Top 10 UX Articles of 2019
Announcements
The following user-experience articles published in 2019 were the ones our audience read the most:
- Top 10 Application-Design Mistakes
Application usability is enhanced when the UI guides and supports users through the workflow. - Portfolios for UX Researchers: Top 10 Recommendations
A portfolio of past projects can advance the career of a UX researcher. Present the right work, summarize your findings, and communicate clearly to showcase your skills. - 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). - User Experience vs. Customer Experience: What’s the Difference?
Customer experience (CX) is a term commonly used to define UX over long periods of time. - 5 Steps to Creating a UX-Design Portfolio
A portfolio highlighting your design process and past work shows others who you are as a designer. The process of creating a UX-design portfolio allows you to reflect on your skills and achievements. - 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. - Sympathy vs. Empathy in UX
The majority of UX professionals practice sympathy instead of empathy for their users. - Tooltip Guidelines
Tooltips are user-triggered messages that provide additional information about a page element or feature. Although tooltips aren’t new to the web, they are often incorrectly implemented. - 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. - The 3-Click Rule for Navigation Is False
While it is important to keep key information easily accessible, the 3-click rule is an arbitrary rule of thumb that is not backed by data.
Bonus: Top 5 from Last Year
These five articles from last year got so many hits in 2019 that they would have placed high on this year’s top-10 list:
- Empathy Mapping: The First Step in Design Thinking
Visualizing user attitudes and behaviors in an empathy map helps UX teams align on a deep understanding of end users. The mapping process also reveals any holes in existing user data. - Between-Subjects vs. Within-Subjects Study Design
In user research, between-groups designs reduce learning effects; repeated-measures designs require fewer participants and minimize the random noise. - Journey Mapping 101
A journey map is a visualization of the process that a person goes through in order to accomplish a goal. - User Interviews: How, When, and Why to Conduct Them
User interviews have become a popular technique for getting user feedback, mainly because they are fast and easy. Use them to learn about users’ perceptions of your design, not about its usability. - 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.