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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

  • Mobile Microsessions

    Notifications, widgets, quick actions, and Siri shortcuts or Google Assistant routines are all ways to support mobile sessions shorter than 15 seconds, with minimal interaction to complete a user goal.

  • Between-Subject vs. Within-Subject Study Design in User Research

    There are two ways to structure a UX research study when we're testing two (or more) designs: we can have each design tested by different people, or we can reuse the same users for all conditions. Each approach has some advantages and problems.

  • Do People Scroll? What Information Foraging Says

    People scroll down web pages only if they have reasons to do so. Information-foraging theory explains for how long people stay on the page and why.

  • 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."

  • Marking Required Fields in Forms

    Using an asterisk to mark required fields is an easy way to improve the usability of your forms. Only marking optional fields makes it difficult for people to fill out the form.

  • Tesla’s Touchscreen UI: A Case Study of Car-Dashboard User Interface

    Vehicle controls should be easily accessible and require minimum attention from drivers, while driving-related information should be displayed clearly and understandably.

  • Usability Heuristic 6: Recognition vs. Recall in User Interfaces

    #6 of the top 10 UX design heuristics is to design user interfaces to facilitate #memory recognition which is easier than recall because there are more cues available to facilitate the retrieval of information from memory.

  • Intelligent Assistants: Where We Are and Where We Should Be

    Are Siri, Alexa, and Google Assistant truly intelligent? While they do have some "intelligent" features, they are still far from what people expect such an intelligent assistant to do.

  • Mental Models for Intelligent Assistants

    Users of Siri, Alexa, and Google Assistant conceptualize them in one of 3 ways: an interface, a personal assistant, or a brain. Frequent users are less likely to push the interaction limits of these AI systems than new users.

  • The User Experience of Customer-Service Chat: 20 Guidelines

    Chat is hard to find on many websites; it is often inefficiently designed and supplies too superficial information.