Overview: UX

For its first two years, the web was a text-only medium with a command-line user interface similar to the UI for current generative AI tools like ChatGPT. Only after GUI browsers launched in 1993 did the web explode. AI needs a similar GUI revolution in usability.

Two new user behaviors are prevalent in interactions with text-based AI chatbots. User research shows the iterative and often complex ways users engage with AI tools for productivity.

Users spend most of their time on other websites, so they expect your site to work like all the other sites they already know. When a design deviates from users’ expectations, usability suffers. Don’t be arrogant and assume that your new design idea is so brilliant that it can overrule decades of user habituation.

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

People Don’t Read Online—They Scan. This Is How to Write for Them Scanning is searching. Reader’s behavior when scanning may seem pure laziness, but it’s not. It’s an efficient strategy to seek out and filter information. Scanning also allows readers to avoid informational overload.

Heuristic evaluation is the activity of using a set of guidelines (heuristics) to evaluate if an interface is user-friendly. Let’s look at what heuristics are and how you can conduct a heuristic evaluation to improve the usability of your designs

Design effective error messages by ensuring they are highly visible, provide constructive communication, and respect user effort.

Your constantly-updated definition of Mobile User Experience (UX) Design and collection of topical content and literature

In a distracted environment, the best form of smartphone interaction is a high-speed, easy-to-use one. Luke calls the typical mobile usage a "one thumb, one eyeball" experience, since the highly distracted environment causes most mobile users to engage in one-handed use with short spans of partial attention.

The easier your mobile application is to learn to use and the easier it is for your users to find the functionality to learn it – the more useful that application is likely to be to the user. The user experience is also likely to greater.

Hick’s Law (or the Hick-Hyman Law) states that the more choices a person is presented with, the longer the person will take to reach a decision. Named after psychologists William Edmund Hick and Ray Hyman, Hick’s Law finds frequent application in user experience (UX) design—namely, to avoid overwhelming users with too many choices, thereby keeping

A good design process: How is someone navigating through it? How are these things co-located together? Which pages are we grouping together? Can people find them? ... less attached to the tone of voice and more interested in simplicity and utility ... more like an architect than a prose-writer, putting LEGO blocks together in the most useful w…

If a website is difficult to use, people leave. How to define usability? How, when, and where to improve it? Why should you care? Overview defines key usability concepts and answers basic questions.

Usability assesses how easy user interfaces are to use. Usability is defined by 5 quality components: learnability, efficiency, memorability, errors, and satisfaction.

Surveys asking users to give feedback during or after an interaction should not interrupt the users' task and should be sent to the appropriate channel. They need to be short, easy to complete, and give the user the opportunity to provide details about their experience.

Unsure where to start? Use this collection of links to our articles and videos to learn more about the basics of user experience.

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…

Users should not have to wonder whether different words, situations, or actions mean the same thing. Follow platform and industry conventions.

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.

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.

We'll ask questions about how your organization approaches UX. Based on your answers, we'll give you an estimate of your organization's UX maturity. This assessment is based on the Nielsen Norman Group UX Maturity Model. There are six stages in the UX maturity model.

The case for accessibility has to be about more than a legal and moral requirement. It has to persuade management that accessibility will generate a return on investment.

The phrase ‘Learn More’ is increasingly used as a crutch for link labels. But the text has poor information scent and is bad for accessibility. With a little effort, transform this filler copy into descriptive labels that help users confidently predict what the next page will be.

accessibility in journalism is important for everyone: Making news products more accessible, after all, often means making them more user-friendly and efficient. He hopes to discover and standardize ways of making the Post’s journalism accessible to as many people as possible.

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.