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Articles

Aurora Harley

Aurora Harley is a Senior User Experience Specialist with Nielsen Norman Group. Aurora’s research and consulting experience includes organizations in a variety of industries, such as ecommerce, travel, healthcare, and B2B (business-to-business). She also conducts independent research for NN/g, and regularly leads training courses on mobile usability, UX strategies, psychology and UX, and analytics. Aurora combines her background in front-end web development and UX design to inform her work, creating effective designs that balance technical, business, and user needs.

@aurorararara

Articles and Videos

  • Bounces vs Exits in Web Analytics

    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.

  • How to Film and Photograph Online Content for Usability: UX Details for Videos and Images

    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.

  • Videos as Instructional Content: User Behaviors and UX Guidelines

    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.

  • Vanity Metrics in Analytics

    Analytics for websites or other UX design projects should drive the project forward to better business success. Metrics that make you feel good may not achieve this goal.

  • Remote Ideation: Synchronous or Asynchronous?

    Ideation in the UX design process can be conducted remotely: without having team members in the same room. This can be done synchronously (everybody participates at the same time) or asynchronously (people contribute at different times).

  • Accelerators Allow Experts to Increase Efficiency

    Alternate methods for accomplishing a frequent action in a user interface support expert users by speeding up their interactions, without hindering novices.

  • Why Didn't People Scroll? The Illusion of Completeness

    In testing, we often see users who don't scroll a web page even though there is much useful info below the fold. Often, the reason is "the illusion of completeness" which causes users to believe that they are seeing all there is.

  • The Negativity Bias in a User's Experience

    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.

  • Vanity Metrics: Add Context to Add Meaning

    Tracked analytics metrics should be actionable: variations in a meaningful, relatively stable metric reflect change in the user experience. In contrast, vanity metrics appear impressive, but their fluctuations are not operational.

  • Decision Biases Affecting UX Practitioners

    It's not just users who are subject to illogical thinking: designers and UX professionals can also make sub-optimal design decisions by falling prey to the same decision biases, such as framing effects when analyzing usability data.