8 Design Guidelines for Complex Applications
Despite great diversity in the workflows and end users supported by complex applications, these 8 design guidelines are generally applicable.
my_library
7 Ways to Analyze a Customer-Journey Map
Evaluate your journey map to identify low and high points, failures to set expectations, unnecessary or too long steps, channel transitions, and moments of truth. Use this information to find opportunities for improving the journey.
How to Leverage Thematic Analysis for Better UX | Toptal®
Thematic analysis, an approach used to analyze qualitative data, is central to credible research and can be used to improve UX design by uncovering user needs, motivations, and behaviors. #Research #Product #Design #UX #Web #B2B
The Role Of Storyboarding In UX Design — Smashing Magazine
UX designers use a lot of different research techniques, such as interviews and workshops. They summarize research findings into user stories and user flows and communicate their thinking and solutions to the teams. But somewhere in all of this, there are real people for whom…
Vanity Metrics: Add Context to Add Meaning
Tracked analytics metrics should reflect change in the user experience. Vanity metrics appear impressive, but their fluctuations are not actionable.
UI Animation – All You Need to Know and Examples
Are you using UI animation to make your products exciting and accessible? Draw inspiration from these four UI animations.
The Role of Animation and Motion in UX
Animation in UX must be unobtrusive, brief, and subtle. Use it for feedback, state-change and navigation metaphors, and to enhance signifiers.
UI Design Best Practices for Better Scannability | Toptal®
Sixty percent of first-time visitors leave a website in less than fifteen seconds. Yet, there is an often overlooked usability factor that improves visitor retention—scannability. These UI design tips for using research, science, and strategy to layout content help convert…
Front-End Performance Checklist 2021 (PDF, Apple Pages, MS Word) — Smashing Magazine
Let’s make 2021... fast! An annual front-end performance checklist, with everything you need to know to create fast experiences on the web today, from metrics to tooling and CSS/JavaScript techniques.
Using Cognitive Psychology in UX Design: What to Know - noupe
Even if a website is spotless from the UI viewpoint, it could still deliver poor user experiences. Apart from their technical knowledge, UX developers
Sympathy vs. Empathy in UX
The majority of UX professionals practice sympathy instead of empathy for their users.
Web Layout Best Practices – 12 Timeless UI Patterns | Toptal®
What makes a web UI pattern timeless? Adherence to web layout best practices that result in a combination of user-friendliness and adaptability to changing trends and technology. #design #ui #design #ux #web #product
The Paradox of Intelligent Assistants: Poor Usability, High Adoption
Frequent users of Siri, Alexa, and Google Assistant report attempting low-complexity tasks such as simple fact retrievals, weather forecast, navigation, playing music, setting timers.
Benchmarking UX: Tracking Metrics
Quantitatively evaluate a product or service’s user experience by using metrics to gauge its relative performance against a meaningful standard.
Good UX: What I Learned While Working in Restaurants
Good UX has great customer service at its base. Restaurants provide many instructive examples for designers.
User-Experience Quiz 2023
Test your usability knowledge by taking our quiz. All questions and answers are based on articles that we published last year.
The Lawn Mower Eyetracking Pattern for Scanning Comparison Tables
Users are likely to methodically scan comparison tables row by row, from right to left and back again.
The 6 UX Methods That Proved to Be Effective in Driving Results
Experimenting with creative UX methods. Creativity plays an important role, but your designs must drive results to make products successful.
In Defense of Post-its
Sticky notes strengthen team dynamics and represent an egalitarian, concise means for expressing ideas in UX design projects.
Learnability in UX Design
Building a learnable website is much tougher than it sounds.One thinks one’s design is clear and comprehensible; however, a design that might be obvious for you, might be perceived totally different by a user with a different set of experiences. Therefore, the goal is to design…
Navigating Ambiguity :: UXmatters
Web magazine about user experience matters, providing insights and inspiration for the user experience community
Book Review: The Jobs To Be Done Playbook :: UXmatters
Web magazine about user experience matters, providing insights and inspiration for the user experience community
Dot Voting: A Simple Decision-Making and Prioritizing Technique in UX
By placing colored dots, participants in UX workshops, activities, or collaborative sessions individually vote on the importance of design ideas, features, usability findings, and anything else that requires prioritization.
Journey Mapping 101
A journey map is a visualization of the process that a person goes through in order to accomplish a goal.
Why You Only Need to Test with 5 Users
Elaborate usability tests are a waste of resources. The best results come from testing no more than 5 users and running as many small tests as you can afford.
How To Deliver A Successful UX Project In The Healthcare Sector — Smashing Magazine
UX researchers can learn a lot from hospital patients through empathetic interviews — but that alone is not enough. Instead, you need to pay particular attention to how your users’ clinical context influences their perceptions, trust, and the care they receive. If you are a UX…
UX Guidelines for Ecommerce Homepages, Category Pages, and Product Listing Pages
Streamline users’ path to products by providing clear, differentiating product information at all levels — from the homepage to product listing pages.
3 Persona Types: Lightweight, Qualitative, and Statistical
For most teams, approaching persona creation qualitatively is the right balance of effort vs. value, but very large or very small organizations might benefit from statistical or lightweight approaches, respectively.
Better Link Labels: 4Ss for Encouraging Clicks
Specific link text sets sincere expectations and fulfills them, and is substantial enough to stand alone while remaining succinct.
Cognitive Mapping in User Research
In cognitive mapping sessions, users are asked to produce a visual representation of their mental models. Cognitive mapping guides conversation and acts as a facilitation aid.
‘Our Users Are Everyone’: Designing Mass-Market Products for Large User Audiences
Even if your target demographics are very broad, you should still identify specific groups of users within that audience to use for UX research and design.
Artificial Intelligence, Supervised Learning, and User Experience :: UXmatters
Web magazine about user experience matters, providing insights and inspiration for the user experience community
Top books, movies, and series recommended by designers in 2019
Here’s a list of great books, movies, and tv series that designers liked in 2019. It’s probably not the most objective, but surely very interesting.
Design Principles: Compositional Flow And Rhythm — Smashing Magazine
Compositional flow determines how the eye is led through a design: where it looks first, where it looks next, where the eye pauses, and how long it stays. You have a lot of control over where people look when they’re viewing a webpage you’ve designed. On a text-heavy and…
The Complete Guide to UX Research Methods | Toptal®
UX research provides invaluable insight into what people need and value. Not only will UX research reduce the risk of a wrong guess, but it’ll also uncover new opportunities for innovation. #ux #uxresearch #ProductDesign
Discussion Guide Gaffes and How to Fix Them :: UXmatters
Web magazine about user experience matters, providing insights and inspiration for the user experience community
Hick’s Law: Making the choice easier for users
Use Hick’s Law to examine how many functions you should offer at any part of your website & how this will affect your users’ overall approach to decision making.
What is Change Blindness in UX Design - noupe
When researchers carry out usability testing, they have often observed that users overlook a change on the screen otherwise considered obvious and highly
Design Principles: Visual Weight And Direction — Smashing Magazine
Visual direction is the perceived direction of forces acting on and exerted by elements. A visually heavy element will attract the eye to it. The direction is a cue to the viewer’s eye to move elsewhere. We refer to this force as visual weight and to the perceived direction of…
Avoid PDF for On-Screen Reading
Forcing users to browse PDF files causes frustration and slow task completion, compared to standard webpages. Use PDF only for documents that users will print. In those cases, following 10 basic guidelines will minimize usability problems.
Is The F-Pattern Still Relevant in Web Design?
When we refer to patterns like the F-pattern, Gutenberg layout, or layer-cake pattern in web design, what we’re talking about is how readers scan the content on a page. As you can see from these eye-tracking studies from NNG, the F-pattern isn’t always an explicit “F”…
Lessons on Visualization from the Industrial Environment :: UXmatters
Web magazine about user experience matters, providing insights and inspiration for the user experience community
Login Walls Stop Users in Their Tracks
Demanding that users register or log in before they can use an app or see website information has high interaction cost and defies the reciprocity principle.
Spatial Memory: Why It Matters for UX Design
With repeated practice, users develop imprecise memory of objects and content in a UI, but still need additional visual and textual signals to help them find a specific item.
10 Tips for Building a Visual Language
A visual language is just like any other form of communication. Elements from color to style to type of photos or illustrations establish what a brand or company is. A visual language includes both the written and spoken elements of a website or brand, as well as every design…
How to Film and Photograph for Usability: UX Details for Videos and Images
Consider how your audience will be using the visuals to determine the optimal camera angle, set the right tone, choose the right props, and maintain attention.
Front-End Performance Checklist 2021 (PDF, Apple Pages, MS Word) — Smashing Magazine
Let’s make 2021... fast! An annual front-end performance checklist, with everything you need to know to create fast experiences on the web today, from metrics to tooling and CSS/JavaScript techniques.
7 Steps to Benchmark Your Product’s UX
Benchmark your UX by first determining appropriate metrics and a study methodology. Then track these metrics across different releases of your product by running studies that follow the same established methodology.
Building Narrative into Your User Interface, Part 2 :: UXmatters
Web magazine about user experience matters, providing insights and inspiration for the user experience community
How Lorem Ipsum Kills Your Designs
It’s tempting to add Lorem ipsum to early designs. Unfortunately, this can create more problems than it solves. UXPin helps you avoid this.