UX Guidelines For... Almost Everything! Design patterns and best practices, from dashboards, data tables and filters to onboarding, sorting and search UX -- by Vitaly Friedman, UX Designer • Smart Interface Design Patterns • Founder/Editor-in-chief of SmashingMag

Unsure where to start? Use this collection of links to our articles and videos to learn more about accessible and inclusive design.

To improve crossfunctional collaboration, UX teams must be aware of the challenges they face and develop tailored solutions for each unique challenge

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Determining the nature and properties of trust at first may seem pointless [...] As it relates to UX design, it’s a scientific concept that means the difference between a user building faith in a design and staying to interact more, or that user leaving, never to return and perhaps telling others to beware of it.

The choices are so many that the decision to pick one (the optimal), becomes unmanageably hard. And even when a choice is made, second thoughts and doubts about whether it was the best, linger in the background, slowly consuming brain energy and peace of mind.

A while back, in the early days of our design system, we had a ticket for a component sitting in our backlog, with the title “Alert.” My initial reaction was “Oh yeah, a colored box with a little icon to the left of it and some text, easy.” Oh dear reader, how naive I was…

What separates great products from good ones? Attractive designs? User testing? Genius designers? Well, these might be contributory factors, but the true distinction lies in how they make users feel. Emotional design plays a huge role in the success of UX design.

The MVP awoke one morning from uneasy dreams and found itself transformed into a giant insect. It had devolved so far that it bore no resemblance to its former self. However, the fault was not in The Lean Startup but in a pervasive culture of overpromising and underdelivering.

Skilled UX designers and teams use tools such as empathy mapping to help them create products that keep the user or customer at the center of the design process, resulting in a product that resonates with users and provides a good user experience. But what is an empathy map, what are its uses, and how does empathy mapping fit into the process?

Product managers share common goals, strengths, activities, and skill sets. Awareness of these commonalities helps designers figure out how to best collaborate with product managers on Agile teams.

Chat GPT to brainstorm ideas, write document outlines, compose tweets, make my emails friendlier, and much more. Recently, I even used it to suggest a possible information architecture based on the site content I provided.

The more choices a user has to make, the bigger the risk of getting into trouble. More features can easily reduce usability.

It's hard work to make a user interface that's easy to use. The end result may seem obvious to an outsider, but ease-of-use comes from trying out many design ideas and rejecting ones that are too difficult while polishing those that make the UI better.

Unsure where to start? Use this collection of links to our articles and videos to learn about visual design in UX.

A myriad of fields, skills and insights come together to create the overarching discipline of user experience design... Let’s explore five behavioral science insights you can use right now to design better products

In this article we’ll be taking at look at what exactly UX designers mean by the term heuristic evaluation, how to conduct a heuristic evaluation for yourself, what to do if you can’t afford a usability expert, and the difference between a heuristic evaluation and user testing.

Users visit websites and use apps to get things done, so emphasize the content of interest to communicate with your audience. Avoid design pollution that decorates the UI with non-communicative elements.

The foundation of user experience is the difference between the people on the design team and the people using the product. You can't ask users to design, but you also can't ask the designers whether their own design will be easy for the target audience to use.

Some UX designers (and many clients) aim to "jazz up" the design to supposedly engage users. This usually backfires because extraneous design elements get in the way of users' tasks.

The funnel technique is used in user interviews and usability tests and ensures you get rich insights while not compromising validity.

User research is an essential part of UX design. Unless we understand who we are designing for and why, how can we even know what to create or where to begin?

User research is the methodic study of target users—including their needs and pain points—so designers have the sharpest possible insights to work with to make the best designs. User researchers use various methods to expose problems and design opportunities, and find crucial information to use in their design process.

Being aware of our cognitive biases helps to recognize their power in shaping our thoughts, opinions, attitudes and the decisions we make. Let’s check out these effects by analyzing ten cognitive biases that shape our world today.

To strengthen people’s memory skills, we should design interfaces that help users practice recall.

principles of design every graphic designer should be familiar with:HierarchyBalanceAlignmentEmphasisProportionMovementNegative SpaceContrastRepetitionVarietyUnity

Fitts's Law describes how long time it takes to click a target, based on the distance to the target and its size. Use this information to make buttons and links faster to click.

The homepage remains the “front door” for the many users who still begin their browsing experience here. Avoiding the 8 common UX issues discussed in this article is the first step toward improving users’ Homepage experience

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.

We’re not as rational as we think. The human brain is designed to make quick and effective decisions rather than stick to facts at all times. Instead of acting rationally, we prefer to act fast. This may lead to better outcomes indeed, but it might also lead you astray. Cognitive biases can be both a blessing and a curse.