If experienced designers want to learn about psychology and how it applies to user experience, should they get a psychology degree, or is it better to learn on your own?
Qualitative usability testing aims to identify issues in an interface, while quantitative usability testing is meant to provide metrics that capture the behavior of your whole user population.
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.
A good design relies on a thorough task analysis of the steps required to complete a task, as well as determining what information users need at each step.
When users search for information, they don't always keep looking for the best solution. In our eyetracking studies 20% of the time, users make do with the first result and don't look any further.
The push for less-ethical or even deceptive user interfaces is often caused by short-term thinking and immediate UX metrics. The long-term impact of harming users can backfire and lead to reduced brand loyalty.
A confidence-interval calculation gives a probabilistic estimate of how well a metric obtained from a study explains the behavior of your whole user population.
Jakob Nielsen's 10 general principles for interaction design. They are called "heuristics" because they are broad rules of thumb for UX and not specific usability guidelines.
Visualizing user attitudes and behaviors in an empathy map helps UX teams align on a deep understanding of end users. The mapping process also reveals any holes in existing user data.
Modern day UX research methods answer a wide range of questions. To know when to use which method, each of 20 methods is mapped across 3 dimensions and over time within a typical product-development process.
A website’s tone of voice communicates how an organization feels about its message. The tone of any piece of content can be analyzed along 4 dimensions: humor, formality, respectfulness, and enthusiasm.
Elaborate usability tests are a waste of resources. The best results come from testing no more than 5 users and running as many small tests as you can afford.
Empathy maps, customer journey maps, experience maps, and service blueprints depict different processes and have different goals, yet they all build common ground within an organization.
What is design thinking and why should you care? History and background plus a quick overview and visualization of 6 phases of the design thinking process. Approaching problem solving with a hands-on, user-centric mindset leads to innovation, and innovation can lead to differentiation and a competitive advantage.
Our UX-maturity model has 6 stages that cover processes, design, research, leadership support, and longevity of UX. Use our quiz to get an idea of your organization’s UX maturity.
User interviews have become a popular technique for getting user feedback, mainly because they are fast and easy. Use them to learn about users’ perceptions of your design, not about its usability.
Eyetracking research shows that people scan webpages and phone screens in various patterns, one of them being the shape of the letter F. Eleven years after discovering this pattern, we revisit what it means today.
User interface guidelines for when to use a checkbox control and when to use a radio button control. Twelve usability issues for checkboxes and radio buttons.
Mapping can help UX practitioners synthesize insight into one place and visualize the problem space. This video covers 3 maps that are often utilized during the discovery phase of a UX design project: ecosystem maps, experience maps, and process maps.
Roadmaps cover future work and vision, but this can be done at different scopes, from everything related to the product to only the UX activities and priorities, possibly narrowed to a sub-specialty of UX.
Dual career ladders are important in user experience. Don't force talented UX professionals to become managers if their growth path would instead benefit from focusing on UX craft.
Contextual inquiry is a UX research method where you shadow people as they do their job (or leisure tasks), allowing you to ask questions in context. This video provides advice on overcoming the main challenges with this method.
Our research with UX practitioners found 3 main areas of frustrations with service-blueprint projects. Here are recommendations for overcoming or alleviating these problems.
Test early and often is a key recommendation for UX research. Dora Brune shares her approach, including regular Open Test Labs to engage more product teams and make user research more agile. Kinder Eggs make for a nice warmup task, even in remote tests. (Recorded at a participant panel at the UX Conference.)
Good UX design requires understanding the context and patterns of human behavior, especially in new products or features that solve real needs. The 5 steps to rapid corporate ethnography lead you to these discoveries.
The reciprocity principle states that people, when given something upfront, tend to feel a sense of obligation to repay what has been provided. Login walls reverse this sequence and require users to disclose personal info before allowing access to content. People often resent this, and may not be as forthcoming or cooperative as a result.
Create a team mission statement collaboratively with your team. Make sure everybody understands what a mission statement is and abstract the core purpose and value of your team by identifying themes in stories of value about your team.
Unsure how to get started using UX mapping methods? Use this collection of links to our articles and videos to learn how to visualize UX insights and ideas into mapped visualizations.
Along with design and development work, research efforts need to be represented in an Agile backlog to enable teams to focus on continuously learning about users throughout the project.
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.
ConocoPhillips included publishers in its intranet redesign to improve content processes and offer new tools to create high-quality information for employees.
Commonwealth Care Alliance began its intranet redesign with discovery research that continued into detailed design and development. Involving employees early generated excitement and contributed to the new intranet’s success.
