Web Usability Articles & Videos

  • 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.

  • Homepage Real Estate Allocation

    Websites spend too little homepage space on content of interest to users and fail to utilize modern screen sizes.

  • HealthCare.gov’s Account Setup: 10 Broken Usability Guidelines

    HealthCare.gov’s account setup process is unnecessarily complex and may have contributed to backend technology failures.

  • Fight Against “Right-Rail Blindness”

    Users have trained themselves to divert their attention away from areas that look like advertising. When designed well, sidebars can effectively increase content discoverability.

  • Carousel Usability: Designing an Effective UI for Websites with Content Overload

    Carousels require good navigation and content to effectively communicate information in a crowded space.

  • Interaction Cost

    Interaction cost is the effort users spend to achieve their goals on a site or app.

  • Usability for Senior Citizens: Improved, But Still Lacking

    Users aged 65 and older are 43% slower at using websites than users aged 21–55. This is an improvement over previous studies, but designs must change to better accommodate aging users.

  • Users' Pagination Preferences and "View All"

    Long listings might need pagination by default, but if users customize the display to View All list items, respect that preference.

  • Auto-Forwarding Carousels and Accordions Annoy Users and Reduce Visibility

    The user's target was at the top of the page in 98-point font. But she failed to find it because the panel auto-rotated instead of staying still.

  • Homepage Design Changes

    Web design is stabilizing; the average homepage is only about 40% different than it was a year before, corresponding to 3 years between complete redesigns.

  • Tunnel Vision and Selective Attention

    Users don't see stuff that's right on the screen. Selective attention makes people overlook things outside their focus of interest.

  • Why Country Sites Are So Bad

    When a multinational company produces a localized country site, usability is often lost. Local advertising agencies design good-looking sites that don't communicate.

  • Computer Screens Getting Bigger

    Reasonably big monitors have finally become the most common class of desktop computer screen, dethroning the 1024x768 resolution that was long the target for web design.

  • Disruptive Workflow Design

    Smooth-flow task performance makes application use pleasurable. But disruptions are all too common due to crinkly design or creaking implementation.

  • Browser and GUI Chrome

    'Chrome' is the user interface overhead that surrounds user data and web page content. Although chrome obesity can eat half of the available pixels, a reasonable amount enhances usability.

  • Usability 101: Introduction to Usability

    Usability makes designs easy, efficient, and satisfying to use. Improve it through early, repeated user testing with real users

  • Ecommerce Usability Improvements

    Sites have improved, and we now know much more about e-tailing usability. Today, poor content is the main cause of user failure.

  • How Long Do Users Stay on Web Pages?

    Users often leave Web pages in 10–20 seconds, but pages with a clear value proposition can hold people's attention for much longer. To gain several minutes of user attention, you must clearly communicate your value proposition within 10 seconds.

  • Can Hated Design Elements Be Made to Work?

    Once users reject a design technique due to repeated bad experiences it's almost impossible to use it for good because people will avoid it every time.

  • Top 10 Mistakes in Web Design

    The ten most egregious offenses against users. Web design disasters and HTML horrors are legion, though many usability atrocities are less common than they used to be.