Users’ field of vision, arm motion, affordance, and privacy are a few of the design considerations for very large touchscreens (kiosks and other nonmobile use).| Nielsen Norman Group
The mouse (desktop computer) and the finger (touchscreen) each has unique strengths and weaknesses. Thus different UI designs are best for desktop vs mobile.| Nielsen Norman Group
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.| Nielsen Norman Group
"Hamburger" menus have some usability problems in mobile designs and many problems on desktop. A bold new design solves these flaws.| Nielsen Norman Group
188 tips for attracting business customers and turning leads into sales. Includes discussions and 301 screenshots to supplement the research findings.| Nielsen Norman Group
Jakob Nielsen's classic book discusses the most important of the guidelines for Web usability. It also revisits guidelines from the 1990s in light of newer research.| Nielsen Norman Group
While researching a purchase, a user conducted 25 visits to 15 different sites. Discussion of why and how the user visited each site and shy she left it.| Nielsen Norman Group
Every year brings new mistakes. In 2002, several of the worst mistakes in Web design related to poor email integration. The number one mistake, however, was lack of pricing information, followed by overly literal search engines.| Nielsen Norman Group
Prospective customers want to know the price as their #1 info need on any website — including B2B sites, but these sites often hide or obscure pricing information.| Nielsen Norman Group
Search engines extract too much of the Web's value, leaving too little for the websites that actually create the content. Liberation from search dependency is a strategic imperative for both websites and software vendors.| 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
Architecting a Journey Management Practice:| Nielsen Norman Group
Qualitative usability studies have few users and variable protocol; numbers obtained from such studies are likely to poorly reflect the true behavior of your population due to large measurement errors.| Nielsen Norman Group
Qualitative research informs the design process; quantitative research provides a basis for benchmarking programs and ROI calculations.| Nielsen Norman Group
Don’t report descriptive statistics like success rates and averages unless you ran a quantitative study. Reported numbers must be qualified with statistical information such as confidence intervals or statistical significance.| Nielsen Norman Group
A confidence-interval calculation gives a probabilistic estimate of how well a metric obtained from a study explains the behavior of your whole user population.| Nielsen Norman Group
Quantitatively evaluate a product or service’s user experience by using metrics to gauge its relative performance against a meaningful standard.| Nielsen Norman Group
Users spend most of their time on other sites. This means that users prefer your site to work the same way as all the other sites they already know. Design for patterns for which users are accustomed. (2 min. video w. Jakob Nielsen)| Nielsen Norman Group
Anything done by more than 90% of big sites becomes a de-facto design standard that must be followed unless an alternative design achieves 100% increased usability.| Nielsen Norman Group
New user testing of site maps shows that they are still useful as a secondary navigation aide, and that they're much easier to use than they were during our research 7 years ago.| Nielsen Norman Group
The website is becoming a less prominent locus of experience as people use search engines to bring up answers to their current questions. How can sites cope with masses of freeloaders?| Nielsen Norman Group
Simple, unobtrusive designs that support users are successful because they abide by the Web's nature -- and they make people feel good.| Nielsen Norman Group
People get lost and move in circles when websites use the same link color for visited and new destinations. To reduce navigational confusion, select different colors for the two types of links.| Nielsen Norman Group
One line of text shows a page's location in the site hierarchy. User testing shows many benefits and no downsides to breadcrumbs for secondary navigation.| Nielsen Norman Group
International usability testing addresses methods and logistical concerns to consider when evaluating the usability of products intended for an international audience.| Nielsen Norman Group
Users generally prefer designs that are fast and easy to use, but satisfaction isn't 100% correlated with objective usability metrics.| Nielsen Norman Group
Study your users’ real-life behaviors and make data-informed design decisions.| Nielsen Norman Group
Over the past decade, usability improved by 6% per year. This is a faster rate than most other fields, but much slower than technology advances might have predicted.| Nielsen Norman Group
What appears at the top of the page vs. what’s hidden will always influence the user experience — regardless of screen size.| Nielsen Norman Group
Feline users require special considerations, including larger tap target zones for paws, continual animation, and audible vocalization.| Nielsen Norman Group
Macro conversions are desired user actions that directly contribute to your business's primary goals. In contrast, micro conversions are user actions that precede macro conversions and occur more frequently.| Nielsen Norman Group
Despite being an artificial situation, user testing generates realistic findings because people engage strongly with the tasks and suspend their disbelief.| Nielsen Norman Group
User experience training courses offered worldwide. Over 40 in-depth, full-day courses teaching practical skills, proven methods and best practices.| Nielsen Norman Group
The tone of any piece of digital content can be analyzed along 4 dimensions: humor, formality, respectfulness, and enthusiasm.| Nielsen Norman Group
Users don't see stuff that's right on the screen. Selective attention makes people overlook things outside their focus of interest.| Nielsen Norman Group
If you place text over a background image, make sure it’s readable by providing adequate contrast.| Nielsen Norman Group
Improve the layout of your online forms by placing form labels near the associated text field and by grouping similar fields.| Nielsen Norman Group
In visual design, elements within the same boundary are perceived as related.| Nielsen Norman Group
Users overlook features if the GUI elements (such as buttons and checkboxes) are too far away from the objects they act on.| 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
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
