Skip navigation

Visual Design Articles & Videos

  • The Golden Ratio and User-Interface Design

    Although traditionally used in art and architecture, the golden ratio can be referenced to design aesthetically pleasing interfaces.

  • 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.

  • Better Charts for Analytics & Quantitative UX Data

    Spreadsheet defaults don't generate the most meaningful visualizations of UX data. Modify charts to enhance Context, Clutter (less of it than spreadsheet software likes!), and Contrast.

  • Principle of Closure in Visual Design

    People tend to fill in blanks to perceive a complete object.

  • Using Color to Enhance Your Design

    To support the user experience, colors need to be combined wisely so that they work together well, do not overwhelm, and communicate the same kind of information everywhere in the interface.

  • 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!)

  • Left-Side Vertical Navigation on Desktop: Scalable, Responsive, and Easy to Scan

    Vertical navigation is a good fit for broad or growing IAs, but takes up more space than horizontal navigation. Ensure that it is left-aligned, keyword front-loaded, and visible.

  • The Visual Principle of Contrast in UI Design

    When visual design elements appear clearly different (for example, have contrasting colors) users easily deduce that the contrasting item is different or special in some way. So if it actually is different, this enhances usability.

  • Applying UX Principles to the Visual Design of Graphical Artifacts: The Case of the Heuristics Posters

    We made the 10 heuristics’ posters easy to read and understand by iterating through multiple versions and improving each based on user-centered principles and methods.

  • Why Does a Design Look Good?

    Visually aesthetic designs use consistent typography, establish a clear hierarchy, utilize a refined color palette, and align to a grid.

  • Aesthetic and Minimalist Design (Usability Heuristic #8)

    Aesthetically pleasing designs can provide memorable experiences that differentiate a brand. However, interfaces should only include necessary elements, with high informational value. Clarity will always win over visual flourish.

  • Visual Hierarchy in UX: Definition

    A clear visual hierarchy guides the eye to the most important elements on the page. It can be created through variations in color and contrast, scale, and grouping.

  • 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.

  • Data Visualizations for Dashboards

    To enable fast and reliable understanding of data shown on dashboard overviews, use visualization styles that work with human preattentive visual processing.

  • The Visual Principle of Scale in User Interface Design

    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.

  • 4 Trustworthiness Factors

    Users are constantly evaluating whether they believe what you're saying and whether to leave a website. You can do 4 things to make users trust you more and stay on your site.

  • Vote By Mail: Mistakes Are Too Easy

    The design of vote-by-mail materials (made imperative by the COVID-19 pandemic) have UX issues that make the voting process unnecessarily difficult and error prone.

  • Similarity Principle in Visual Design

    Design elements that appear similar in some way — sharing the same color, shape, or size — are perceived as related, while elements that appear dissimilar are perceived as belonging to separate groups.

  • UX Portfolios: What Hiring Managers Look For

    We asked over 200 hiring managers who hire for UX jobs what they look for in candidates' portfolios. The expectations are different for people looking to be hired as designers vs. as researchers, and also different for junior vs. senior positions.

  • 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.

  • Better Charts for Analytics & Quantitative UX Data

    Spreadsheet defaults don't generate the most meaningful visualizations of UX data. Modify charts to enhance Context, Clutter (less of it than spreadsheet software likes!), and Contrast.

  • 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!)

  • The Visual Principle of Contrast in UI Design

    When visual design elements appear clearly different (for example, have contrasting colors) users easily deduce that the contrasting item is different or special in some way. So if it actually is different, this enhances usability.

  • 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.

  • Data Visualizations for Dashboards

    To enable fast and reliable understanding of data shown on dashboard overviews, use visualization styles that work with human preattentive visual processing.

  • The Visual Principle of Scale in User Interface Design

    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.

  • 4 Trustworthiness Factors

    Users are constantly evaluating whether they believe what you're saying and whether to leave a website. You can do 4 things to make users trust you more and stay on your site.

  • UX Portfolios: What Hiring Managers Look For

    We asked over 200 hiring managers who hire for UX jobs what they look for in candidates' portfolios. The expectations are different for people looking to be hired as designers vs. as researchers, and also different for junior vs. senior positions.

  • 4 Things to Do When Designing for Seniors

    The number of senior citizens who use computers and the Internet grows every year. This user population does have special needs, driven by the human aging process, and modest design changes can vastly increase the business you get from seniors.

  • Transitioning from UI to UX

    Anybody who's already a good UI designer and can make great screens, has a big head start to becoming a good UX designer, but more is required to excel in this expanded role.

  • Usability Heuristic 8: Aesthetic and Minimalist Design

    No. 8 of the top 10 UX design heuristics is to remove unnecessary elements from the user interface and to maximize the signal-to-noise ratio of the design.

  • Change Blindness in User Interfaces

    Change blindness is the tendency for people to overlook things that change outside their focus of attention. In user interface design, this explains why screen changes that seem striking to the designer can be completely ignored by users.

  • Usability Heuristic 1: Visibility of System Status

    No. 1 of the top 10 UX design heuristics is to provide visibility of system status through proper feedback, so that the user knows how commands are being interpreted and what the computer is up to at any time.

  • 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."

  • Why You Should Use a Grid for Designing Layouts

    Grids are a great framework to help designers quickly put together a clean, well-aligned interface, and help users to easily scan, read, and use those interfaces.

  • Animations Are Distracting!

    Moving UI elements attract attention, which often means distracting users from accomplishing their primary goals. Some types of animations are more distracting than others, and it's important to match how attention grabbing the motion is to the context and user needs.

  • How to Test Visual Design

    Visual design details like fonts and colors can have subtle but important effects on the overall user experience. Use research methods that are sensitive to these effects to test your visual design.

  • Decorative Images: Delightful or Dreadful?

    Images are content, and different types of images serve different purposes. Decorative images have a role in establishing tone and emotional appeal, but they must not interfere with a user’s ability to accomplish a task.

  • Closeness of Actions and Objects in GUI Design

    Users overlook features if the GUI elements (such as buttons and checkboxes) are too far away from the objects they act on.

  • Fancy Formatting, Fancy Words = Looks Like a Promotion = Ignored

    A site did most things right, but still had a miserable 14% success rate for its most important task. The reason? Users ignored a key area because it resembled a promotion.

  • Banner Blindness: The Original Eyetracking Research

    Users rarely look at display advertisements on websites. Of the 4 design elements that do attract a few ad fixations, one is unethical and reduces the value of advertising networks.

  • Recommended Books About Visual Design

    Jakob Nielsen's short list of recommended books about visual interface design (especially Web graphics).

  • Screen Resolution and Page Layout

    Optimize Web pages for 1024x768, but use a liquid layout that stretches well for any resolution, from 800x600 to 1280x1024.

  • Differences Between Print Design and Web Design

    Anything that is a great print design is likely to be a lousy web design. The big canvas size and controlled layout make print visually superior; web interaction is more engaging.

  • The Definition of User Experience (UX)

    "User experience" encompasses all aspects of the end-user's interaction with the company, its services, and its products.

  • Usability Testing of Advanced Homepage Concepts for the Sun Microsystems' 1997 Web Design

    Users' reactions to early design ideas for the Sun Microsystems' 1997 Web site demonstrate that users are becoming more web sophisticated, and prefer straightfoward access to content.

  • Seductive User Interfaces

    Because computers are no longer used exclusively for utilitarian tasks, we should use systematic methods to design products that are not just efficient but also attractive to users.

  • Iterative Design and Testing of Icon Usability

    Icons for Sun Microsystems' website design were designed and tested in several iterations, both independent of and in context with the full Web site design.

  • Why No Graphics?

    Useit.com, Jakob Nielsen's site from 1995-2012, had almost no graphics because fast download times are the number one criterion for Web usability.