Overview: UX

Jakob Nielsen's 10 general principles for interaction design. They are called "heuristics" because they are broad rules of thumb and not specific usability guidelines.

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 smaller the word count (and in general, the more concise your online communication), the more users will comprehend and retain your message.

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

To design a delightful product, it isn’t enough to have your user in mind—you need to truly know your user’s mind. And the most effective way to achieve this is through user interviews.

concept of card sorting... UX. The popular, low-tech research technique is used to organize data sets. It’s especially useful for information architecture, menu structures, workflows and website navigation. While it’s easy enough to run a card sort, there’s a massive difference between a flop and a success.

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.

If you want to work in UI (or work with a UI designer), you need to speak the language. In our UI glossary, we’ve compiled (and explained) 100 terms, phrases and resources all designers should know.

Unsure where to start? Use this collection of links to our articles and videos to learn how to write and present information that aligns with users’ needs and online reading behaviors.

...from news media to legal guidance to academic research, the way we write often creates barriers to who can read it. Plain language—a style of writing that uses simplified sentences, everyday vocabulary, and clear structure—aims to remove those barriers.

Plain language and website fonts affect the reading experience more than you think

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.