Overview: UX

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 keep your stakeholders and team members engaged, incorporate storytelling techniques such as writing for your audience, adding anecdotes, and using analogies in your asynchronous research deliverables.

Table design should support four common user tasks: find records that fit specific criteria, compare data, view/edit/add a single row’s data, and take actions on records.

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

Addressing these 3 fundamental psychological needs in our products increases user motivation and well-being and keeps them engaged and likely to use our designs.

Both UX workshops and usability tests benefit when facilitators are focused on goals, follow a meeting guide yet are open to improvisation, encourage participants to act, and don’t talk too much.

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.

40 participants is an appropriate number for most quantitative studies, but there are cases where you can recruit fewer users.

usability testing is not your only option. If I am honest, I am doing less and less usability testing, but instead focusing more on lightweight testing that can be done often and brings more value in getting projects out of the door.

Wherever you work, we all have stakeholders that we need to win over, and the language we use to communicate with them will have a significant impact on whether we succeed or not.

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

User journeys should be managed like products — by people and teams with specialized, journey-dedicated roles who continually research, measure, optimize, and orchestrate the experience.

Jakob Nielsen’s 10 usability heuristics can improve the user experience of VR applications.

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.

A good design relies on a thorough task analysis of the steps required to complete a task, as well as determining what information users need at each step.

Tried and true principles for the past, present, and future of good design

there are many straightforward methods and strategies for measuring design impact. Two areas I recently combined while exploring the design impact at Gem—where we're building the source of truth for top-of-funnel recruiting—are top tasks and PURE (Pragmatic Usability Ratings by Experts). Here's how I did it.

One of these roles is a UX Strategist, which aligns user experience design with the business goals and strategy of the company.

It isn’t a mystery that a large part of delivering a highly successful user experience is understanding what the customer wants/needs along with the cognition that consequently gets customers thinking about what they want/need.

what the differences are between the many different types of visualizations, from “flow-charts” to “User Flows,” and why so many people misunderstand them.

This article explores a few cognitive biases I’ve experienced first-hand as well as strategies for mitigating their influence.

As designers, as creators and managers of websites and apps, we can start by focusing on two principles: Do not track Delete

Any efficient communication requires that communication partners establish and rely on common ground so that they can take communication shortcuts.

Succinctly documenting the right details in key places helps Agile teams avoid information overload. When UX documentation is skipped or disorganized, teams waste time trying to find or remember information instead of improving the product.

A survey of people in user experience and product management shows that these professionals disagree on who should be responsible for many key tasks, like doing discoveries and early design.

Persistent headers can be useful to users if they are unobtrusive, high-contrast, minimally animated, and fit user needs.

A survey of 372 UX and PM professionals shows that duplicative work is frequent and generates confusion and inefficiency.

Frequent major redesigns and changes throughout the interface support users’ need to learn and adapt to new situations.

The single most important thing I’ve learned about online marketing is that it is about paying attention. Offline marketing is about getting attention, but once someone is on your website, they know what they want to do, so your first job is to help them do what they came to you website to do as quickly and easily as possible.