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Top 10 UX Videos of 2020

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These are the videos published in 2020 that received the most views from our audience. Each video runs for 2–4 minutes, unless otherwise indicated.

  1. 21st Century Design
    Traditional design education is too narrow. Don Norman advocates a broader perspective for design and designers.
  2. UX Research Cheat Sheet
    Different user research methods are suited for different stages of the UX design process. Here's an overview of the best methods to discover, explore, test, and listen.
  3. 5 Qualitative Research Methods
    Qualitative user research is invaluable for UX design. Here's an overview of 5 key methods beyond standard usability testing that are especially useful for early discovery studies.
  4. The Changing Role of the Designer: Practical Human-Centered Design (5 min.)
    Human-centered design has 4 principles: understand the problem, the people, and the system, and do iterative design. But what if you don't have time to do all 4 steps?
  5. 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.
  6. Open vs. Closed Questions in User Research
    When doing user research for a UX design project, we can ask questions in two ways: open-ended (no fixed set of response options) and close-ended (users are restricted to picking from a few answers). Both work well, but only for those research questions they are suited to answer.
  7. Don't Listen to the Customers
    The first rule of user experience design is: don't base the product on what customers say they want. You must watch what people actually do when using your design.
  8. The Four Dimensions of Tone of Voice in UX Writing
    The words in your interface can help establish your product’s personality. The tone of any piece of content can be analyzed along 4 dimensions: humor, formality, respectfulness, and enthusiasm.
  9. UX Portfolios: What Hiring Managers Look For
    We asked over 200 hiring managers who hire for UX jobs what they look for in candidates' portfolios. The expectations are different for people looking to be hired as designers vs. as researchers, and also different for junior vs. senior positions.
  10. Vocabulary Inflation in UX (13 min.)
    The user experience field is plagued by vocabulary inflation: repeatedly replacing well-known terminology with new fancy words that cause miscommunication. (This was Jakob Nielsen’s mini-keynote at the Virtual UX Conference.)

Bonus: Top 5 Videos from Last Year

These videos published in 2019 received so many views in 2020 that they would have been on the above list if they had been published this year:

  1. Thematic Analysis of Qualitative User Research Data
    User research generates masses of qualitative data in the form of transcripts and observations that can be summarized and made actionable through thematic analysis to identify the main findings.
  2. The 10 Usability Heuristics (playlist with 11 videos)
    A series of videos about heuristic evaluation, with a dedicated video about each of the 10 usability heuristics, plus an overview.
  3. Customer Journey Mapping 101
    The 5 components of a journey map and the benefits of using this qualitative method as part of a UX design process to discover, document, and share the bigger picture of what users want.
  4. How to Empathy Map
    A 5-step process for creating empathy maps that describe user characteristics at the start of a UX design process.
  5. The Immutable Rules of UX (39 min.)
    Jakob Nielsen's keynote at the Las Vegas UX Conference discussed the foundational principles of user experience that are stable decade after decade.

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