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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

  • Accordions on Mobile

    Accordions conserve space in mobile designs but they can also cause disorientation and too much scrolling. Easy design fixes improve the usability of these UI elements.

  • The Apple Watch: User-Experience Appraisal

    Smartwatch apps should rely on gestures more than on navigation elements, prioritize the essential, support handoff, and create tailored, standalone content.

  • Mobile User Experience: Limitations and Strengths

    Mobile design must reflect smartphone constraints and strengths: small screen, short sessions, single window, touch interaction, GPS and other phone features.

  • Progress in Mobile User Experience

    Mobile usability has improved over the past 7 years due to better prioritization of content over UI elements and better understanding of the users’ needs.

  • Multitasking on Mobile Devices

    Mobile-phone users have difficulty combining information from multiple apps. Support for multitasking is inherently limited by the mobile-screen size.

  • Nonfiction Books on Tablets: Still a Work in Progress

    Book-reading apps need to support rich hyperlinking, nonsequential navigation, and high-quality, detailed illustrations.

  • Search Is Not Enough: Synergy Between Navigation and Search

    When websites prioritize search over navigation, users must invest cognitive effort to create queries and to deal with the weak implementations of site search.

  • Maximize the Content-to-Chrome Ratio, Not the Amount of Content on Screen

    On a large screen, hiding the chrome significantly affects discoverability and interaction cost, with virtually no improvement to the content-to-chrome ratio.

  • Direct Access vs. Sequential Access: Definition

    In interface design favor direct access to the user’s preferred item instead of forcing users to go through your content in a serial order.

  • Memory Recognition and Recall in User Interfaces

    Showing users things they can recognize improves usability over needing to recall items from scratch because the extra context helps users retrieve information from memory.