Usability and User Experience Research Reports by Nielsen Norman Group - NN/G
Architecting a Journey Management Practice:| Nielsen Norman Group
Help gift givers easily find and send the perfect gift. Get 87 tips for designing the ideal wishlist and gift-giving experience on your ecommerce site.| Nielsen Norman Group
53 UX guidelines for improving your website's credibility. How to help customers feel confident enough in your organization to take desirable actions.| Nielsen Norman Group
Design a helpful shopping cart and a smooth checkout process by following these 137 design guidelines.| Nielsen Norman Group
Users expect ecommerce retailers to anticipate and meet their needs throughout the entire shopping journey. Get 102 guidelines for improving your ecommerce marketing, merchandising, and selling techniques.| Nielsen Norman Group
International shoppers can differ from your domestic customers. Follow these 117 design guidelines to satisfy their needs and expand to global markets.| Nielsen Norman Group
Nielsen Norman Group ecommerce usability research report featuring 75 tips for designing websites that support customers when they need it.| Nielsen Norman Group
Get inspiration for conducting your own studies. Learn how we collected the data so you can apply the suggestions appropriately.| Nielsen Norman Group
Nielsen Norman Group report summarizing the key usability findings of our Ecommerce user experience research series.| Nielsen Norman Group
Relevant and informative automated messages help users quickly identify their transaction status. Get 143 design guidelines to convey emails and notifications efficiently.| Nielsen Norman Group
Get people to your physical stores by making yourself easy to find. Get 50 tips for designing locators.| Nielsen Norman Group
Architecting a Journey Management Practice:| Nielsen Norman Group
Nielsen Norman Group report detailing best practices of 2016's 10 best intranets. Take a look at innovative ideas and solutions you can use as inspiration.| Nielsen Norman Group
Nielsen Norman Group report detailing best practices of 2014's 10 best intranets. Take a look at innovative ideas and solutions you can use as inspiration.| Nielsen Norman Group
I was a proud Nest early adopter: It saved energy, and showed me the savings. In an emotional-design fail, it let me down: behaviorally, reflectively, and finally viscerally.| Nielsen Norman Group
Computer systems shouldn't make us feel bad. But they often do. Contextual usability methods can help discover social defects in user experience.| Nielsen Norman Group
To eliminate outdated information and make online shopping efficient, let ecommerce users easily update existing payment information within the checkout flow.| Nielsen Norman Group
Customization tools must be simple-to-use, easy-to-find, and easily edited, with both a clear intent and a clear benefit to users.| Nielsen Norman Group
Over the last several years, entry-level UX salaries have dropped, while pay for experienced user experience staff has been more stable. (Updated to 2019.)| Nielsen Norman Group
Need numerical data about your product’s UX, but not sure where to start? Check out this list of the most popular quantitative methods to help you pick a tool.| Nielsen Norman Group
Users from other countries have special needs related to entry fields for names and addresses, measurements and dates, and information about regional product standards.| Nielsen Norman Group
Data on what works well or poorly on other sites saves you from implementing useless features and guides UX investments to features that your users need.| Nielsen Norman Group
The average difference in measured usability between competing websites is 68%. This is smaller than expected, but makes sense given the dynamics of design within individual industries.| Nielsen Norman Group
The more engaged users are, the more features an application can sustain. But most users have low commitment -- especially to websites, which must focus on simplicity, rather than features.| Nielsen Norman Group
Articles explaining the heuristic evaluation technique for assessing usability, from Nielsen Norman Group, a firm specializing in User Experience Research, Training, and Consulting.| Nielsen Norman Group
The book Usability Inspection Methods, edited by Jakob Nielsen and Robert L. Mack, is the first comprehensive, book-length work in the field of usability evaluation and includes a full complement of UI strategies, tools, and techniques.| Nielsen Norman Group
This article summarizes statistics for 13 usability laboratories. It also gives an introduction to the main uses of usability laboratories in usability engineering and surveys some of the issues related to practical use of user testing and computer-aided usability engineering.| Nielsen Norman Group
Number fetishism leads usability studies astray by focusing on statistical analyses that are often false, biased, misleading, or overly narrow. Better to emphasize insights and qualitative research.| Nielsen Norman Group
Intranets are improving findability and discoverability by organizing content by task, using mega-menus, offering wayfinding cues, and providing shortcuts.| Nielsen Norman Group
Labels in a card sorting study must be neutral to prevent keyword matching and encourage careful, conceptual groupings from users.| Nielsen Norman Group
When people select alternatives, they avoid loss and optimize for sure wins because the pain of losing is greater than the satisfaction of an equivalent gain. UX designs should frame decisions accordingly.| Nielsen Norman Group
People remember the bad more than the good. Users’ tendency to identify flaws in designs raises the bar for what they consider acceptable.| Nielsen Norman Group
Overreliance on narrative details and assumptions about cause-and-effect explanations can lead to errors in judgment by UX practitioners.| Nielsen Norman Group
Recruiting internal staff to test a user interface should be a last resort. Consider potential biases before drawing any conclusions.| Nielsen Norman Group
Designers are vulnerable to the same cognitive biases as users. The context in which you present a problem can bias your design choices.| Nielsen Norman Group
Hidden features, reduced discoverability, cognitive overhead from dual environments, and reduced power from a single-window UI and low information density. Too bad.| Nielsen Norman Group
Paper prototyping, card sorting, and traditional usability testing were all employed to guide the design of the 1995 Sun Microsystems' Web site.| Nielsen Norman Group
Flat design hides calls to action, and swiping around the edges can interfere with carousels and scrolling.| Nielsen Norman Group
Textual links should be colored and underlined to achieve the best perceived affordance of clickability, though there are a few exceptions to these guidelines.| Nielsen Norman Group
Flat design is a web-design style that became popular around 2012. It is still widely used today, and its misuse can cause serious usability problems.| Nielsen Norman Group
Clickable interface elements with absent or weak visual signifiers condition users to click and hover uncertainly across pages — reducing efficiency.| Nielsen Norman Group
The tighter the mapping between icons and the thing they represent, the easier they are to understand, but standardization can also make an icon easy.| Nielsen Norman Group
A website's tagline must explain what the company does and what makes it unique among competitors. Two questions can help you assess your own tagline: Would it work just as well for competitors? Would any company ever claim the opposite?| Nielsen Norman Group
Active voice is best for most Web content, but using passive voice can let you front-load important keywords in headings, blurbs, and lead sentences. This enhances scannability and thus SEO effectiveness.| Nielsen Norman Group
Attractive headlines and titles are critical in getting you noticed and making the right first impression.| Nielsen Norman Group
Design effective error messages by ensuring they are highly visible, provide constructive communication, and respect user effort.| Nielsen Norman Group
Focus on the first 40 characters. Descriptive and well-written subject lines allow recipients to make an informed decision to get more details or move on.| Nielsen Norman Group
Category and link labels should tell users what will happen when they click on them.| Nielsen Norman Group
A “card” is a UI design pattern that groups related information in a flexible-size container visually resembling a playing card.| Nielsen Norman Group
Avoid awkward and difficult page layouts by fitting flexible templates to content whenever possible. Test often during design, and plan to scale up.| Nielsen Norman Group
Ease users’ purchase decisions by designing interfaces that support both compensatory and noncompensatory decision-making strategies.| Nielsen Norman Group
Progressive disclosure defers advanced or rarely used features to a secondary screen, making applications easier to learn and less error-prone.| Nielsen Norman Group
Tutorials interrupt users, don’t necessarily improve task performance, and are quickly forgotten. Contextual help signals can avoid these pitfalls but require unintrusive ways to activate.| Nielsen Norman Group
Our research shows that tutorials don’t make users faster or more successful at completing tasks; on the contrary, they make them perceive the tasks as more difficult.| Nielsen Norman Group
People rely on menus to find content and use features. Use this checklist to make sure your menus do their job.| Nielsen Norman Group
Branding elements and interaction design guidelines can bridge the gap between how a company constructs its identity and how its customers experience it.| Nielsen Norman Group
When websites prioritize search over navigation, users must invest cognitive effort to create queries and to deal with the weak implementations of site search.| Nielsen Norman Group
Writers always get the advice to be concise, but doing so is easier said than done. These tips and tricks help reduce your word count.| Nielsen Norman Group
Bullet points help break up large blocks of text, make complex articles and blog posts easier to grasp, and make key information stand out.| Nielsen Norman Group
Even as more sites mimic swiping gestures and incorporate horizontal scrolling in desktop designs, users remain reluctant to move sideways through content.| Nielsen Norman Group
Digital products are competing for users’ limited attention. The modern economy increasingly revolves around the human attention span and how products capture that attention.| Nielsen Norman Group
Automated email can improve customer service, strengthen relationships, and help websites bypass search engines. But most messages fared poorly in user testing and didn't fulfill this potential.| Nielsen Norman Group
Jakob Nielsen reviews Esther Dyson's book Release 2.0: useless, yet ultra-strategic; a tool to envision the network economy and the Web's eventual effect on our lives.| Nielsen Norman Group
The Web is not a community: a huge impersonal city is a better metaphor. User-generated content (UGC) can be valuable (if edited), but chat rooms should be avoided because of participation inequality.| Nielsen Norman Group
Beyond Being There was a research project at Bell Communications Research in 1991 and 1992. Its key insight was that computer and communications technology cannot in the foreseeable future achieve the same quality of human interaction as that afforded by in-person exchanges.| Nielsen Norman Group
Affiliate programs are an effective Web marketing tool and a natural fit with the nature of the Web since they make value flow along the links. Weaknesses and future trends for affiliates programs.| Nielsen Norman Group
People are not frogs, making it difficult to navigate 3D computer spaces: stick to 2D for most navigation designs. Shun virtual reality gimmicks that distract from users' goals.| Nielsen Norman Group
A skeleton screen is used as a placeholder while users wait for a page to load. This progress indicator is used for full page loads and reduces the perception of a long loading time by providing clues for how the page will ultimately look.| Nielsen Norman Group
Users are more satisfied and will wait longer when a site uses wait animations such as percent-done bars and spinners to explain >1 s response times delays.| Nielsen Norman Group
Reduce input effort for fields with values that vary little from the default by allowing users to increase or decrease the number in a single button press.| Nielsen Norman Group
Jakob Nielsen's textbook on applying systematic methods throughout the development lifecycle to increase ease-of-use for software, websites, and other user interfaces. Emphasis on cheap and fast methods.| Nielsen Norman Group
Nielsen Norman Group usability research presenting 124 tips for improving your website and apps to make a compelling user experience for teens aged 13-17.| Nielsen Norman Group
Nielsen Norman Report: usability research presenting 156 tips for improving the user experience for children between the ages of 3 and 12.| Nielsen Norman Group
Mobile design must reflect smartphone constraints and strengths: small screen, short sessions, single window, touch interaction, GPS and other phone features.| Nielsen Norman Group
Users won’t read web content unless the text is clear, the words and sentences are simple, and the information is easy to understand. You can test all of this.| Nielsen Norman Group
Drop-downs, megamenus, and radial or marking menus arrange items in different patterns to optimize the reach time to individual menu options.| Nielsen Norman Group
When working on business problems, users flitter among sites, alternating visits to different service genres. No single website defines the user experience on its own.| Nielsen Norman Group
The average business metrics improvement after a usability redesign is now 83%. This is substantially less than 6 years ago, but ROI remains high because usability is still cheap relative to gains.| Nielsen Norman Group
The average mid-sized company could gain $5 million per year in employee productivity by improving its intranet design to the top quartile level of a cross-company intranet usability study. The return on investment? One thousand percent or more.| Nielsen Norman Group
A leader in the user experience field, NN/g conducts groundbreaking research, trains and certifies UX practitioners, and provides UX consulting to clients.| Nielsen Norman Group
Give ecommerce customers the product information they want, at the right time, and at the appropriate level of detail. Get 108 guidelines for producing engaging product pages.| Nielsen Norman Group
Having a good designer doesn't eliminate the need for a systematic usability process. Risk reduction and quality improvement both require user testing and other usability methods.| Nielsen Norman Group
In addition to being expensive, collecting usability metrics interferes with the goal of gathering qualitative insights to drive design decisions. As a compromise, you can measure users' ability to complete tasks. Success rates are easy to understand and represent the UX bottom line.| Nielsen Norman Group
Downloadable files, tasks, and questionnaires to allow replication or modifications of a research study of how users read on the Web (a 1997 study in the SunSoft Science Office).| Nielsen Norman Group
Users don't read Web pages; they scan. Concise text improved usability by 58%, SCANNABLE layout added 47%, and objective language added 27% to measured usability; combining all three improvements gave 124%.| Nielsen Norman Group
To engage users, website copy must speak to readers and not at them. Include words people can relate to, and avoid jargon, business speak, and feature-driven language.| Nielsen Norman Group
20 user-research methods: where they fit in the design process, whether they are attitudinal or behavioral, qualitative or quantitative, and their context of use.| Nielsen Norman Group
Users expect 77% of the simpler Web design elements to behave in a certain way. Unfortunately, confusion reigns for many higher-level design issues.| Nielsen Norman Group
Remote usability testing allows you to get customer insights when travel budgets are small, timeframes are tight, or test participants are hard to find.| Nielsen Norman Group
Testing your site’s existing design along with a few competitor sites provides valuable insight for new designs.| Nielsen Norman Group
Not only does design thinking foster innovation, but it also strengthens teams by creating common vocabulary and artifacts, and a trust-based team culture.| Nielsen Norman Group
Open feedback is essential for a collaborative UX process.| Nielsen Norman Group
Charrettes inspire sketches and ideas, include more people in the design process, explore and expose colleagues' objectives and goals, and drive off designer’s block.| Nielsen Norman Group
Bucknell University caused a stir with its unconventional responsive redesign, but at a high cost to usability, as shown in tests with students and parents.| Nielsen Norman Group
The Hamburger-Menu Icon Today: Is it Recognizable?| Nielsen Norman Group
Strategically combine content, visuals, and interactive components to design successful web pages| Nielsen Norman Group
All usability studies show that fast response times are essential for Web usability: let's believe the data for once! Advice for speeding up sites despite the fact that bandwidth is going down, not up.| Nielsen Norman Group
Mobile usability has improved over the past 7 years due to better prioritization of content over UI elements and better understanding of the users’ needs.| Nielsen Norman Group
Your interaction-design decisions have measurable effects on your users’ emotions and how they perceive your brand.| Nielsen Norman Group
Increased conversion is one of the strongest ROI arguments for better user experience and more user research. Track over time, because it's a relative metric.| Nielsen Norman Group
Learn to plan, conduct, and analyze your own user testing studies, whether in person or remote.| Nielsen Norman Group
