Recalling items from scratch is harder than recognizing the correct option in a list of choices because the extra context helps users retrieve information from memory.
Users quickly attribute human-like characteristics to artificial systems, which reflect their personality back to them. This phenomenon is called the ELIZA effect.
A cognitive walkthrough is a task-based usability-inspection technique used to evaluate the learnability of a system from the perspective of a new user.
Basic psychological principles can guide you as a UX designer because most users share many common characteristics. Consider learning more about: motivation, attention, memory, persuasion, learning, decision making, emotion, sensation, perception, or cognitive biases.
Individuals often modify their behavior if they know they are being observed. That phenomenon became known as the Hawthorne effect or the observer bias. We can mitigate this effect by building rapport, designing natural tasks, and spending more time with study participants.
Users don't work hard enough to discover how to use your design in the intended manner. Bad user! But really, they're just prioritizing their own time and interests and behaving the way evolution made people.
User experience is not really about computers or technology. It's about the users (people) and about the design teams and proper processes for their members (people) to produce good UX.
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.
People have very limited ability to keep information in their working memory while performing tasks, so user interfaces should be designed accordingly: to minimize memory load. One way of doing so is to offload items to external memory by showing them on the screen.
Video game design is a special case of user interface design, with some differences (especially in user goals) but also many similarities with more traditional UX design problems and methods.
The user experience field will see dramatic changes over the next 3 decades, driven by trends in demographics and the world economy. We will end up like the Little Mermaid. (This was Jakob Nielsen's UX Conference keynote.)
Aesthetically pleasing designs can provide memorable experiences that differentiate a brand. However, interfaces should only include necessary elements, with high informational value. Clarity will always win over visual flourish.
A cognitive walkthrough is a task-based usability-inspection technique used to evaluate the learnability of a system from the perspective of a new user.
Basic psychological principles can guide you as a UX designer because most users share many common characteristics. Consider learning more about: motivation, attention, memory, persuasion, learning, decision making, emotion, sensation, perception, or cognitive biases.
Users don't work hard enough to discover how to use your design in the intended manner. Bad user! But really, they're just prioritizing their own time and interests and behaving the way evolution made people.
User experience is not really about computers or technology. It's about the users (people) and about the design teams and proper processes for their members (people) to produce good UX.
People have very limited ability to keep information in their working memory while performing tasks, so user interfaces should be designed accordingly: to minimize memory load. One way of doing so is to offload items to external memory by showing them on the screen.
Video game design is a special case of user interface design, with some differences (especially in user goals) but also many similarities with more traditional UX design problems and methods.
The user experience field will see dramatic changes over the next 3 decades, driven by trends in demographics and the world economy. We will end up like the Little Mermaid. (This was Jakob Nielsen's UX Conference keynote.)
Problems arise when people get older, but that just means opportunities for better design to support elderly users. The very best designs will help the elderly, but also be adapted by everybody else.
Users waste unacceptably much time struggling with computer bugs. Users' mental models suffer when systems don't work as advertised, leading people to question their understanding of the UX.
To solve big-scale design problems, Don Norman recommends engaging with the community that has these problems and leveraging existing creativity and experience.
Human-centered design has 4 principles: understand the problem, the people, and the system, and do iterative design. But what if you don't have time to do all 4 steps?
At the first Virtual UX Conference, Jakob Nielsen answered participant questions about topics ranging from user-experience careers and skill development to foldable smartphones and the future of user interfaces.
User interfaces must be fast, or users will give up. (In the case of websites, they'll leave if pages download too slowly.) The exact maximum response times vary by usage circumstances, and should be either 0.1, 1.0, or 10 seconds.
In a graphical user interface, having the user move a cursor within a narrow path (e.g., in a hierarchical menu or a slider) follows a strict law for how easy or difficult it is to do, depending on the specifics of the GUI.
Fitts's Law describes how long it takes a user to hit a target in a graphical user interface (GUI) or other design, as a function of size and distance. Understanding this law helps us design better buttons, forms, lists, and other interactive elements.
Recalling items from scratch is harder than recognizing the correct option in a list of choices because the extra context helps users retrieve information from memory.
Users quickly attribute human-like characteristics to artificial systems, which reflect their personality back to them. This phenomenon is called the ELIZA effect.
Individuals often modify their behavior if they know they are being observed. That phenomenon became known as the Hawthorne effect or the observer bias. We can mitigate this effect by building rapport, designing natural tasks, and spending more time with study participants.
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.
Aesthetically pleasing designs can provide memorable experiences that differentiate a brand. However, interfaces should only include necessary elements, with high informational value. Clarity will always win over visual flourish.
Carefully examine the user’s context, task at hand, and next steps when deciding whether to open links to documents and external sites in the same or a new browser tab.
Task analysis is the systematic study of how users complete tasks to achieve their goals. This knowledge ensures products and services are designed to efficiently and appropriately support those goals.
Now that people can easily find answers to their questions directly on results pages, content creators must rethink their role in providing information to their users.
In people with normal vision (or corrected-to-normal vision), visual performance tends to be better with light mode, whereas some people with cataract and related disorders may perform better with dark mode. On the flip side, long-term reading in light mode may be associated with myopia.
When deciding which links to click on the web, users choose those with the highest information scent — which is a mix of cues that they get from the link label, the context in which the link is shown, and their prior experiences.
To measure learnability, determine your metric, gather your data, and plot the averages on a line curve. Analyze the learning curve by looking at its slope and its plateau.
