Skip navigation

Articles

Raluca Budiu

Raluca Budiu is Director of Research at Nielsen Norman Group, where she consults for clients from a variety of industries and presents tutorials on mobile usability, designing interfaces for multiple devices, quantitative usability methods, cognitive psychology for designers, and principles of human-computer interaction. She also serves as editor for the articles published on NNgroup.com. Raluca coauthored the NN/g reports on tablet usability, mobile usability, iPad usability, and the usability of children's websites, as well as the book Mobile Usability. She holds a Ph.D. from Carnegie Mellon University.

@rbudiu

Articles and Videos

  • 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.

  • The Reciprocity Principle: Give Before You Take in Web Design

    Humans tend to return good deeds: use this social psychology law in user interface design to gain users’ trust and motivate engagement with your site or app.

  • Usability Testing for Mobile Is Easy

    Testing phones, tablets, or other mobile devices with real users requires special consideration for recording equipment, room setup, and even the test users.

  • Smartwatches Are the Future—But Samsung Galaxy Gear Only Partway There

    The Samsung Galaxy Gear smartwatch poses unique problems due to the tiny touchscreen. The use of gestures and streamlining content are reasonable solutions, but need to be implemented in a more usable manner.

  • iOS 7 User-Experience Appraisal

    Flat design hides calls to action, and swiping around the edges can interfere with carousels and scrolling.

  • Mobile: Native Apps, Web Apps, and Hybrid Apps

    Native and hybrid apps are installed in an app store, whereas web apps are mobile-optimized webpages that look like an app. Both hybrid and web apps render HTML web pages, but hybrid apps use app-embedded browsers to do that.

  • Interaction Cost

    The interaction cost is the sum of efforts — mental and physical — that the users must deploy in interacting with a site in order to reach their goals.

  • Success Rate: The Simplest Usability Metric

    In addition to being expensive, collecting usability metrics interferes with the goal of gathering qualitative insights to drive design decisions. As a compromise, you can measure users' ability to complete tasks. Success rates are easy to understand and represent the UX bottom line.