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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

  • Expandable Menus: Pull-Down, Square, or Pie?

    Selecting an option inside a menu depends on how far away that option is from the menu icon. Drop-down menus, megamenus, pie or radial menus, and marking menus arrange items in different patterns to optimize the reach time.

  • The Role of Enhancement in Web Design

    An enhancement is a user-interface feature that speeds up or enriches the interaction on some platforms for some users. Enhancements take advantage of special user or device capabilities and need to be backed up by more traditional ways of implementing the same interaction.

  • Mobile Websites: Mobile-Dedicated, Responsive, Adaptive, or Desktop Site?

    Different approaches to implementing mobile websites have each their advantages and disadvantages. All should follow the same mobile user-experience principles.

  • Priming and User Interfaces

    Exposure to a stimulus influences behavior in subsequent, possibly unrelated tasks. This is called priming; priming effects abound in usability and web design.

  • User-Experience Quiz: 2015 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.

  • Basic Patterns for Mobile Navigation: A Primer

    Mobile navigation must be discoverable, accessible, and take little screen space. Exposing the navigation and hiding it in a hamburger both have pros and cons.

  • 3D Touch on iPhone 6S: Embrace the Force

    The iOS gesture poses some physical challenges for users. Designers should take advantage of it to enhance the user experience by making pages previewable and supporting quick access to frequently used features.

  • iOS 9 App Switching and the Back-to-App Button

    App switching in iOS 9 can disorient users in multiple ways. Simple design fixes can significantly improve the user experience.

  • 4 iOS Rules to Break

    Page control (dots), Submit at top, and the Plus (+) and Move icons are 4 common iOS patterns that cause usability problems in testing.

  • A Checklist for Designing Mobile Input Fields

    When you design an input field for use on mobile devices, check whether it satisfies this list of 14 usability requirements.