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Articles

Raluca Budiu

Raluca Budiu is Director of Research at Nielsen Norman Group, where she consults for clients from a variety of industries and presents tutorials on mobile usability, designing interfaces for multiple devices, quantitative usability methods, cognitive psychology for designers, and principles of human-computer interaction. She also serves as editor for the articles published on NNgroup.com. Raluca coauthored the NN/g reports on tablet usability, mobile usability, iPad usability, and the usability of children's websites, as well as the book Mobile Usability. She holds a Ph.D. from Carnegie Mellon University.

@rbudiu

Articles and Videos

  • Accordion Icons: Which Signifiers Work Best?

    The caret icon most clearly indicated to users that it would open an accordion in place, rather than linking directly to a new page.

  • Online Shopping for Food and Groceries During Covid-19: Workflow Issues Impact the Ecommerce Customer Experience

    Allow users to reserve delivery windows before they start shopping; clearly communicate delivery minimums and fees; allow users to specify substitutions for low-stock items as they shop.

  • Dark Mode vs. Light Mode: Which Is Better?

    In people with normal vision (or corrected-to-normal vision), visual performance tends to be better with light mode, whereas some people with cataract and related disorders may perform better with dark mode. On the flip side, long-term reading in light mode may be associated with myopia.

  • Information Scent: How Users Decide Where to Go Next

    When deciding which links to click on the web, users choose those with the highest information scent — which is a mix of cues that they get from the link label, the context in which the link is shown, and their prior experiences.

  • Don't Report Numbers from Small UX Studies

    Testing a small number of participants gives qualitative insights, which are great. But if 4 out of 5 test users do something, don't conclude that 80% of all users will do the same.

  • User-Experience Quiz: 2019 UX Year in Review

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

  • 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?

  • Mental Models for Cloud-Storage Systems

    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.

  • Information Foraging: A Theory of How People Navigate on the Web

    To decide whether to visit a page, people take into account how much relevant information they are likely to find on that page relative to the effort involved in extracting that info.

  • 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.