Consistent design enhances learnability and is usually best for usability. But if the problem you're solving is sufficiently different, then inconsistency may be better.
Animations can make user interfaces both easier and nicer to use, but the timing has to be right, as we demonstrate in this video. Many other details also contribute to the quality of animation in the user experience.
User interfaces that simulate a presence in a physical space allow people to tour an environment without travelling there, but were mostly considered secondary by our research participants, partly because it’s currently slow and confusing to navigate virtual tours.
On–off controls that switch between two different system states need to clearly communicate to users both the current state and the state the system will move to, should the user press that control.
Demanding that users create a new account before they are able to access a website or mobile app is only justified in rare cases. Usually, people go away, rather than scale a wall placed between them and your offerings.
Virtual tours are an occasionally useful secondary tool for checking on specific details, but most users find them to be high effort, slow, and of limited value.
Two of the most fundamental usability metrics are learnability (the user's ability to use a new design they have not seen before) and efficiency (the speed with which people do tasks after they have learned the interface).
Listboxes and dropdowns are compact UI controls that allow users to select options. Listboxes expose options right away and support multi-selection while dropdowns require a click to see options and support only single-selection.
Customer Experience (CX) and User Experience (UX) are two common terms that mostly mean the same thing but have different connotations. Whatever your preferred term, it's important to consider design at 3 levels of experience.
Many issues in the user-experience field don’t have a simple answer. Rather there’s a tension between two good answers that are often polar opposites. Both extremes can be useful perspectives, and both have their advocates when people debate UX. How do we resolve these differences? This was Jakob Nielsen's keynote at the UX Conference in Las Vegas.
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.
A treemap is a complex, area-based data visualization for hierarchical data that can be hard to interpret precisely. In many cases, simpler visualizations such as bar charts are preferable.
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.
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.
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."
A split button is a dual-function menu button that offers a default action as well as the possibility of choosing a different action by selecting from a set of alternatives.
