • Voice Interaction UX: Brave New World...Same Old Story

    Although voice interaction is markedly different from graphical user interfaces, classic usability principles are still critical to the quality of the user experience.

  • User-Experience Quiz: 2015 UX Year in Review

    Test your usability knowledge by taking our quiz. All questions and answers are based on articles that we published last year.

  • Why Designers Think Users Are Lazy: 3 Human Behaviors

    Designs should align with common user behaviors like device inertia, momentum behavior, and selective attention rather than blaming users for perceived laziness.

  • Apple's products are getting harder to use because they ignore principles of design

    Today, the products are beautiful, but for many of us, confusing. The fonts are pleasant to the eye, but difficult to read. The principle of "discoverability" has been lost. The only way to know what to do in many situations is to have memorized the action.

  • The Roots of Minimalism in Web Design

    Many popular web-design trends originate in minimalism, a movement that aims to reduce information overload by presenting content in its simplest form.

  • Help People Create Passwords That They Can Actually Remember

    Human memory studies can inform design so they help people remember passwords. This makes customers happy, saves money and time, and increases security.

  • Don’t Prioritize Efficiency Over Expectations: The Case of Autosave

    Features meant to increase user efficiency by reducing steps can end up hurting users if they do not conform to existing mental models and expectations based on past experiences.