Techniques like summaries, bullet points, callouts, bolding, and helpful visuals improve comprehension and engagement with content exceeding 1,000 words.
Dark mode is popular, but not always a critical feature. Users behave similarly without it. They think about it at the system level, not the application level.
UX design must make all elements of the interaction understandable and explicit. Mystifying things to entice more clicks from users will only result in dissatisfied customers.
Among high-legibility fonts, a study found 35% difference in reading speeds between the best and the worst. People read 11% slower for every 20 years they age.
Communicating UX work and findings to the full team, stakeholders, and leadership requires engaging deliverables. Amanda Gulley shared her experience improving the design and usability of UX deliverables at a UX Conference participant panel.
Coming from a traditional content/writing background, Michelle Blake presents her case study of broadening her remit to a fuller range of user-experience issues and improving the design of her organization's website.
If the foreground color (the actual words) is too similar to the background color, legibility suffers, and users can't read your copy. Simple tweaks make websites much easier to read.
Policy pages often fail to follow basic usability guidelines: they are not readable, lack high-level summaries and inside-policy navigation, have poor formatting, and are not available in expected places.
Before you write any content for the web, you should clearly define who will read it, what the reader’s goals are, and what impact you want your content to have on the reader.
The number of older adults who use computers and the Internet grows every year. This user population does have special needs, driven by the human aging process, and modest design changes can vastly increase the business you get from seniors.
Eyetracking research shows that there are 4 main patterns that people use to scan textual information on webpages: F-pattern, spotted pattern, layer-cake pattern, and commitment pattern.
When headings and subheadings visually stand out on the page and are descriptive, users engage in an efficient scanning pattern that allows them to quickly find the information that they need.
Grids are a great framework to help designers quickly put together a clean, well-aligned interface, and help users to easily scan, read, and use those interfaces.
Parallax-scrolling effects add visual interest, but they often create usability issues, such as content that is slow to load or hard to read. Consider if the benefits are worth the cost.
In our usability study with domain experts, we discovered that even highly educated readers crave succinct information that is easy to scan, just like everyone else.
Newsletter recipients expect high-quality images, but excessive focus on graphic design can result in emails that are illegible, unusable, and can’t deliver on business goals.
