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.
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.
When users search for information, they don't always keep looking for the best solution. In our eyetracking studies 20% of the time, users make do with the first result and don't look any further.
Confirmatory and destructive actions should be far apart from each other; use additional redundant visual signals to differentiate between them and avoid user errors.
Extensive user research with people shopping online identified 5 main types of behavior: product-focused, browsing, researchers, bargain-hunters, and one-time shoppers. Each user type benefits from different UX elements.
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.
An engaging gameplay experience is good design. But there's a fine line between engagement and addiction, which would be bad UX, especially in the long term.
Fact-finding tasks were less memorable, while complex research-based tasks required more effort from users. Top user expectations for each task type varied.
People increasingly discover critical information online without actively searching for it, but such information has poor context and may have credibility issues.
Age groups differ in how they use websites, the internet, and computers. Our findings from studying teenagers are contrasted with our other user research with children and adults: user experience designers should target their designs based on target audience behavior patterns.
Today, a SERP (search engine results page) contains so many design elements that users don't have a simple way of picking out their preferred link. Eyetracking studies show that users' eyes bounce around the page between items in a scan pattern that resembles a pinball machine game.
User errors while using computers take two forms: slips (right intent, wrong action) and mistakes (wrong intent). Understanding the differences between the types of user error will help you design to prevent or minimize these problems.
It's important to study why users leave websites. Analytics tools give you two metrics for web pages: exit rate and bounce rate. Understanding the difference between these two numbers is essential for better UX design.
Too many offerings (e.g., products or services) on a website make it harder for users to make a decision due to analysis paralysis. Alternatively, too many options can also cause users to hastily make a decision and later regret their choice due to buyer's remorse.
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.
Users have a rudimentary understanding of cloud services and attempt to fit them into their existent, simpler mental models that they had formed for similar, more-traditional services.
Because today’s search-results pages have many possible complex layouts, users don’t always process search results sequentially. They distribute their attention more variably across the page than in the past.
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.
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.
When users search for information, they don't always keep looking for the best solution. In our eyetracking studies 20% of the time, users make do with the first result and don't look any further.
Extensive user research with people shopping online identified 5 main types of behavior: product-focused, browsing, researchers, bargain-hunters, and one-time shoppers. Each user type benefits from different UX elements.
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.
An engaging gameplay experience is good design. But there's a fine line between engagement and addiction, which would be bad UX, especially in the long term.
Age groups differ in how they use websites, the internet, and computers. Our findings from studying teenagers are contrasted with our other user research with children and adults: user experience designers should target their designs based on target audience behavior patterns.
Today, a SERP (search engine results page) contains so many design elements that users don't have a simple way of picking out their preferred link. Eyetracking studies show that users' eyes bounce around the page between items in a scan pattern that resembles a pinball machine game.
User errors while using computers take two forms: slips (right intent, wrong action) and mistakes (wrong intent). Understanding the differences between the types of user error will help you design to prevent or minimize these problems.
It's important to study why users leave websites. Analytics tools give you two metrics for web pages: exit rate and bounce rate. Understanding the difference between these two numbers is essential for better UX design.
Too many offerings (e.g., products or services) on a website make it harder for users to make a decision due to analysis paralysis. Alternatively, too many options can also cause users to hastily make a decision and later regret their choice due to buyer's remorse.
Negative experiences have stronger emotional impact on humans than positive experiences do. Thus, in designing the user experience, we need extra emphasis on avoiding those lows.
Our new user research with seniors (users aged 65 and up) shows 3 major shifts in how they use computers, compared with our first research with this audience, 20 years ago. Design for today's older users, and not for your stereotype of how these users used to be.
Change blindness is the tendency for people to overlook things that change outside their focus of attention. In user interface design, this explains why screen changes that seem striking to the designer can be completely ignored by users.
Hick's Law (or the Hick–Hyman Law) says that the more choices you present to your users, the longer it takes them to reach a decision. However, combining Hick’s Law with other design techniques can make long menus easy to use.
Eyetracking research shows people read Web content in the F-pattern. The results highlight the importance of following guidelines for writing for the Web.
Across 33 rich countries, only 5% of the population has high computer-related abilities, and only a third of people can complete medium-complexity tasks.
When choosing among several alternatives, people avoid losses and optimize for sure wins because the pain of losing is greater than the satisfaction of an equivalent gain. UX designs should frame decisions accordingly.
As the new largest generation in the American workforce, Millennials are subject to rampant speculation, investigation, and even some moral panic. These young adults have high expectations about user interfaces and are confident in their skills, but they’re error prone and their tendency to multitask reduces their task efficiency.
Clickable UI elements with absent or weak visual signifiers condition users over time to click and hover uncertainly across pages — reducing efficiency and increasing reliance on contextual cues and immediate click feedback. Young adult users may be better at perceiving subtle clickability clues, but they don’t enjoy click uncertainty any more than other age groups.
Browser tabs separate the stages of collection and comparing and serve as memory aids to keep many alternate pages available for consideration as users are shopping or researching. 7 UX guidelines support this user behavior, which is particularly common among younger users.
Do you ever think your users are lazy, or maybe even a little bit dumb? Device Inertia, momentum behavior, and selective attention are common behaviors that can make users seem slothful. However, interface design, not deficient user effort, is the true cause for these error-prone user paths.
Considering e-commerce shoppers’ motivations and habits when they come to a site can help designers make decisions that improve overall site usability while supporting users’ needs.
Students are multitaskers who move through websites rapidly, often missing the item they come to find. They're enraptured by social media but reserve it for private conversations and thus visit company sites from search engines.
The granularity of user decisions is much finer on the Web, which is dominated by the instant gratification of the user's needs in any given instant. Content must cater to this rapid pace.
Between the ages of 25 and 60, people's ability to use websites declines by 0.8% per year - mostly because they spend more time per page, but also because of navigation difficulties.
The economic divide is a non-issue, but the usability and empowerment divides alienate huge population groups who miss out on the Internet's potential.
When doing website tasks, the slowest 25% of users take 2.4 times as long as the fastest 25% of users. This difference is much higher than for other types of computer use; only programming shows a greater disparity.
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.
