Human Computer Interaction Articles & Videos

  • Dark Mode vs. Light Mode: Which Is Better?

    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.

  • Information Scent: How Users Decide Where to Go Next

    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.

  • User-Experience Quiz: 2019 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.

  • The 3 Response Time Limits in Interaction Design

    User interfaces must be fast, or users will give up. (In the case of websites, they'll leave if pages download too slowly.) The exact maximum response times vary by usage circumstances, and should be either 0.1, 1.0, or 10 seconds.

  • How to Measure Learnability of a User Interface

    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.

  • Steering Law for Cursor and Mouse Movements in a GUI Tunnel

    In a graphical user interface, having the user move a cursor within a narrow path (e.g., in a hierarchical menu or a slider) follows a strict law for how easy or difficult it is to do, depending on the specifics of the GUI.

  • The Attention Economy

    Digital products are competing for users’ limited attention. The modern economy increasingly revolves around the human attention span and how products capture that attention.

  • Accot-Zhai Steering Law: Implications for UI Design

    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.

  • Creepiness–Convenience Tradeoff

    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.

  • Tesla’s Touchscreen UI: A Case Study of Car-Dashboard User Interface

    Vehicle controls should be easily accessible and require minimum attention from drivers, while driving-related information should be displayed clearly and understandably.

  • Modes in User Interfaces: When They Help and When They Hurt Users

    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.

  • Unbridged Knowledge Gaps Hurt UX

    Many websites fail to provide the right information for research-based tasks, requiring unnecessary effort for users to piece together various information sources manually.

  • Mental Models for Intelligent Assistants

    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.

  • Fitts's Law

    Fitts's Law describes how long it takes a user to hit a target in a graphical user interface (GUI) or other design, as a function of size and distance. Understanding this law helps us design better buttons, forms, lists, and other interactive elements.

  • User-Experience Quiz: 2018 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.

  • Will People Be More Tech Savvy in 10 Years? (Jakob Nielsen)

    People naturally avoid studying computers. Don't expect people's technical skills to improve in the future.

  • Can Users Understand Recommendations and Personalization Driven by Machine Learning?

    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.

  • The User Experience of Chatbots

    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.

  • Observe, Test, Iterate, and Learn (Don Norman)

    There isn’t a next time in product development. You must always study to keep up with the product cycle.

  • Natural Mappings and Stimulus-Response Compatibility in User Interface Design

    Designs that quickly convey relationships between the user input and the result often use natural mappings or have a high stimulus–response compatibility.