7 Best Articles on Usability
The most useful articles on usability from around the web—beginners to advanced—curated by thought leaders and our community. We focus on timeless pieces and update the list whenever we discover new, must-read articles or videos—make sure to bookmark and revisit this page.
Top 5 Usability Articles
At a glance: these are the articles that have been most read, shared, and saved on usability by Refind users in 2023 so far.
Short Articles
Short on time? Check out these useful short articles on usability—all under 10 minutes.
The State Of Usability In 2023 🎊 — Smashing Magazine
That’s how people behave on the web in 2023. Some observations from real usability testing on what people do and what they don’t do on the web. From disabled copy-paste to magic link sign-in.
Five Ways to Recruit Participants for User Research (Video)
Getting representative members of the target audience as your test participants is essential for user research validity. You can outsource recruiting to an agency, or do it yourself. Each method has…
Paper Prototyping: How to Create & Usability-Test Simple UI Prototypes (40 min tutorial) (Video)
Create low-fidelity, low-commitment rapid user interface prototypes to can get early user feedback. Video shows how to conduct user testing of these simulated screens, with examples of the kinds of…
Your Product is Too Easy to Use, And That’s a Problem
Why, when, and how you should make your users struggle
10 usability heuristics with examples
We often choose different UX methods for different projects based on its complexity to get the best solutions. Among these processes, the…
Long Articles
These are some of the most-read long-form articles on usability.
Accessible Front-End Patterns For Responsive Tables (Part 1) — Smashing Magazine
There is no universal solution for making every kind of table responsive and usable on smaller screens, so we have to rely on various patterns, which Adrian explains in this two-part series.
A is for Accessibility — 12 top tips for designing an inclusive user experience
Shared by 81, including Oliver Pitsch, Victor Tolosa, Gabriele, Jonathan Kogan, Nick Floro
Publications
We monitor hundreds of publications, blogs, newsletters, and news sources in Usability, including:
Nielsen Norman Group
User advocates offering evidence-based user experience (UX) research, training, consulting. Jakob Nielsen, Don Norman, Tog, and colleagues.
UX Collective
Curated stories on user experience, usability, and product design. By @fabriciot and @caioab.
Smashing Magazine 🇺🇦 🏳️🌈
An online magazine for designers and web developers. Questions? We've got your back: @SmashingSupport, @SmashingConf. Curated by Iris, Vitaly and the team.
What is Refind?
Every day Refind picks the most relevant links from around the web for you. Picking only a handful of links means focusing on what’s relevant and useful. We favor timeless pieces—links with long shelf-lives, articles that are still relevant one month, one year, or even ten years from now. These lists of the best resources on any topic are the result of years of careful curation.
How does Refind curate?
It’s a mix of human and algorithmic curation, following a number of steps:
- We monitor 10k+ sources and 1k+ thought leaders on hundreds of topics—publications, blogs, news sites, newsletters, Substack, Medium, Twitter, etc.
- In addition, our users save links from around the web using our Save buttons and our extensions.
- Our algorithm processes 100k+ new links every day and uses external signals to find the most relevant ones, focusing on timeless pieces.
- Our community of active users gets the most relevant links every day, tailored to their interests. They provide feedback via implicit and explicit signals: open, read, listen, share, mark as read, read later, «More/less like this», etc.
- Our algorithm uses these internal signals to refine the selection.
- In addition, we have expert curators who manually curate niche topics.
The result: lists of the best and most useful articles on hundreds of topics.
How does Refind detect «timeless» pieces?
We focus on pieces with long shelf-lives—not news. We determine «timelessness» via a number of metrics, for example, the consumption pattern of links over time.
How many sources does Refind monitor?
We monitor 10k+ content sources on hundreds of topics—publications, blogs, news sites, newsletters, Substack, Medium, Twitter, etc.
Which sources does Refind monitor on usability?
We monitor hundreds of sources on usability, including Nielsen Norman Group, UX Collective, Smashing Magazine 🇺🇦 🏳️🌈, and many more.
Can I submit a link?
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