Designers, researchers, and generalists alike can improve their visual design skills through creative exercises focused on identification, replication, or exploration.
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.
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.
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.
How to familiarize users with new user interfaces? Onboarding techniques include feature promotion, customization, and instructions. All must be kept simple.
A good design relies on a thorough task analysis of the steps required to complete a task, as well as determining what information users need at each step.
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.
Redesigning a user interface can be done in many smaller incremental releases, or as one big complete redo. Big change is risky, but necessary in 3 cases.
Enterprise applications that support work often do so poorly and have bad user experience. The usability requirements and tradeoffs for workplace app design are different from consumer apps.
Onboarding instructions that users must digest before they start using an app or other product require attention and effort, and thus reduce usability. They should be avoided as much as possible.
Animations can make user interfaces both easier and nicer to use, but the timing has to be right, as we demonstrate in this video. Many other details also contribute to the quality of animation in the user experience.
Users waste unacceptably much time struggling with computer bugs. Users' mental models suffer when systems don't work as advertised, leading people to question their understanding of the UX.
To enable fast and reliable understanding of data shown on dashboard overviews, use visualization styles that work with human preattentive visual processing.
Using a modal dialog to display an error message can cause usability problems on mobile devices. Error handling must respect human-memory constraints and remain visible as the user is fixing the problem.
Users pay more attention to big things than to small things, and this design principle can be used to prioritize a user experience design, such as a web page or application screen.
On–off controls that switch between two different system states need to clearly communicate to users both the current state and the state the system will move to, should the user press that control.
Three stereotypes explain much resistance to improving the usability of complex applications for domain-specific tasks: that people like the old ways, that they are experts in the existing UI, and that training will make up for bad design. All are misleading.
Designers, researchers, and generalists alike can improve their visual design skills through creative exercises focused on identification, replication, or exploration.
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.
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.
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.
How to familiarize users with new user interfaces? Onboarding techniques include feature promotion, customization, and instructions. All must be kept simple.
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.
Redesigning a user interface can be done in many smaller incremental releases, or as one big complete redo. Big change is risky, but necessary in 3 cases.
Enterprise applications that support work often do so poorly and have bad user experience. The usability requirements and tradeoffs for workplace app design are different from consumer apps.
Onboarding instructions that users must digest before they start using an app or other product require attention and effort, and thus reduce usability. They should be avoided as much as possible.
Animations can make user interfaces both easier and nicer to use, but the timing has to be right, as we demonstrate in this video. Many other details also contribute to the quality of animation in the user experience.
Users waste unacceptably much time struggling with computer bugs. Users' mental models suffer when systems don't work as advertised, leading people to question their understanding of the UX.
To enable fast and reliable understanding of data shown on dashboard overviews, use visualization styles that work with human preattentive visual processing.
Using a modal dialog to display an error message can cause usability problems on mobile devices. Error handling must respect human-memory constraints and remain visible as the user is fixing the problem.
Users pay more attention to big things than to small things, and this design principle can be used to prioritize a user experience design, such as a web page or application screen.
Three stereotypes explain much resistance to improving the usability of complex applications for domain-specific tasks: that people like the old ways, that they are experts in the existing UI, and that training will make up for bad design. All are misleading.
Virtual reality (VR) user interfaces are currently more difficult for users to manipulate than a traditional GUI, partly because of more degrees of freedom and partly because VR is still new, so people have less experience using it. Advice for how to employ usability studies to alleviate this problem.
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.
At the very first Virtual UX Conference, Jakob Nielsen answered a participant question about what user experience can do to help with the coronavirus crisis.
Native and hybrid apps are installed in an app store, whereas web apps are mobile-optimized webpages that look like an app. Both hybrid and web apps render HTML web pages, but hybrid apps use app-embedded browsers to do that.
'Chrome' is the user interface overhead that surrounds user data and web page content. Although chrome obesity can eat half of the available pixels, a reasonable amount enhances usability.
Overloading different outcomes on similar commands can be confusing. Using the same command for multiple actions enhances usability if the results are conceptually the same.
It's more difficult to conduct usability studies with experienced users than with novices, and the improvements are usually smaller. Still, improving expert performance is often worth the effort.
Websites that let users customize the UI have the same measured usability as regular sites. Sites for customizing products, however, score substantially worse due to complex workflow.
Many winners employ dashboards to give users a single overview of complex information and use lightboxes to ensure that users notice dialogs. Also, the Office 2007 ribbon showed surprisingly strong early adoption.
Should the OK button come before or after the Cancel button? Following platform conventions is more important than optimizing an individual dialog box.
Application usability is enhanced when users know how to operate the UI and it guides them through the workflow. Violating common guidelines prevents both.
The more engaged users are, the more features an application can sustain. But most users have low commitment -- especially to websites, which must focus on simplicity, rather than features.
Application commands can be presented as buttons or as links, which offer more room for explanation. For primary commands, however, buttons are still best.
