For each research or design method you employ, create a document that defines this method and can be used to educate other team members on UX activities.
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.
Fitts's Law describes how long time it takes to click a target, based on the distance to the target and its size. Use this information to make buttons and links faster to click.
Unsure where to start? Use this collection of links to our articles and videos to learn about planning, conducting, and analyzing qualitative user testing.
Spreadsheet defaults don't generate the most meaningful visualizations of UX data. Modify charts to enhance Context, Clutter (less of it than spreadsheet software likes!), and Contrast.
To gain a holistic picture of your users, exchange data with the non-UX teams in your company who are collecting other forms of customer data, besides the user research you do yourself. You gain; they gain.
Jakob Nielsen's 10 general principles for interaction design. They are called "heuristics" because they are broad rules of thumb for UX and not specific usability guidelines.
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.
Modern day UX research methods answer a wide range of questions. To know when to use which method, each of 20 methods is mapped across 3 dimensions and over time within a typical product-development process.
A website’s tone of voice communicates how an organization feels about its message. The tone of any piece of content can be analyzed along 4 dimensions: humor, formality, respectfulness, and enthusiasm.
Elaborate usability tests are a waste of resources. The best results come from testing no more than 5 users and running as many small tests as you can afford.
Empathy maps, customer journey maps, experience maps, and service blueprints depict different processes and have different goals, yet they all build common ground within an organization.
What is design thinking and why should you care? History and background plus a quick overview and visualization of 6 phases of the design thinking process. Approaching problem solving with a hands-on, user-centric mindset leads to innovation, and innovation can lead to differentiation and a competitive advantage.
Our UX-maturity model has 6 stages that cover processes, design, research, leadership support, and longevity of UX. Use our quiz to get an idea of your organization’s UX maturity.
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.
Eyetracking research shows that people scan webpages and phone screens in various patterns, one of them being the shape of the letter F. Eleven years after discovering this pattern, we revisit what it means today.
User interface guidelines for when to use a checkbox control and when to use a radio button control. Twelve usability issues for checkboxes and radio buttons.
Mapping can help UX practitioners synthesize insight into one place and visualize the problem space. This video covers 3 maps that are often utilized during the discovery phase of a UX design project: ecosystem maps, experience maps, and process maps.
Roadmaps cover future work and vision, but this can be done at different scopes, from everything related to the product to only the UX activities and priorities, possibly narrowed to a sub-specialty of UX.
Dual career ladders are important in user experience. Don't force talented UX professionals to become managers if their growth path would instead benefit from focusing on UX craft.
Contextual inquiry is a UX research method where you shadow people as they do their job (or leisure tasks), allowing you to ask questions in context. This video provides advice on overcoming the main challenges with this method.
Our research with UX practitioners found 3 main areas of frustrations with service-blueprint projects. Here are recommendations for overcoming or alleviating these problems.
Test early and often is a key recommendation for UX research. Dora Brune shares her approach, including regular Open Test Labs to engage more product teams and make user research more agile. Kinder Eggs make for a nice warmup task, even in remote tests. (Recorded at a participant panel at the UX Conference.)
Good UX design requires understanding the context and patterns of human behavior, especially in new products or features that solve real needs. The 5 steps to rapid corporate ethnography lead you to these discoveries.
The reciprocity principle states that people, when given something upfront, tend to feel a sense of obligation to repay what has been provided. Login walls reverse this sequence and require users to disclose personal info before allowing access to content. People often resent this, and may not be as forthcoming or cooperative as a result.
Vertical navigation is a good fit for broad or growing IAs, but takes up more space than horizontal navigation. Ensure that it is left-aligned, keyword front-loaded, and visible.
Pain points are problems that occur at the different levels of the customer experience: interaction level, customer-journey level, or relationship level.
The United Nations’ intranet, The UN Intranet-iSeek, consolidated many separate intranets to align and connect employees as they carry out their important work.
A survey of people in user experience and product management shows that these professionals disagree on who should be responsible for many key tasks, like doing discoveries and early design.
Succinctly documenting the right details in key places helps Agile teams avoid information overload. When UX documentation is skipped or disorganized, teams waste time trying to find or remember information instead of improving the product.
Collaboration is one of the 5 key components of omnichannel user experience. Collaboration between normally disparate devices or channels creates new ways to interact.
The Duo is a two-screen foldable mobile device that enables users to use two applications side by side, but most apps do not take advantage of the two screens. Support for information transfer from one app to the other is limited and multitasking within the same app is at times confusing.
UX professionals often work hard to convince stakeholders to support UX research and design efforts. Recognizing who your key stakeholders are and how they impact your work is the first step to building fruitful stakeholder relationships.
User testing in different countries helps identify culturally specific usability issues. Testing correctly and at the right time will help you thrive in a new market.
