If you can add more and more features and several different ways of doing a task, should you do so? No, more UI isn't more usability. Usually, less is more, so focus on users' key tasks and design simple interactions for each task.
The road to usability is paved with temptations to complicate the design with extra features and options, but resisting featuritis is the best prescription for a good user experience.
Understanding and sharing the needs and motivations of users will lead to better design decisions. Observational research should be nonjudgmental while keeping an open mind and reducing bias.
Contextual inquiry is a UX research method where you shadow people as they do their job (or leisure tasks), allowing you to ask questions in context. This video provides advice on overcoming the main challenges with this method.
Good UX design requires understanding the context and patterns of human behavior, especially in new products or features that solve real needs. The 5 steps to rapid corporate ethnography lead you to these discoveries.
Low-code platforms and other end-user programming or simplified implementation don't remove the need for task analysis and other deeper UX work and thus don't guarantee great usability. But they can free up budget for better UX work.
Problems arise when people get older, but that just means opportunities for better design to support older users. The very best designs will help older users, but also be adapted by everybody else.
Can we make healthcare enjoyable for patients? Or at least less bad than now? Yes, at least as far as medical devices go, because they can be designed with more emphasis on user experience, and thus become easier and more pleasant to use.
The relationship between accessibility and usability and the best ways to convince companies to take both seriously were some of the audience questions answered by Jakob Nielsen at the Virtual UX Conference.
To solve big-scale design problems, Don Norman recommends engaging with the community that has these problems and leveraging existing creativity and experience.
Human-centered design has 4 principles: understand the problem, the people, and the system, and do iterative design. But what if you don't have time to do all 4 steps?
Discoveries are a powerful part of the UX design process, but unfortunately, many teams are not doing true discovery. Here are 5 main ways to go wrong.
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.
We asked a group of UX professionals what they think will happen to the field over the next 5 years. Will design get better? Worse? (Nobody thought this.) Or something completely new?
Before you draw a single pixel, define what user need you're trying to solve with the (next-step) user-experience design. UX should be grounded in real user needs.
No. 3 of the top 10 UX design heuristics is to allow users freedom to be in control of the interaction, even if they make mistakes and will need a clearly marked way out of trouble.
