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Mobile-first web designs cause significant usability issues when viewed on desktop. Content becomes overly dispersed across long scrolling pages with expansive white space and enlarged images and fonts, making it difficult for users to consume and understand the information.
iOS 26’s visual language obscures content instead of letting it take the spotlight. New (but not always better) design patterns replace established conventions.
In spite of an increase in Internet speed, webpage speeds have not improved over time.
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.
Across 33 rich countries, only 5% of the population has high computer-related abilities, and only a third of people can complete medium-complexity tasks.
Research spanning 20 years proves PDFs are problematic for online reading. Yet they’re still prevalent and users continue to get lost in them. They’re unpleasant to read and navigate and remain unfit for digital-content display.
In an eyetracking experiment comparing different clickability clues, weak and flat signifiers required more user effort than strong ones.
We reverse all of the core design principles behind the Macintosh human interface guidelines to arrive at the characteristics of the Internet desktop.
AI is introducing the third user-interface paradigm in computing history, shifting to a new interaction mechanism where users tell the computer what they want, not how to do it — thus reversing the locus of control.
Among high-legibility fonts, a study found 35% difference in reading speeds between the best and the worst. People read 11% slower for every 20 years they age.
Personas are useful tools for UX work, so why do they often fail? Find out what pitfalls cause personas to fail, and how to avoid and overcome them.
Guest checkout with optional registration on e-commerce sites simplifies the purchase process and invites users to register when they feel comfortable, rather than forcing unwanted registration.
New technology and conventions have led to several new classes of usability problems in Web design.
Teams often make worse decisions than individuals by relying too much on widely understood data while disregarding information possessed by only a few individuals.
Modal ads, ads that reorganize content, and autoplaying video ads were among the most disliked. Ads that are annoying on desktop become intolerable on mobile.
When organizations optimize metrics at the cost of all else, they expose themselves to metric corruption. Ultimately, as the Facebook scandal illustrates, they may fail their users and their business goals.
Good UX has great customer service at its base. Restaurants provide many instructive examples for designers.
Infinite scrolling minimizes interaction costs and increases user engagement, but it isn’t a good fit for every website. For some, pagination or a Load More button will be a better solution.
Hamburger menus are a more familiar pattern today than 10 years ago, but the same old best practices for hidden navigation still apply.
From 0.1 seconds to 10 years or more, user interface design has many different timeframes, and each has its own particular usability issues.
On average, UX changes have a smaller impact on quantitative metrics. This trend means that UX has substantially advanced since 2006.
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.
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.
In most online communities, 90% of users are lurkers who never contribute, 9% of users contribute a little, and 1% of users account for almost all the action.
Jakob Nielsen's 10 principles for interaction design. They are called "heuristics" because they are broad rules of thumb and not specific usability guidelines.
How users react to delays in a user interface, whether website or application. The 3 main response time limits are determined by human perceptual abilities.
Hidden features, reduced discoverability, cognitive overhead from dual environments, and reduced power from a single-window UI and low information density. Too bad.