Skip navigation

Interaction Design Articles & Videos

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • Designing Empty States in Complex Applications: 3 Guidelines

    Empty states provide opportunities for designers to communicate system status, increase learnability of the system, and deliver direct pathways for key tasks. This article provides guidance for designing empty-state dialogues for content-less containers.

  • Using Fitts's Law to Make Links and Buttons Easier to Click

    Fitts's Law describes how long time it takes to click a target, based on the distance to the target and its size. Use this information to make buttons and links faster to click.

  • 3 Types of Onboarding New Users

    How to familiarize users with new user interfaces? Onboarding techniques include feature promotion, customization, and instructions. All must be kept simple.

  • UI Modes and Modals

    Modes can be a hidden state and lead to user errors. But they can also make a user interface more efficient by allowing the same action to have different results, depending on the situation.

  • Direct Manipulation in User Interfaces

    Direct manipulation is an interaction technique in graphical user interfaces where users move depictions of objects around and get immediate feedback about their actions and the outcome of these actions.

  • UX vs. UI

    User experience and user interface are highly related. Both are important, but what's the difference between UX and UI? (Often confused!)

  • Sticky Headers: 5 Ways to Make Them Better

    Persistent headers can be useful to users if they are unobtrusive, high-contrast, minimally animated, and fit user needs.

  • 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.

  • UX Animations

    Animations can make user interfaces both easier and nicer to use, but the timing has to be right, as we demonstrate in this video. Many other details also contribute to the quality of animation in the user experience.

  • Augmented/Virtual Reality vs. Computer Screens

    Will 3D user interfaces like VR and AR replace flat screens, and how should UX designers prepare for these technologies?

  • 8 Design Guidelines for Complex Applications

    Despite great diversity in the workflows and end users supported by complex applications, these 8 design guidelines are generally applicable.

  • Virtual Tours

    User interfaces that simulate a presence in a physical space allow people to tour an environment without travelling there, but were mostly considered secondary by our research participants, partly because it’s currently slow and confusing to navigate virtual tours.

  • State-Switch Controls: The Infamous Case of the "Mute" Button

    On–off controls that switch between two different system states need to clearly communicate to users both the current state and the state the system will move to, should the user press that control.

  • Login Walls

    Demanding that users create a new account before they are able to access a website or mobile app is only justified in rare cases. Usually, people go away, rather than scale a wall placed between them and your offerings.

  • Virtual Tours: High Interaction Cost, Moderate Usefulness

    Virtual tours are an occasionally useful secondary tool for checking on specific details, but most users find them to be high effort, slow, and of limited value.

  • Learnability vs Efficiency in User Interface Design

    Two of the most fundamental usability metrics are learnability (the user's ability to use a new design they have not seen before) and efficiency (the speed with which people do tasks after they have learned the interface).

  • Better Forms Through Visual Organization

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

  • Listboxes vs. Dropdown Lists

    Listboxes and dropdowns are compact UI controls that allow users to select options. Listboxes expose options right away and support multi-selection while dropdowns require a click to see options and support only single-selection.

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • Using Fitts's Law to Make Links and Buttons Easier to Click

    Fitts's Law describes how long time it takes to click a target, based on the distance to the target and its size. Use this information to make buttons and links faster to click.

  • 3 Types of Onboarding New Users

    How to familiarize users with new user interfaces? Onboarding techniques include feature promotion, customization, and instructions. All must be kept simple.

  • UI Modes and Modals

    Modes can be a hidden state and lead to user errors. But they can also make a user interface more efficient by allowing the same action to have different results, depending on the situation.

  • Direct Manipulation in User Interfaces

    Direct manipulation is an interaction technique in graphical user interfaces where users move depictions of objects around and get immediate feedback about their actions and the outcome of these actions.

  • UX vs. UI

    User experience and user interface are highly related. Both are important, but what's the difference between UX and UI? (Often confused!)

  • 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.

  • UX Animations

    Animations can make user interfaces both easier and nicer to use, but the timing has to be right, as we demonstrate in this video. Many other details also contribute to the quality of animation in the user experience.

  • Augmented/Virtual Reality vs. Computer Screens

    Will 3D user interfaces like VR and AR replace flat screens, and how should UX designers prepare for these technologies?

  • Virtual Tours

    User interfaces that simulate a presence in a physical space allow people to tour an environment without travelling there, but were mostly considered secondary by our research participants, partly because it’s currently slow and confusing to navigate virtual tours.

  • Login Walls

    Demanding that users create a new account before they are able to access a website or mobile app is only justified in rare cases. Usually, people go away, rather than scale a wall placed between them and your offerings.

  • Learnability vs Efficiency in User Interface Design

    Two of the most fundamental usability metrics are learnability (the user's ability to use a new design they have not seen before) and efficiency (the speed with which people do tasks after they have learned the interface).

  • Better Forms Through Visual Organization

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

  • CX vs. UX

    Customer Experience (CX) and User Experience (UX) are two common terms that mostly mean the same thing, but have different connotations. Whatever your preferred term, it's important to consider design at 3 levels of experience.

  • Dualities of User Experience (Jakob Nielsen keynote)

    Many issues in the user-experience field don’t have a simple answer. Rather there’s a tension between two good answers that are often polar opposites. Both extremes can be useful perspectives, and both have their advocates when people debate UX. How do we resolve these differences? This was Jakob Nielsen's keynote at the UX Conference in Las Vegas.

  • Disclosing Password Constraints in the UI

    Having to register for websites, services, or apps is already annoying enough for users. But complications compound when they are faced with hidden requirements for what constitutes an acceptable password.

  • Steering Law for Cursor and Mouse Movements in a GUI Tunnel

    In a graphical user interface, having the user move a cursor within a narrow path (e.g., in a hierarchical menu or a slider) follows a strict law for how easy or difficult it is to do, depending on specifics of the GUI.

  • Simple Design Is Relative

    Simplicity depends on the capacity of the information channel and what's simple for one device, can be primitive or intricate for another, since screens are information channels with a limited capacity. When you're designing for multiple devices, don't go by common cliches like "simple is good."

  • How to Empathy Map

    A 5-step process for creating empathy maps that describe user characteristics at the start of a UX design process.

  • Toggle-Switch Guidelines

    On/off switches are UI elements that prompt users to choose between 2 mutually exclusive options, always have a default value, and provide immediate results.

  • Storyboards Help Visualize UX Ideas

    Storyboards are visual representations of UX stories, which capture attention, provide clarity, and inspire us to take action.

  • Adding an Item to a Shopping Cart: Provide Clear, Persistent Feedback

    To confirm that an item has been added to cart, show a number badge and a confirmation popover or page, and change the label of the Add to Cart button.

  • The Two UX Gulfs: Evaluation and Execution

    With every interaction, users must overcome the twin challenges of understanding the current state of a system and figuring out how to change it. Designers can support them by being aware of these gulfs and bridging them with a transparent conceptual model.

  • How to Deal With Bad Design Suggestions

    Gracefully respond to unsolicited design ideas, and prevent them from derailing good design. Turn them into UX learning experiences.

  • Dropdowns: Design Guidelines

    Dropdown boxes and menus are overused and clunky but can be useful for revealing a list of options or commands.

  • Input Controls for Parameters: Balancing Exploration and Precision with Sliders, Knobs, and Matrices

    Linked controls support coarse and fine parameter selection and ensure both ease of exploration and precision.

  • Flat-Design Best Practices

    Avoid the negative side effects of flat design by clearly differentiating between clickable and unclickable elements.

  • Using Swipe to Trigger Contextual Actions

    Implementations of swipe-to-delete or swipe to reveal contextual actions often suffer from usability problems.

  • How Channels, Devices, and Touchpoints Impact the Customer Journey

    Customer journeys are collections of touchpoints between users and organizations. A touchpoint is defined by a combination of channel, device, and user task.

  • Wireflows: A UX Deliverable for Workflows and Apps

    Wireflows are a combination of wireframes and flowcharts. They can document workflow and screen designs when there are few pages that change dynamically.

  • Consistency in the Omnichannel Experience

    Consistency of interaction across channels builds customer trust and leads to a successful omnichannel user experience.

  • 6 Tips for Successful Personalization

    Well-designed personalization carefully considers the creation of roles or types, ensures content is available for roles, and retains user control over the experience.

  • Augmented Reality: What Does It Mean for UX?

    AR technologies can impact the user experience by decreasing interaction cost, cognitive load, and attention switching.

  • 7 Tips for Successful Customization

    Customization tools must be simple-to-use, easy-to-find, and easily edited, with both a clear intent and a clear benefit to users.

  • Customer Journeys and Omnichannel User Experience

    Organizations must create omnichannel UX strategies that optimize the end-to-end user experience of completing a task across devices and interaction channels.

  • The Impact of Interaction Design on Brand Perception

    Your interaction-design decisions have measurable effects on your users’ emotions and how they perceive your brand.

  • Customization vs. Personalization in the User Experience

    Customization gives control to the user and personalization gives control to the site. Both can enhance experiences, but only when carefully implemented.

  • Brand Is Experience in the Digital Age

    Brand is a perception of value resulting from the sum of a customer’s experiences, made up of visual, tonal, and behavioral brand components, often shaped by UX.

  • Expandable Menus: Pull-Down, Square, or Pie?

    Selecting an option inside a menu depends on how far away that option is from the menu icon. Drop-down menus, megamenus, pie or radial menus, and marking menus arrange items in different patterns to optimize the reach time.