Web Usability Articles & Videos

  • No More Pogo Sticking: Protect Users from Wasted Clicks

    Misleading links and omitted information force users to bounce back and forth in a hub-and-spoke pattern between a routing page and subpages linked from it, increasing the interaction cost and decreasing engagement over time. Use web analytics tools to identify and monitor pogo-stick behavior on your site.

  • Pop-ups and Adaptive Help Get a Refresh

    Presenting adaptive help in a small overlay can make it faster to find answers to simple questions, but the tradeoffs of obscuring the page and failing to predict user needs may not be worthwhile.

  • Beyond Blue Links: Making Clickable Elements Recognizable

    Whether you adopt a flat-design style or not, interactive components must retain sufficient cues to suggest clickability. Signaling clickability with cues such as borders, color, size, consistency, placement, and adherence to web standards can give interactive components the proper look.

  • Radical Redesign or Incremental Change?

    Before you throw out the old and bring in the new, make sure you have solid evidence that doing so is necessary to achieve user-centered goals.

  • The Fold Manifesto: Why the Page Fold Still Matters

    What appears at the top of the page vs. what’s hidden will always influence the user experience — regardless of screen size.

  • Scoped Search: Dangerous, but Sometimes Useful

    Restricting search to a specific area of a website can provide better results, faster. But users overlook, misunderstand, and forget about the search scope.

  • Timing Guidelines for Exposing Hidden Content

    Events triggered via hover or click require distinct timing to avoid accidental activations and ensure that the user feels in control of the interface.

  • Video Usability

    Video content is helpful only if users have control over it, understand what’s contained within it, and have an alternate way to access it.

  • Shopping Online for an iPhone Plan Is Painful

    The experience of researching and purchasing a mobile plan online is marred by hard-to-access cost information, site-specific jargon, and disruptive pop-ups.

  • Progress Indicators Make a Slow System Less Insufferable

    Wait animations, such as percent-done bars and spinners, inform users of the current working state and make the process more tolerable to the user by reducing uncertainty. Users experience higher satisfaction with a site and are willing to wait longer when the site uses a dynamic progress indicator.

  • Image-Focused Design: Is Bigger Better?

    Large images are visually appealing, but they can harm the overall user experience if they aren't appropriately prioritized.

  • Maximize the Content-to-Chrome Ratio, Not the Amount of Content on Screen

    On a large screen, hiding the chrome significantly affects discoverability and interaction cost, with virtually no improvement to the content-to-chrome ratio.

  • Breaking Web Design Conventions = Breaking the User Experience

    Bucknell University caused a stir with its unconventional responsive redesign, but at a high cost to usability, as shown in tests with students and parents.

  • Direct Access vs. Sequential Access: Definition

    In interface design favor direct access to the user’s preferred item instead of forcing users to go through your content in a serial order.

  • Placeholders in Form Fields Are Harmful

    Labels or sample text inside a form field makes it difficult for people to remember what information belongs in that field once they start data entry.

  • Responsive Web Design (RWD) and User Experience

    Responsive design teams create a single site to support many devices, but need to consider content, design and performance across devices to ensure usability.

  • Beware Horizontal Scrolling and Mimicking Swipe on Desktop

    Even as more sites mimic swiping gestures and incorporate horizontal scrolling in desktop designs, users remain reluctant to move sideways through content.

  • Scaling User Interfaces: An Information-Processing Approach to Multi-Device Design

    Designing for all screen sizes must consider the human–device communication capacity, which depends on users’ memory, device portability, and screen size.

  • Login Walls Stop Users in Their Tracks

    Demanding that users register or log in before they can use an app or see website information has high interaction cost and defies the reciprocity principle.

  • Infinite Scrolling Is Not for Every Website

    Endless scrolling saves people from having to attend to the mechanics of pagination in browsing tasks, but is not a good choice for websites that support goal-oriented finding tasks.