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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

  • Multitasking on Microsoft’s Surface Duo

    The Duo is a two-screen foldable mobile device that enables users to use two applications side by side, but most apps do not take advantage of the two screens. Support for information transfer from one app to the other is limited and multitasking within the same app is at times confusing.

  • UXers and Product Managers Both Say Others Intrude on Their Work

    A survey of 372 UX and PM professionals shows that duplicative work is frequent and generates confusion and inefficiency.

  • Internal vs. External Validity of UX Studies

    Poorly designed qualitative or quantitative research may produce invalid results. Avoid encouraging certain responses or behaviors and make sure that your study conditions and participants are representative.

  • The Magical Number 7 and UX

    People can remember about 7 (plus/minus 2) items in short-term memory. This memory limitation has implications for UX design, but not the ones you often hear stated.

  • 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.

  • Easier Input on Mobile Devices

    Form filling and other user input on mobile devices such as smartphones can be awkward and error prone, but by taking advantage of the strengths of the phone, designers can improve the usability of these tasks substantially.

  • 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.

  • Error Handling on Mobile Devices: Showing Alerts

    Using a modal dialog to display an error message can cause usability problems on mobile devices. Error handling must respect human-memory constraints and remain visible as the user is fixing the problem.

  • 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.