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Interaction Design Articles & Videos

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • Designing Empty States in Complex Applications: 3 Guidelines

    Empty states provide opportunities for designers to communicate system status, increase learnability of the system, and deliver direct pathways for key tasks. This article provides guidance for designing empty-state dialogues for content-less containers.

  • Using Fitts's Law to Make Links and Buttons Easier to Click

    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.

  • 3 Types of Onboarding New Users

    How to familiarize users with new user interfaces? Onboarding techniques include feature promotion, customization, and instructions. All must be kept simple.

  • UI Modes and Modals

    Modes can be a hidden state and lead to user errors. But they can also make a user interface more efficient by allowing the same action to have different results, depending on the situation.

  • Direct Manipulation in User Interfaces

    Direct manipulation is an interaction technique in graphical user interfaces where users move depictions of objects around and get immediate feedback about their actions and the outcome of these actions.

  • UX vs. UI

    User experience and user interface are highly related. Both are important, but what's the difference between UX and UI? (Often confused!)

  • Sticky Headers: 5 Ways to Make Them Better

    Persistent headers can be useful to users if they are unobtrusive, high-contrast, minimally animated, and fit user needs.

  • 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.

  • UX Animations

    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.

  • Augmented/Virtual Reality vs. Computer Screens

    Will 3D user interfaces like VR and AR replace flat screens, and how should UX designers prepare for these technologies?

  • 8 Design Guidelines for Complex Applications

    Despite great diversity in the workflows and end users supported by complex applications, these 8 design guidelines are generally applicable.

  • Virtual Tours

    User interfaces that simulate a presence in a physical space allow people to tour an environment without travelling there, but were mostly considered secondary by our research participants, partly because it’s currently slow and confusing to navigate virtual tours.

  • State-Switch Controls: The Infamous Case of the "Mute" Button

    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.

  • Login Walls

    Demanding that users create a new account before they are able to access a website or mobile app is only justified in rare cases. Usually, people go away, rather than scale a wall placed between them and your offerings.

  • Virtual Tours: High Interaction Cost, Moderate Usefulness

    Virtual tours are an occasionally useful secondary tool for checking on specific details, but most users find them to be high effort, slow, and of limited value.

  • Learnability vs Efficiency in User Interface Design

    Two of the most fundamental usability metrics are learnability (the user's ability to use a new design they have not seen before) and efficiency (the speed with which people do tasks after they have learned the interface).

  • Better Forms Through Visual Organization

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

  • Listboxes vs. Dropdown Lists

    Listboxes and dropdowns are compact UI controls that allow users to select options. Listboxes expose options right away and support multi-selection while dropdowns require a click to see options and support only single-selection.

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • Using Fitts's Law to Make Links and Buttons Easier to Click

    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.

  • 3 Types of Onboarding New Users

    How to familiarize users with new user interfaces? Onboarding techniques include feature promotion, customization, and instructions. All must be kept simple.

  • UI Modes and Modals

    Modes can be a hidden state and lead to user errors. But they can also make a user interface more efficient by allowing the same action to have different results, depending on the situation.

  • Direct Manipulation in User Interfaces

    Direct manipulation is an interaction technique in graphical user interfaces where users move depictions of objects around and get immediate feedback about their actions and the outcome of these actions.

  • UX vs. UI

    User experience and user interface are highly related. Both are important, but what's the difference between UX and UI? (Often confused!)

  • 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.

  • UX Animations

    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.

  • Augmented/Virtual Reality vs. Computer Screens

    Will 3D user interfaces like VR and AR replace flat screens, and how should UX designers prepare for these technologies?

  • Virtual Tours

    User interfaces that simulate a presence in a physical space allow people to tour an environment without travelling there, but were mostly considered secondary by our research participants, partly because it’s currently slow and confusing to navigate virtual tours.

  • Login Walls

    Demanding that users create a new account before they are able to access a website or mobile app is only justified in rare cases. Usually, people go away, rather than scale a wall placed between them and your offerings.

  • Learnability vs Efficiency in User Interface Design

    Two of the most fundamental usability metrics are learnability (the user's ability to use a new design they have not seen before) and efficiency (the speed with which people do tasks after they have learned the interface).

  • Better Forms Through Visual Organization

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

  • CX vs. UX

    Customer Experience (CX) and User Experience (UX) are two common terms that mostly mean the same thing, but have different connotations. Whatever your preferred term, it's important to consider design at 3 levels of experience.

  • Dualities of User Experience (Jakob Nielsen keynote)

    Many issues in the user-experience field don’t have a simple answer. Rather there’s a tension between two good answers that are often polar opposites. Both extremes can be useful perspectives, and both have their advocates when people debate UX. How do we resolve these differences? This was Jakob Nielsen's keynote at the UX Conference in Las Vegas.

  • Disclosing Password Constraints in the UI

    Having to register for websites, services, or apps is already annoying enough for users. But complications compound when they are faced with hidden requirements for what constitutes an acceptable password.

  • Steering Law for Cursor and Mouse Movements in a GUI Tunnel

    In a graphical user interface, having the user move a cursor within a narrow path (e.g., in a hierarchical menu or a slider) follows a strict law for how easy or difficult it is to do, depending on specifics of the GUI.

  • Simple Design Is Relative

    Simplicity depends on the capacity of the information channel and what's simple for one device, can be primitive or intricate for another, since screens are information channels with a limited capacity. When you're designing for multiple devices, don't go by common cliches like "simple is good."

  • How to Empathy Map

    A 5-step process for creating empathy maps that describe user characteristics at the start of a UX design process.

  • The Role of Enhancement in Web Design

    An enhancement is a user-interface feature that speeds up or enriches the interaction on some platforms for some users. Enhancements take advantage of special user or device capabilities and need to be backed up by more traditional ways of implementing the same interaction.

  • User Intent Affects Filter Design

    Results pages that refresh too soon or shift the page position disrupt the filtering process. Design filters and facets to offer a smooth user experience.

  • Everything I Needed to Know About Good User Experience I Learned While Working in Restaurants

    Satisfying user experiences are built on good customer-service principles. Restaurant UX provides many lessons for interaction design.

  • Long-Term Exposure to Flat Design: How the Trend Slowly Decreases User 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.

  • Smart-TV Usability: Accessing Content is Key

    UX design for television UIs should focus on minimizing user effort and providing quick and smooth access to content.

  • Preventing User Errors: Avoiding Conscious Mistakes

    Thoughtful design is transparent and easy to understand, provides a preview, and helps users to easily correct their errors.

  • Preventing User Errors: Avoiding Unconscious Slips

    Users are often distracted from the task at hand, so prevent unconscious errors by offering suggestions, utilizing constraints, and being flexible.

  • Timing Guidelines for Exposing Hidden Content

    Events triggered via hover or click require distinct timing to avoid accidental activations and ensure that the user feels in control of the interface.

  • Beware Horizontal Scrolling and Mimicking Swipe on Desktop

    Even as more sites mimic swiping gestures and incorporate horizontal scrolling in desktop designs, users remain reluctant to move sideways through content.

  • First Principles of Interaction Design (Revised & Expanded)

    Basic principles are fundamental to the design and implementation of effective interfaces, whether for traditional GUI environments, the web, mobile devices, wearables, or Internet-connected smart devices.

  • Suggested Readings From Design of Everyday Things, Revised edition (at jnd.org)

    Don Norman's list of general books for interaction design from the 2013 revision and expansion of the book "Design of Everyday Things."

  • Providing Predictable Targets (at asktog.com)

    Predictable Target should appear high on your list of mandatory rules, only to be violated when it can be proven that another consideration, in a particular circumstance, will result in even greater productivity.

  • Browse vs. Search: Which Deserves to Go? (at asktog.com)

    A reader asks for advice: "Why on earth we seem to want to browse or scroll long lists to find something when typing into a search box is so much more efficient?"

  • Parallel & Iterative Design + Competitive Testing = High Usability

    3 methods for increasing UX quality by exploring and testing diverse design ideas work even better when you use them together.

  • Mental Models

    What users believe they know about a UI strongly impacts how they use it. Mismatched mental models are common, especially with designs that try something new.

  • How to Achieve Painless Registration (at asktog.com)

    I'm about to give you a number of ways to increase sales on ecommerce sites and increase sign-ups on service sites, but first, raise your hand if you personally, when surfing the web, enjoy registering to use a site.

  • Restoring Spring to iPhone/iPod Touch Springboard (at asktog.com)

    The killer app for the iPhone/iPod Touch is the App Store. 85,000+ apps have been written and, via the App Store, 2 billion copies of those apps have been downloaded. Apple gets 30% of the revenue; the developers, 70%. Everyone has been making a lot of money.

  • Apple's Flatland Aesthetic, Part 1: The Mac (at asktog.com)

    Appleland is becoming progressively flatter and, at the same time, less usable. Properly-designed interfaces scale, so that they support the new user as well as the expert.

  • Slashing Subjective Time (at asktog.com)

    The typical web experience is a series of slow, stuttering steps, punctuated by moments of utter boredom. We can do better, and we can do it without faster processors, servers, or networks. How? By taking advantage of subjective time.

  • Progressive Disclosure

    Progressive disclosure defers advanced or rarely used features to a secondary screen, making applications easier to learn and less error-prone.