Web Usability Articles & Videos

  • Repeated User Actions Are Frustrating

    It's frustrating for users to go back-and-forth and back-and-forth to the same web page, bouncing around without getting what they need. Analytics data can help identify pages that don't help users progress.

  • 3 Ways to Level Up Your Visual Design Skills

    Designers, researchers, and generalists alike can improve their visual design skills through creative exercises focused on identification, replication, or exploration.

  • Top 10 Web-Design Mistakes of 2021

    Jakob Nielsen condemns 10 awful design flaws that plague today's websites, as voted by the audience at his Virtual UX Conference keynote.

  • The Aesthetic Usability Effect and Prioritizing Appearance vs. Functionality

    Users believe that designs that look good also work well, and UX should take advantage of this. But don't make aesthetic usability lead you astray as a designer, because the UI must actually work well for long-term success.

  • Short-Term Memory Limitations Impact User Interface Design

    People can only hold a small amount of information in their short-term memory, which fades fast. These facts impact most aspects of screen design and dictate many usability guidelines.

  • 10 Usability Heuristics Applied to Complex Applications

    Nielsen’s 10 usability heuristics can be used to analyze the UX of applications that support domain-specific, complex workflows.

  • Breaking out of the Content Silo

    Coming from a traditional content/writing background, Michelle Blake presents her case study of broadening her remit to a fuller range of user-experience issues and improved the design of her organization's website.

  • Overlay Overload: Competing Popups Are an Increasing Menace

    Today’s users are overwhelmed by a plethora of site and browser-initiated popups with content unrelated to their current task.

  • Tooltips in the User Interface

    Tooltips are small user-triggered popups that explain UI elements when the user points to something. They are useful, but don't use them for critical information.

  • Three Levels of Pain Points in Customer Experience

    Pain points are problems that occur at the different levels of the customer experience: interaction level, customer-journey level, or relationship level.

  • How to Design a Good Search UI

    If users don't use your search a lot, it's often because the search user interface is poorly designed. Here are the top guidelines for how to show the search feature on both desktop and mobile.

  • When is It OK to Be Inconsistent in User Interface Design?

    Consistent design enhances learnability and is usually best for usability. But if the problem you're solving is sufficiently different, then inconsistency may be better.

  • Popup Problems

    Popups and many kinds of modal dialogs are often intrusive user interface elements that get in the way of users' goals and cause annoyance. Here are some of the worst popup UX sins.

  • User-Experience Quiz: 2020 UX Year in Review

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

  • UX Guidelines for Augmented-Reality Shopping Tools

    Ecommerce AR tools are relatively new, so must be highly discoverable and easy to learn. Calibration issues run rampant, and users must dedicate focused attention to interact with this unfamiliar feature.

  • Faculty Pages on University Websites Persuade Prospective Students

    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.

  • Information Scent

    Information foraging explains how users behave on the web and why they click certain links and not others. Information scent can be used to analyze how people assess a link and the page context surrounding the link to judge what's on the other end of the link.

  • Augmented Reality for Ecommerce: Is It Useful Yet?

    Augmented reality is an exciting technology, but the experience of using it is underwhelming, which hurts its overall perception of helpfulness.

  • Opening Links in New Browser Windows and Tabs

    Carefully examine the user’s context, task at hand, and next steps when deciding whether to open links to documents and external sites in the same or a new browser tab.

  • Jakob's Law of Internet User Experience

    What are the shortcomings of following Jakob's Law of Internet UX (which states that "users spend most of their time on other sites")?

  • Repeated User Actions Are Frustrating

    It's frustrating for users to go back-and-forth and back-and-forth to the same web page, bouncing around without getting what they need. Analytics data can help identify pages that don't help users progress.

  • 3 Ways to Level Up Your Visual Design Skills

    Designers, researchers, and generalists alike can improve their visual design skills through creative exercises focused on identification, replication, or exploration.

  • Top 10 Web-Design Mistakes of 2021

    Jakob Nielsen condemns 10 awful design flaws that plague today's websites, as voted by the audience at his Virtual UX Conference keynote.

  • The Aesthetic Usability Effect and Prioritizing Appearance vs. Functionality

    Users believe that designs that look good also work well, and UX should take advantage of this. But don't make aesthetic usability lead you astray as a designer, because the UI must actually work well for long-term success.

  • Short-Term Memory Limitations Impact User Interface Design

    People can only hold a small amount of information in their short-term memory, which fades fast. These facts impact most aspects of screen design and dictate many usability guidelines.

  • Breaking out of the Content Silo

    Coming from a traditional content/writing background, Michelle Blake presents her case study of broadening her remit to a fuller range of user-experience issues and improved the design of her organization's website.

  • Tooltips in the User Interface

    Tooltips are small user-triggered popups that explain UI elements when the user points to something. They are useful, but don't use them for critical information.

  • How to Design a Good Search UI

    If users don't use your search a lot, it's often because the search user interface is poorly designed. Here are the top guidelines for how to show the search feature on both desktop and mobile.

  • When is It OK to Be Inconsistent in User Interface Design?

    Consistent design enhances learnability and is usually best for usability. But if the problem you're solving is sufficiently different, then inconsistency may be better.

  • Popup Problems

    Popups and many kinds of modal dialogs are often intrusive user interface elements that get in the way of users' goals and cause annoyance. Here are some of the worst popup UX sins.

  • Faculty Pages on University Websites Persuade Prospective Students

    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.

  • Information Scent

    Information foraging explains how users behave on the web and why they click certain links and not others. Information scent can be used to analyze how people assess a link and the page context surrounding the link to judge what's on the other end of the link.

  • Jakob's Law of Internet User Experience

    What are the shortcomings of following Jakob's Law of Internet UX (which states that "users spend most of their time on other sites")?

  • Mask Interaction Delays with Progress Indicators

    In case of slow response times in a user interface, indicate that the wait time will soon be over by showing an animation. For longer delays use a percent-done indicator.

  • Changes in Important Information-Seeking Behavior on the Internet Over 22 Years

    We studied the most important activities users perform on the internet, repeating an old classic study. Users' most critical behaviors have shifted substantially over 22 years, due to more information available online and the constant presence of mobile devices.

  • Better Forms Through Visual Organization

    How to organize and lay out your form fields and their labels to make data entry easier for users.

  • Risk of Copying Famous Companies' Designs

    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.

  • Stop Counting Clicks: The 3 Click Rule is Nonsense

    Users want to do the least amount of work possible to get to a desired web page. However, "work" is the sum of difficulty presented by each click and not the number of clicks in itself. Here are some tips for making a path easier to navigate.

  • Website Design in High-Context Cultures like China

    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.

  • Marking Required Fields in Online Forms

    Do you need to mark fields as "required" in forms on your website or in apps? What if all fields are required? And what is the best way to show that a form field is required?

  • 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 Seniors: 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 aging 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.

  • Scrolling and Attention

    People scroll vertically more than they used to, but new eyetracking data shows that they will still look more above the page fold than below it.

  • User-Experience Quiz: 2017 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.

  • Zigzag Image–Text Layouts Make Scanning Less Efficient

    In two-column layouts, vertically aligned images support efficient scanning better than images that alternate placement with text.