Web Usability Articles & Videos

  • Repeated User Actions Are Frustrating

    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.

  • 3 Ways to Level Up Your Visual Design Skills

    Designers, researchers, and generalists alike can improve their visual design skills through creative exercises focused on identification, replication, or exploration.

  • Top 10 Web-Design Mistakes of 2021

    Jakob Nielsen condemns 10 awful design flaws that plague today's websites, as voted by the audience at his Virtual UX Conference keynote.

  • The Aesthetic Usability Effect and Prioritizing Appearance vs. Functionality

    Users believe that designs that look good also work well, and UX should take advantage of this. But don't make aesthetic usability lead you astray as a designer, because the UI must actually work well for long-term success.

  • Short-Term Memory Limitations Impact User Interface Design

    People can only hold a small amount of information in their short-term memory, which fades fast. These facts impact most aspects of screen design and dictate many usability guidelines.

  • 10 Usability Heuristics Applied to Complex Applications

    Nielsen’s 10 usability heuristics can be used to analyze the UX of applications that support domain-specific, complex workflows.

  • Breaking out of the Content Silo

    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.

  • Overlay Overload: Competing Popups Are an Increasing Menace

    Today’s users are overwhelmed by a plethora of site and browser-initiated popups with content unrelated to their current task.

  • Tooltips in the User Interface

    Tooltips are small user-triggered popups that explain UI elements when the user points to something. They are useful, but don't use them for critical information.

  • Three Levels of Pain Points in Customer Experience

    Pain points are problems that occur at the different levels of the customer experience: interaction level, customer-journey level, or relationship level.

  • How to Design a Good Search UI

    If users don't use your search a lot, it's often because the search user interface is poorly designed. Here are the top guidelines for how to show the search feature on both desktop and mobile.

  • When is It OK to Be Inconsistent in User Interface Design?

    Consistent design enhances learnability and is usually best for usability. But if the problem you're solving is sufficiently different, then inconsistency may be better.

  • Popup Problems

    Popups and many kinds of modal dialogs are often intrusive user interface elements that get in the way of users' goals and cause annoyance. Here are some of the worst popup UX sins.

  • User-Experience Quiz: 2020 UX Year in Review

    Test your usability knowledge by taking our quiz. All questions and answers are based on articles published last year.

  • UX Guidelines for Augmented-Reality Shopping Tools

    Ecommerce AR tools are relatively new, so must be highly discoverable and easy to learn. Calibration issues run rampant, and users must dedicate focused attention to interact with this unfamiliar feature.

  • Faculty Pages on University Websites Persuade Prospective Students

    User research with prospective university students, ranging from kids still in high school to Ph.D. level grad students, found that they really want to know about the professors they'll be learning from, so when visiting university websites, these users (and their parents) scrutinized the faculty pages.

  • Information Scent

    Information foraging explains how users behave on the web and why they click certain links and not others. Information scent can be used to analyze how people assess a link and the page context surrounding the link to judge what's on the other end of the link.

  • Augmented Reality for Ecommerce: Is It Useful Yet?

    Augmented reality is an exciting technology, but the experience of using it is underwhelming, which hurts its overall perception of helpfulness.

  • Opening Links in New Browser Windows and Tabs

    Carefully examine the user’s context, task at hand, and next steps when deciding whether to open links to documents and external sites in the same or a new browser tab.

  • Jakob's Law of Internet User Experience

    What are the shortcomings of following Jakob's Law of Internet UX (which states that "users spend most of their time on other sites")?

  • Repeated User Actions Are Frustrating

    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.

  • 3 Ways to Level Up Your Visual Design Skills

    Designers, researchers, and generalists alike can improve their visual design skills through creative exercises focused on identification, replication, or exploration.

  • Top 10 Web-Design Mistakes of 2021

    Jakob Nielsen condemns 10 awful design flaws that plague today's websites, as voted by the audience at his Virtual UX Conference keynote.

  • The Aesthetic Usability Effect and Prioritizing Appearance vs. Functionality

    Users believe that designs that look good also work well, and UX should take advantage of this. But don't make aesthetic usability lead you astray as a designer, because the UI must actually work well for long-term success.

  • Short-Term Memory Limitations Impact User Interface Design

    People can only hold a small amount of information in their short-term memory, which fades fast. These facts impact most aspects of screen design and dictate many usability guidelines.

  • Breaking out of the Content Silo

    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.

  • Tooltips in the User Interface

    Tooltips are small user-triggered popups that explain UI elements when the user points to something. They are useful, but don't use them for critical information.

  • How to Design a Good Search UI

    If users don't use your search a lot, it's often because the search user interface is poorly designed. Here are the top guidelines for how to show the search feature on both desktop and mobile.

  • When is It OK to Be Inconsistent in User Interface Design?

    Consistent design enhances learnability and is usually best for usability. But if the problem you're solving is sufficiently different, then inconsistency may be better.

  • Popup Problems

    Popups and many kinds of modal dialogs are often intrusive user interface elements that get in the way of users' goals and cause annoyance. Here are some of the worst popup UX sins.

  • Faculty Pages on University Websites Persuade Prospective Students

    User research with prospective university students, ranging from kids still in high school to Ph.D. level grad students, found that they really want to know about the professors they'll be learning from, so when visiting university websites, these users (and their parents) scrutinized the faculty pages.

  • Information Scent

    Information foraging explains how users behave on the web and why they click certain links and not others. Information scent can be used to analyze how people assess a link and the page context surrounding the link to judge what's on the other end of the link.

  • Jakob's Law of Internet User Experience

    What are the shortcomings of following Jakob's Law of Internet UX (which states that "users spend most of their time on other sites")?

  • Mask Interaction Delays with Progress Indicators

    In case of slow response times in a user interface, indicate that the wait time will soon be over by showing an animation. For longer delays use a percent-done indicator.

  • Changes in Important Information-Seeking Behavior on the Internet Over 22 Years

    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.

  • Better Forms Through Visual Organization

    How to organize and lay out your form fields and their labels to make data entry easier for users.

  • Risk of Copying Famous Companies' Designs

    If a website or company is big and famous, should you copy their design for your own site? Likely not, because good UX depends on context, and your situation could be quite different than a world-famous company's circumstances.

  • Stop Counting Clicks: The 3 Click Rule is Nonsense

    Users want to do the least amount of work possible to get to a desired web page. However, "work" is the sum of difficulty presented by each click and not the number of clicks in itself. Here are some tips for making a path easier to navigate.

  • Website Design in High-Context Cultures like China

    The contrast between low-context and high-context cultures has substantial implications for web designs that target users in different countries. Examples from eyetracking research in China (a high-context culture) illustrate this point.

  • Marking Required Fields in Online Forms

    Do you need to mark fields as "required" in forms on your website or in apps? What if all fields are required? And what is the best way to show that a form field is required?

  • Ephemeral Web-Based Applications

    Usability tests of 46 Flash applications identified basic issues related to the ephemeral nature of Web-embedded apps. Some findings restate old truths about GUIs; others reflect the Net's new status as nexus of the user experience.

  • Making Flash Usable for Users With Disabilities

    Flash designs are easier for users with disabilities to use when designers combine visual and textual presentations, minimize incessant movement, decrease spacing between related objects, and simplify features.

  • Let Users Control Font Size

    Tiny text tyrannizes users by dramatically reducing task throughput. IE4 had a great UI that let users easily change font sizes; let's get this design back in the next generation of browsers.

  • Improving Usability Guideline Compliance

    Over the last 1.5 years, the average compliance with established usability guidelines increased by 4%. If we can sustain this level of improvement, we'll reach the ideal of 90% guideline compliance in 2017.

  • Top 10 Guidelines for Homepage Usability

    A company's homepage is its face to the world and the starting point for most user visits. Improving your homepage multiplies the entire website's business value, so following key guidelines for homepage usability is well worth the investment.

  • Site Map Usability, 1st study

    Most site maps fail to convey multiple levels of the site's information architecture. In usability tests, users often overlook site maps or can't find them. Complexity is also a problem: a map should be a map, not a navigational challenge of its own.

  • Beyond Accessibility: Treating Users with Disabilities as People

    With current Web design practices, users without disabilities experience three times higher usability than users who are blind or have low vision. Usability guidelines can substantially improve the matter by making websites and intranets support task performance for users with disabilities.

  • 113 Design Guidelines for Homepage Usability

    These design guidelines are excerpted from our book Homepage Usability: 50 Websites Deconstructed which contains more details, including copiously annotated screenshots of 50 homepages.

  • Tagline Blues: What's the Site About?

    A website's tagline must explain what the company does and what makes it unique among competitors. Two questions can help you assess your own tagline: Would it work just as well for competitors? Would any company ever claim the opposite?

  • Helping Users Find Physical Locations

    When we asked users to find a nearby store, office, dealership, or other outlet based on information provided at a parent company's website, users succeeded only 63% of the time. On average, the 10 sites we studied complied with less than half of our 21 usability guidelines for locator design.

  • Avoid PDF for On-Screen Reading (Original Article)

    Forcing users to browse PDF files makes usability approximately 300% worse compared to HTML pages. Only use PDF for documents that users are likely to print. In those cases, following six basic guidelines will minimize usability problems.

  • Flash: 99% Bad

    Flash reduces usability for three reasons: it makes bad design more likely, it breaks the Web's fundamental interaction style, and it consumes resources that would be better spent enhancing a site's core value.

  • End of Web Design

    Websites have to reduce their differences and allow advanced features to either become standard across sites or be extracted from the sites altogether and placed in the browser. Focus on services and content; use a standard design.

  • Alertbox 5 Years Retrospective

    Since 1995, the readership of the Alertbox has grown by 4,800%. Most of the 105 old usability columns remain valid to this day since people change more slowly than the technology. But the Alertbox has encountered some setbacks as well.

  • Finally Progress in Internet Client Design

    Napster, IE 5 for the Mac, and Yahoo FinanceVision introduce specialized Internet UIs beyond the standard page viewing that had been unchanged since Mosaic.

  • Reset and Cancel Buttons

    Most Web forms would have improved usability if the Reset button was removed. Cancel buttons are also often of little value on the Web.

  • Predictions for the Web in Year 2000

    Micropayments will start with value-added content; mobile access; advice and sales become unbundled and physical experience environments may launch.

  • 10 Good Deeds in Web Design

    Ten design elements that would increase the usability of virtually all websites if only they were employed more widely.

  • User-Supportive Internet Architecture

    The basic ideology of the Internet is bit transport; we need a utility-focused human-centered ideology for its fundamental architecture and protocols.

  • Do Interface Standards Stifle Design Creativity?

    Standards ensure a consistent vocabulary, but don't limit designers' freedom (and responsibility) in deeper design issues. Also: Guidelines for writing design standards.