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Aurora Harley

Aurora Harley is a Senior User Experience Specialist with Nielsen Norman Group. Aurora’s research and consulting experience includes organizations in a variety of industries, such as ecommerce, travel, healthcare, and B2B (business-to-business). She also conducts independent research for NN/g, and regularly leads training courses on mobile usability, UX strategies, psychology and UX, and analytics. Aurora combines her background in front-end web development and UX design to inform her work, creating effective designs that balance technical, business, and user needs.

@aurorararara

Articles and Videos

  • Ideation for Everyday Design Challenges

    Improve your UI design solutions by considering many ideas before settling on any one of them. A solid ideation methodology broadens your idea-generation capacity.

  • Optimize for Return Visits, not Bounce Rate

    Use bounce rate as a red flag for possible issues lurking on your site, but don’t make design decisions aimed solely at chasing that second click. Optimize for long-term engagement through return visits and track deeper conversion goals.

  • Frequency & Recency of Site Visits: 2 Metrics for User Engagement

    How often people visit your site and how long they wait between two visits can help to gauge visitor loyalty and to uncover the behavioral trends distinguishing frequent users from occasional ones.

  • Visual Indicators to Differentiate Items in a List

    Users are 37% faster at finding items within a list when visual indicators vary both in color and icon compared to text alone. If choosing between using color or an icon, icons with strong information scent perform better than color alone.

  • Prospect Theory and Loss Aversion: How Users Make Decisions

    When choosing among several alternatives, people avoid losses and optimize for sure wins because the pain of losing is greater than the satisfaction of an equivalent gain. UX designs should frame decisions accordingly.

  • Trustworthiness in Web Design: 4 Credibility Factors

    The methods that people use to determine trustworthiness on the web have remained stable throughout the years, even with changing design trends.

  • Perceived Value in User Interfaces

    The perceived value of a site represents the benefit that users expect to derive from using it. High expectations make users more likely to engage with the site.

  • Usability Testing of Icons

    To ensure that people understand the meaning and purpose of icons, conduct multiple types of tests at various stages of the product-development cycle.

  • List Thumbnails on Mobile: When to Use Them and Where to Place Them

    Decide whether and where to display thumbnails for list items based on the images’ importance relative to associated text, on whether images will be displayed for all list items, and on whether the small images are recognizably different from each other.

  • Ensure High Contrast for Text Over Images

    If you place text over a background image, make sure it’s readable by providing adequate contrast. Subtle tweaks can increase the contrast without affecting the overall aesthetic of the site.