Understanding the cyclical nature of design trends allows us to build on the past and fulfill the evolving needs of users. 3 examples of returning trends are neumorphism, dark mode, and gradients.
Skeleton screens, progress bars, and spinners all indicate the system is loading content, but they serve different purposes and work best in different contexts.
Responsive web design adapts to various screen sizes while emphasizing developmental efficiency over device-specific designs. It's key to prioritize content based on different contexts of use across devices and create a cohesive experience for all users.
NN/g’s 2023 Intranet Design Annual winners used AI for chatbots, tool recommendations, career guides, virtual assistants, and personalized communications to boost productivity.
Infinite scrolling can create great user experiences, but it also has weaknesses. Consider 3 alternative design patterns that may work better for your product: A load-more button, integrated pagination within a long scroll, and traditional pages.
Infinite scrolling through long lists of homogeneous items can lower interaction costs, but is less suited to support specific tasks such as finding a particular item.
When users search for information, they don't always keep looking for the best solution. In our eyetracking studies 20% of the time, users make do with the first result and don't look any further.
User research with prospective university students, ranging from kids still in high school to Ph.D. level grad students, found that they really want to know about the professors they'll be learning from, so when visiting university websites, these users (and their parents) scrutinized the faculty pages.
The user experience field is plagued by vocabulary inflation: repeatedly replacing well-known terminology with new fancy words that cause miscommunication.
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.
If a website or company is big and famous, should you copy their design for your own site? Likely not, because good UX depends on context, and your situation could be quite different than a world-famous company's circumstances.
Age groups differ in how they use websites, the internet, and computers. Our findings from studying teenagers are contrasted with our other user research with children and adults: user experience designers should target their designs based on target audience behavior patterns.
The contrast between low-context and high-context cultures has substantial implications for web designs that target users in different countries. Examples from eyetracking research in China (a high-context culture) illustrate this point.
In testing, we often see users who don't scroll a web page even though there is much useful info below the fold. Often, the reason is "the illusion of completeness" which causes users to believe that they are seeing all there is.
4 guidelines for writing the link texts on websites to ensure users click the right options. Links should be Specific, Sincere, Substantial, and Succinct.
There's a footer at the bottom of every web page, but the design of this utilitarian page element is often overlooked, making the website perform below its potential. In our usability studies, users often turn to page footers for important information and tasks, making them an integral part of the overall experience of a site.
