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Web Usability Articles & Videos

  • Carousel Usability: Designing an Effective UI for Websites with Content Overload

    Carousels allow multiple pieces of content to occupy a single, coveted space. This may placate corporate infighting, but on large or small viewports, people often scroll past carousels. A static hero or integrating content in the UI may be better solutions. But if a carousel is your hero, good navigation and content can help make it effective.

  • Usability for Senior Citizens: Improved, But Still Lacking

    Users aged 65 and older are 43% slower at using websites than users aged 21–55. This is an improvement over previous studies, but designs must change to better accommodate aging users.

  • Users' Pagination Preferences and "View All"

    Long listings might need pagination by default, but if users customize the display to View All list items, respect that preference.

  • Auto-Forwarding Carousels and Accordions Annoy Users and Reduce Visibility

    The user's target was at the top of the page in 98-point font. But she failed to find it because the panel auto-rotated instead of staying still.

  • Homepage Design Changes

    Web design is stabilizing; the average homepage is only about 40% different than it was a year before, corresponding to 3 years between complete redesigns.

  • Tunnel Vision and Selective Attention

    Users don't see stuff that's right on the screen. Selective attention makes people overlook things outside their focus of interest.

  • Why Country Sites Are So Bad

    When a multinational company produces a localized country site, usability is often lost. Local advertising agencies design good-looking sites that don't communicate.

  • Computer Screens Getting Bigger

    Reasonably big monitors have finally become the most common class of desktop computer screen, dethroning the 1024x768 resolution that was long the target for web design.

  • Disruptive Workflow Design

    Smooth-flow task performance makes application use pleasurable. But disruptions are all too common due to crinkly design or creaking implementation.

  • Browser and GUI Chrome

    'Chrome' is the user interface overhead that surrounds user data and web page content. Although chrome obesity can eat half of the available pixels, a reasonable amount enhances usability.

  • Usability 101: Introduction to Usability

    What is usability? How, when, and where to improve it? Why should you care? Overview answers basic questions + how to run fast user tests.

  • Ecommerce Usability Improvements

    Sites have improved, and we now know much more about e-tailing usability. Today, poor content is the main cause of user failure.

  • How Long Do Users Stay on Web Pages?

    Users often leave Web pages in 10–20 seconds, but pages with a clear value proposition can hold people's attention for much longer. To gain several minutes of user attention, you must clearly communicate your value proposition within 10 seconds.

  • Can Hated Design Elements Be Made to Work?

    Once users reject a design technique due to repeated bad experiences it's almost impossible to use it for good because people will avoid it every time.

  • Top 10 Mistakes in Web Design

    The ten most egregious offenses against users. Web design disasters and HTML horrors are legion, though many usability atrocities are less common than they used to be.

  • Photos as Web Content

    Users pay close attention to photos and other images that contain relevant information but ignore fluffy pictures used to "jazz up" web pages.

  • Website Response Times

    Slow page rendering today is typically caused by server delays or overly fancy page widgets, not by big images. Users still hate slow sites and don't hesitate telling us.

  • Scrolling and Attention (Original Research Study)

    Web users spend 80% of their time looking at information above the page fold. Although users do scroll, they allocate only 20% of their attention to below the fold.

  • Progress in Usability: Fast or Slow?

    Over the past decade, usability improved by 6% per year. This is a faster rate than most other fields, but much slower than technology advances might have predicted.

  • Powers of 10: Time Scales in User Experience

    From 0.1 seconds to 10 years or more, user interface design has many different timeframes, and each has its own particular usability issues.

  • Repeated User Actions Are Frustrating

    It's frustrating for users to go back-and-forth and back-and-forth to the same web page, bouncing around without getting what they need. Analytics data can help identify pages that don't help users progress.

  • 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.

  • Top 10 Web-Design Mistakes of 2021

    Jakob Nielsen condemns 10 awful design flaws that plague today's websites, as voted by the audience at his Virtual UX Conference keynote.

  • 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.

  • Short-Term Memory Limitations Impact User Interface Design

    People can only hold a small amount of information in their short-term memory, which fades fast. These facts impact most aspects of screen design and dictate many usability guidelines.

  • Breaking out of the Content Silo

    Coming from a traditional content/writing background, Michelle Blake presents her case study of broadening her remit to a fuller range of user-experience issues and improved the design of her organization's website.

  • Tooltips in the User Interface

    Tooltips are small user-triggered popups that explain UI elements when the user points to something. They are useful, but don't use them for critical information.

  • How to Design a Good Search UI

    If users don't use your search a lot, it's often because the search user interface is poorly designed. Here are the top guidelines for how to show the search feature on both desktop and mobile.

  • When is It OK to Be Inconsistent in User Interface Design?

    Consistent design enhances learnability and is usually best for usability. But if the problem you're solving is sufficiently different, then inconsistency may be better.

  • Popup Problems

    Popups and many kinds of modal dialogs are often intrusive user interface elements that get in the way of users' goals and cause annoyance. Here are some of the worst popup UX sins.

  • Faculty Pages on University Websites Persuade Prospective Students

    User research with prospective university students, ranging from kids still in high school to Ph.D. level grad students, found that they really want to know about the professors they'll be learning from, so when visiting university websites, these users (and their parents) scrutinized the faculty pages.

  • Information Scent

    Information foraging explains how users behave on the web and why they click certain links and not others. Information scent can be used to analyze how people assess a link and the page context surrounding the link to judge what's on the other end of the link.

  • Jakob's Law of Internet User Experience

    What are the shortcomings of following Jakob's Law of Internet UX (which states that "users spend most of their time on other sites")?

  • Mask Interaction Delays with Progress Indicators

    In case of slow response times in a user interface, indicate that the wait time will soon be over by showing an animation. For longer delays use a percent-done indicator.

  • Changes in Important Information-Seeking Behavior on the Internet Over 22 Years

    We studied the most important activities users perform on the internet, repeating an old classic study. Users' most critical behaviors have shifted substantially over 22 years, due to more information available online and the constant presence of mobile devices.

  • Better Forms Through Visual Organization

    How to organize and lay out your form fields and their labels to make data entry easier for users.

  • Risk of Copying Famous Companies' Designs

    If a website or company is big and famous, should you copy their design for your own site? Likely not, because good UX depends on context, and your situation could be quite different than a world-famous company's circumstances.

  • Stop Counting Clicks: The 3 Click Rule is Nonsense

    Users want to do the least amount of work possible to get to a desired web page. However, "work" is the sum of difficulty presented by each click and not the number of clicks in itself. Here are some tips for making a path easier to navigate.

  • Website Design in High-Context Cultures like China

    The contrast between low-context and high-context cultures has substantial implications for web designs that target users in different countries. Examples from eyetracking research in China (a high-context culture) illustrate this point.

  • Marking Required Fields in Online Forms

    Do you need to mark fields as "required" in forms on your website or in apps? What if all fields are required? And what is the best way to show that a form field is required?

  • 10 Usability Heuristics Applied to Complex Applications

    Nielsen’s 10 usability heuristics can be used to analyze the UX of applications that support domain-specific, complex workflows.

  • Overlay Overload: Competing Popups Are an Increasing Menace

    Today’s users are overwhelmed by a plethora of site and browser-initiated popups with content unrelated to their current task.

  • Three Levels of Pain Points in Customer Experience

    Pain points are problems that occur at the different levels of the customer experience: interaction level, customer-journey level, or relationship level.

  • User-Experience Quiz: 2020 UX Year in Review

    Test your usability knowledge by taking our quiz. All questions and answers are based on articles published last year.

  • UX Guidelines for Augmented-Reality Shopping Tools

    Ecommerce AR tools are relatively new, so must be highly discoverable and easy to learn. Calibration issues run rampant, and users must dedicate focused attention to interact with this unfamiliar feature.

  • Augmented Reality for Ecommerce: Is It Useful Yet?

    Augmented reality is an exciting technology, but the experience of using it is underwhelming, which hurts its overall perception of helpfulness.

  • Opening Links in New Browser Windows and Tabs

    Carefully examine the user’s context, task at hand, and next steps when deciding whether to open links to documents and external sites in the same or a new browser tab.

  • PDF: Still Unfit for Human Consumption, 20 Years Later

    Research spanning 20 years proves PDFs are problematic for online reading. Yet they’re still prevalent and users continue to get lost in them. They’re unpleasant to read and navigate and remain unfit for digital-content display.

  • Avoid PDF for On-Screen Reading

    Forcing users to browse PDF files causes frustration and slow task completion, compared to standard webpages. Use PDF only for documents that users will print. In those cases, following 10 basic guidelines will minimize usability problems.

  • Biggest Wins and Fails in 25 Years of UX Columns

    From 1995 to 2001 Jakob Nielsen wrote 250 articles with early usability insights that are still true but also contained predictions for aspirational changes that didn’t happen.

  • The Need for Speed, 23 Years Later

    In spite of an increase in Internet speed, webpage speeds have not improved over time.

  • Listboxes vs. Dropdown Lists

    Listboxes and dropdowns are compact UI controls that allow users to select options. Listboxes expose options right away and support multi-selection while dropdowns require a click to see options and support only single-selection.

  • Passive Information Acquisition on the Increase

    People increasingly discover critical information online without actively searching for it, but such information has poor context and may have credibility issues.

  • How to Film and Photograph Online Content for Usability: UX Details for Videos and Images

    Consider how your audience will be using the visuals to determine the optimal camera angle, set the right tone, choose the right props, and maintain attention.

  • Dark Mode vs. Light Mode: Which Is Better?

    In people with normal vision (or corrected-to-normal vision), visual performance tends to be better with light mode, whereas some people with cataract and related disorders may perform better with dark mode. On the flip side, long-term reading in light mode may be associated with myopia.

  • Information Scent: How Users Decide Where to Go Next

    When deciding which links to click on the web, users choose those with the highest information scent — which is a mix of cues that they get from the link label, the context in which the link is shown, and their prior experiences.

  • How Information-Seeking Behavior Has Changed in 22 Years

    We organize online information-seeking activities that lead to important decisions and actions according to 5 dimensions: purpose, method, content, social interaction, and device used to carry out the activity.

  • Videos as Instructional Content: User Behaviors and UX Guidelines

    Instructional video content is helpful as supplementary information, though not all users will watch it. Videos should be easily discoverable, consistent in style across the site, and with thumbnails that accurately represent the type of content they provide.

  • The Risks of Imitating Designs (Even from Successful Companies)

    Even great companies make mistakes. Don’t risk your UX by assuming it’s safe to follow a design pattern just because it’s used by a successful company.

  • User-Experience Quiz: 2019 UX Year in Review

    Test your usability knowledge by taking our quiz. All questions and answers are based on articles that we published last year.