A common problem during user experience ideation is when design teams are stuck on a traditional way of thinking about aspects of the design. Here are some tips for breaking out of such functional fixedness.
With repeated practice, users develop imprecise memory of objects and content in a UI, but still need additional visual and textual signals to help them find a specific item.
Design elements that appear similar in some way — sharing the same color, shape, or size — are perceived as related, while elements that appear dissimilar are perceived as belonging to separate groups.
An engaging gameplay experience is good design. But there's a fine line between engagement and addiction, which would be bad UX, especially in the long term.
Too many offerings (e.g., products or services) on a website make it harder for users to make a decision due to analysis paralysis. Alternatively, too many options can also cause users to hastily make a decision and later regret their choice due to buyer's remorse.
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.
Users' answers to survey questions are often biased and not the literal truth. Examples include acquiescence bias, social desirability bias, and recency bias. Knowing about response biases will help you interpret survey data with more validity for any design decisions based on the findings.
The Halo Effect says that any one element in a user's experience with a company will rub off on their interpretation of other elements and their feelings about the company as a whole. Good design in one part of a website will make people like other parts better (and like the company better), but the opposite is also true.
To decide whether to visit a page, people take into account how much relevant information they are likely to find on that page relative to the effort involved in extracting that info.
Negative experiences have stronger emotional impact on humans than positive experiences do. Thus, in designing the user experience, we need extra emphasis on avoiding those lows.
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.
It's not just users who are subject to illogical thinking: designers and UX professionals can also make sub-optimal design decisions by falling prey to the same decision biases, such as framing effects when analyzing usability data.
Change blindness is the tendency for people to overlook things that change outside their focus of attention. In user interface design, this explains why screen changes that seem striking to the designer can be completely ignored by users.
Even though B2B and B2C ecommerce sites have different kinds of users, both types of sites can use similar strategies to simplify purchase flows and increase consumer trust.
Priming is a basic principle of psychology with big impact on user interface design: exposure to something makes a user more likely to think and react in related ways at later steps in the interaction.
Digital products are competing for users’ limited attention. The modern economy increasingly revolves around the human attention span and how products capture that attention.
