Bad content, bad links, bad navigation, bad category pages... which is worst for business? In these examples, bad content takes the prize for costing the company the most money.
Users now do basic operations with confidence and perform with skill on sites they use often. But when users try new sites, well-known usability problems still cause failures.
AJAX, rich Internet UIs, mashups, communities, and user-generated content often add more complexity than they're worth. They divert design resources and prove that what's hyped is rarely what's most profitable.
A site did most things right, but still had a miserable 14% success rate for its most important task. The reason? Users ignored a key area because it resembled a promotion.
Users rarely look at display advertisements on websites. Of the 4 design elements that do attract a few ad fixations, one is unethical and reduces the value of advertising networks.
Making users suffer a drop-down menu to enter state abbreviations is one of many small annoyances that add up to a less efficient, less pleasant user experience. It's worth fixing as many of these usability irritants as you can.
Several usability findings lead directly to higher sales and increased customer loyalty. These design tactics should be your first priority when updating your website.
Although the gains don't fall into traditional profit columns, there are clear arguments for improving usability of non-commercial websites and intranets. In one example, a state agency could get an ROI of 22,000% by fixing a basic usability problem.
User testing shows that business-to-business websites have substantially lower usability than mainstream consumer sites. If they want to convert more prospects into leads, B2B sites should follow more guidelines and make it easier for prospects to research their offerings.
B2B sites often have overly complex pricing structures or can't show prices at all. To help prospects with early research, list representative cases and their prices.
When working on business problems, users flitter among sites, alternating visits to different service genres. No single website defines the user experience on its own.
The Internet is growing at an annualized rate of 18% and now has one billion users. A second billion users will follow in the next ten years, bringing a dramatic change in worldwide usability needs.
Users from other countries have special needs related to entry fields for names and addresses, measurements and dates, and information about regional product standards.
It's frustrating for users to go back-and-forth and back-and-forth to the same web page, bouncing around without getting what they need. Analytics data can help identify pages that don't help users progress.
Designers, researchers, and generalists alike can improve their visual design skills through creative exercises focused on identification, replication, or exploration.
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.
People can only hold a small amount of information in their short-term memory, which fades fast. These facts impact most aspects of screen design and dictate many usability guidelines.
Coming from a traditional content/writing background, Michelle Blake presents her case study of broadening her remit to a fuller range of user-experience issues and improved the design of her organization's website.
Tooltips are small user-triggered popups that explain UI elements when the user points to something. They are useful, but don't use them for critical information.
If users don't use your search a lot, it's often because the search user interface is poorly designed. Here are the top guidelines for how to show the search feature on both desktop and mobile.
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.
Popups and many kinds of modal dialogs are often intrusive user interface elements that get in the way of users' goals and cause annoyance. Here are some of the worst popup UX sins.
User research with prospective university students, ranging from kids still in high school to Ph.D. level grad students, found that they really want to know about the professors they'll be learning from, so when visiting university websites, these users (and their parents) scrutinized the faculty pages.
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.
In case of slow response times in a user interface, indicate that the wait time will soon be over by showing an animation. For longer delays use a percent-done indicator.
We studied the most important activities users perform on the internet, repeating an old classic study. Users' most critical behaviors have shifted substantially over 22 years, due to more information available online and the constant presence of mobile devices.
If a website or company is big and famous, should you copy their design for your own site? Likely not, because good UX depends on context, and your situation could be quite different than a world-famous company's circumstances.
Users want to do the least amount of work possible to get to a desired web page. However, "work" is the sum of difficulty presented by each click and not the number of clicks in itself. Here are some tips for making a path easier to navigate.
The contrast between low-context and high-context cultures has substantial implications for web designs that target users in different countries. Examples from eyetracking research in China (a high-context culture) illustrate this point.
Do you need to mark fields as "required" in forms on your website or in apps? What if all fields are required? And what is the best way to show that a form field is required?
Pain points are problems that occur at the different levels of the customer experience: interaction level, customer-journey level, or relationship level.
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.
Carefully examine the user’s context, task at hand, and next steps when deciding whether to open links to documents and external sites in the same or a new browser tab.
Research spanning 20 years proves PDFs are problematic for online reading. Yet they’re still prevalent and users continue to get lost in them. They’re unpleasant to read and navigate and remain unfit for digital-content display.
Forcing users to browse PDF files causes frustration and slow task completion, compared to standard webpages. Use PDF only for documents that users will print. In those cases, following 10 basic guidelines will minimize usability problems.
From 1995 to 2001 Jakob Nielsen wrote 250 articles with early usability insights that are still true but also contained predictions for aspirational changes that didn’t happen.
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.
People increasingly discover critical information online without actively searching for it, but such information has poor context and may have credibility issues.
Consider how your audience will be using the visuals to determine the optimal camera angle, set the right tone, choose the right props, and maintain attention.
In people with normal vision (or corrected-to-normal vision), visual performance tends to be better with light mode, whereas some people with cataract and related disorders may perform better with dark mode. On the flip side, long-term reading in light mode may be associated with myopia.
When deciding which links to click on the web, users choose those with the highest information scent — which is a mix of cues that they get from the link label, the context in which the link is shown, and their prior experiences.
We organize online information-seeking activities that lead to important decisions and actions according to 5 dimensions: purpose, method, content, social interaction, and device used to carry out the activity.
Instructional video content is helpful as supplementary information, though not all users will watch it. Videos should be easily discoverable, consistent in style across the site, and with thumbnails that accurately represent the type of content they provide.
Even great companies make mistakes. Don’t risk your UX by assuming it’s safe to follow a design pattern just because it’s used by a successful company.
