Skip navigation

Articles

Aurora Harley

Aurora Harley is a Senior User Experience Specialist with Nielsen Norman Group. Aurora’s research and consulting experience includes organizations in a variety of industries, such as ecommerce, travel, healthcare, and B2B (business-to-business). She also conducts independent research for NN/g, and regularly leads training courses on mobile usability, UX strategies, psychology and UX, and analytics. Aurora combines her background in front-end web development and UX design to inform her work, creating effective designs that balance technical, business, and user needs.

@aurorararara

Articles and Videos

  • 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.

  • Design Ruts and Functional Fixedness

    A common problem during user experience ideation is when design teams are stuck on a traditional way of thinking about aspects of the design. Here are some tips for breaking out of such functional fixedness.

  • 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.

  • 4 Trustworthiness Factors

    Users are constantly evaluating whether they believe what you're saying and whether to leave a website. You can do 4 things to make users trust you more and stay on your site.

  • Compensatory vs Noncompensatory: 2 Decision-Making Strategies

    Ease users’ purchase decisions by designing interfaces that support both compensatory and noncompensatory decision-making strategies.

  • Findability vs. Discoverability

    Locating features or content on a website or in an app happen in two different ways: finding (users look for the item) and discovering (users come across the item). Both are important, but require different user research techniques to evaluate.

  • Similarity Principle in Visual Design

    Design elements that appear similar in some way — sharing the same color, shape, or size — are perceived as related, while elements that appear dissimilar are perceived as belonging to separate groups.

  • Proximity Principle in Visual Design

    Design elements near each other are perceived as related, while elements spaced apart are perceived as belonging to separate groups.

  • The Principle of Common Region: Containers Create Groupings

    In visual design, elements within the same boundary are perceived as related.

  • Slips vs. Mistakes

    User errors while using computers take two forms: slips (right intent, wrong action) and mistakes (wrong intent). Understanding the differences between the types of user error will help you design to prevent or minimize these problems.