Web Usability Articles & Videos

  • Videos as Instructional Content: User Behaviors and UX Guidelines

    Instructional video content is helpful as supplementary information, though not all users will watch it. Videos should be easily discoverable, consistent in style across the site, and with thumbnails that accurately represent the type of content they provide.

  • The Risks of Imitating Designs (Even from Successful Companies)

    Even great companies make mistakes. Don’t risk your UX by assuming it’s safe to follow a design pattern just because it’s used by a successful company.

  • User-Experience Quiz: 2019 UX Year in Review

    Test your usability knowledge by taking our quiz. All questions and answers are based on articles that we published last year.

  • Mental Models for Cloud-Storage Systems

    Users have a rudimentary understanding of cloud services and attempt to fit them into their existent, simpler mental models that they had formed for similar, more-traditional services.

  • 10 Ways to Use Exit-Intent Popups to Improve UX

    Exit-intent popups can provide a good customer experience and offer benefits to users who are about to leave a website.

  • Usability for Older Adults: Challenges and Changes

    Users ages 65 and older face unique challenges when using websites and apps. Digital literacy among this demographic is rising, but designs need to accommodate older users.

  • Cancel vs Close: Design to Distinguish the Difference

    Distinguishing between these two actions is critical to avoiding losing users’ work. Save changes before closing a view, use text labels rather than an X icon, and provide a confirmation dialog before destructive actions.

  • Popups: 10 Problematic Trends and Alternatives

    Whether modal or not, most overlays appear at the wrong time, interrupt users during critical tasks, use poor language, and contribute to user disorientation.

  • Store Finders: Why People Still Need Locator Links

    In addition to a site-wide store-locator link, location-finder links in key areas anticipate users’ needs and make it easy to find a physical location within the context of their task.

  • Marking Required Fields in Forms

    Using an asterisk to mark required fields is an easy way to improve the usability of your forms. Only marking optional fields makes it difficult for people to fill out the form.

  • Teenager’s UX: Designing for Teens

    Teens are (over)confident in their web abilities, but they perform worse than adults. Lower reading levels, impatience, and undeveloped research skills reduce teens’ task success and require simple, relatable sites.

  • Footers 101: Design Patterns and When to Use Each

    Footers can be found at the bottom of almost every web page, and often take many forms, depending on the type of content on a website. Regardless of the form they take, their presence is critical (and highly underrated).

  • The User Experience of Customer-Service Chat: 20 Guidelines

    Chat is hard to find on many websites; it is often inefficiently designed and supplies too superficial information.

  • User-Experience Quiz: 2018 UX Year in Review

    Test your UX knowledge by taking our quiz. All questions and answers are based on articles that we published last year.

  • Store Finders and Locators

    Finding addresses and location information on company websites has gotten dramatically easier, but users increasingly turn to search engines or native map apps first for this task.

  • UX Guidelines for Ecommerce Homepages, Category Pages, and Product Listing Pages

    Streamline users’ path to products by providing clear, differentiating product information at all levels — from the homepage to product listing pages.

  • Customer-Service Information on Websites: The Hub-and-Spoke Model

    Websites structure and deliver customer-service information in many different ways. We recommend a model for standardized delivery of this content online.

  • Intelligent Assistants Have Poor Usability: A User Study of Alexa, Google Assistant, and Siri

    Both voice-only and screen-based intelligent assistants work well only for very limited, simple queries that have fairly simple, short answers.

  • Visibility of System Status (Usability Heuristic #1)

    Communicating the current state allows users to feel in control of the system, take appropriate actions to reach their goal, and ultimately trust the brand.

  • Working Memory and External Memory

    Human working memory holds information relevant to the current task; a physical or virtual external memory can help in tasks with a high working-memory burden.