Skip navigation

Articles

Sarah Gibbons

Sarah Gibbons is Nielsen Norman Group's Chief Designer. She works at the intersection of design research, strategy, and user experience design.

Articles and Videos

  • How UX Professionals Define Design Thinking in Practice

    We conducted research with UX professionals and designers to find out what they think Design Thinking actually is. What attributes do practitioners assign to Design Thinking, as used in practice? And how does this understanding evolve as practitioners get more experience?

  • Cognitive Mapping in User Research

    In cognitive mapping sessions, users are asked to produce a visual representation of their mental models. This type of user interview can provide stimulus for conversation, generate insights, and act as a facilitation aid.

  • Cognitive Maps, Mind Maps, and Concept Maps: Definitions

    Cognitive maps, concept maps, and mind maps are diagramming techniques that can be utilized throughout the UX process to visualize knowledge and surface relationships among concepts.

  • How to Present UX Design Ideas

    Don't just show your proposed user-interface solution. Set the stage with the necessary background for understanding the design, and follow through with visuals that tell the full UX story.

  • Dot Voting: A Simple Decision-Making and Prioritizing Technique in UX

    By placing colored dots, participants in UX workshops, activities, or collaborative sessions individually vote on the importance of design ideas, features, usability findings, and anything else that requires prioritization.

  • UX vs. Service Design

    What's the difference between user experience and service design? Or, more to the point, how does good service design support a good user experience?

  • Customer Journey Mapping 101

    The 5 components of a journey map and the benefits of using this qualitative method as part of a UX design process to discover, document, and share the bigger picture of what users want.

  • Sympathy vs. Empathy in UX

    The majority of UX professionals practice sympathy instead of empathy for their users.

  • Top 5 Mistakes in Running UX Workshops

    Workshops are a useful tool in the user-experience design process, but mistakes are common when the workshop facilitator didn't prepare right, causing the team to waste time.

  • User Need Statements: The ‘Define’ Stage in Design Thinking

    User need statements, also called problem statements or point-of-view statements, are a powerful, fundamental tool for defining and aligning on the problem you are going to solve.