Skip navigation

Articles

Kate Moran

Kate Moran is a Senior User Experience Specialist with Nielsen Norman Group. She conducts research and leads training seminars to help digital product teams expand and improve their UX practice. Her research findings and recommendations are informed by her background in information theory and design, as well as her development experience.

@kate__moran

Articles and Videos

  • Why Users Feel Trapped in Their Devices: The Vortex

    Many users report anxiety and lack of control over the amount of time they spend online. We call this feeling “the Vortex.”

  • Better Link Labels: 4Ss for Encouraging Clicks

    Specific link text sets sincere expectations and fulfills them, and is substantial enough to stand alone while remaining succinct.

  • Designing Search Suggestions

    Useful search suggestions lead to relevant results and are visually distinct from the query text. (This is about how to design the search feature on your own website, whether it's an ecommerce site or not.)

  • Unbridged Knowledge Gaps Hurt UX

    Many websites fail to provide the right information for research-based tasks, requiring unnecessary effort for users to piece together various information sources manually.

  • Statistical Significance in UX

    If you’re working on digital products, you should be familiar with what statistical significance means in the context of UX research. Otherwise your decisions may be based on meaningless numbers that could be due to pure chance and not a reliable difference between design options.

  • Interpreting Contradictory UX Research Findings

    If your product looks good from one perspective and bad from another, you have to check the methodology and try to interpret the findings.

  • The Dangers of Overpersonalization

    Too much personalization leads to homogeneous experiences for users and can generate content fatigue and lack of diversity.

  • Filling the Silence with Digital Noise

    Many people use digital media to avoid silence or empty time.

  • The Vortex: Why Users Feel Trapped in Their Devices

    Many users report anxiety and lack of control over the amount of time they spend online. We call this feeling “the Vortex.”

  • Technology Myths and Urban Legends

    When users don’t clearly understand how systems function, they develop unique (and often incorrect) theories to explain their experiences.