The Best of Nielsen Norman Group

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…

Techniques like summaries, bullet points, callouts, bolding, and helpful visuals improve comprehension and engagement with content exceeding 1,000 words.

Use generative-AI tools to support and enhance your UX skills — not to replace them. Start with small UX tasks and watch out for hallucinations and bad advice.

Generative-AI bots support UX professionals by acting as content editors, research assistants, ideation partners, and design assistants.

Users quickly attribute human-like characteristics to artificial systems, which reflect their personality back to them. This phenomenon is called the ELIZA effect.

Empathy maps are a powerful, flexible tool that can be used to plan for future research studies, capture insights during current user research, and communicate research insights from research that has…

Journey maps combine two powerful instruments—storytelling and visualization—in order to help teams understand and address customer needs.

Evaluate your journey map to identify low and high points, failures to set expectations, unnecessary or too long steps, channel transitions, and moments of truth. Use this information to find…

As an individual learns design thinking, they go through 4 learning phases: newcomer, adopter, leader, and grandmaster.

Jobs-to-be-done focus on user problems and needs, while well-executed personas include the same information and also add behavioral and attitudinal details.

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.

Even people with limited drawing abilities can learn to sketch a wireframe if they learn a few common conventions used to represent various design elements.

«Use physical constraints to prevent obsessing over tiny aesthetic details: Thick pens or sharpies Time boxing Limited space for the sketch»

Service design improves the experiences of both the user and employee by designing an organization’s operations to better support customer journeys.

Service blueprints visualize organizational processes in order to optimize how a business delivers a user experience.

«Each time a customer interacts with a service (through an employee or via technology), a moment of truth occurs. During these moments of truth, customers judge your quality and make decisions regarding future purchases.»

The answer is 5, except when it's not. Most arguments for using more test participants are wrong, but some tests should be bigger and some smaller.

Using an asterisk to mark required fields is an easy way to improve the usability of your forms. Only marking optional fields makes it difficult for people to fill out the form.

User research can be done at any point in the design cycle. This list of methods and activities can help you decide which to use when.

Visualizing user attitudes and behaviors in an empathy map helps UX teams align on a deep understanding of end users.

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.

Understand similarities and differences among empathy maps, customer journey maps, experience maps, and service blueprints.

Visually pleasing designs use consistent type styles and spacing, create a visual hierarchy, and utilize an underlying grid structure.

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.

Antipersonas help anticipate how products can be misused in ways that can harm users and the business.

Use a flexible responsibility-assignment matrix to clarify UX roles and responsibilities, anticipate team collaboration points, and maintain productivity in product development.

«Roles that are Responsible and Accountable for a given task need to work together in collaborative partnership to get the work done. The accountable person should ensure how and when any Consulted and Informed roles are brought into the process.    »

Unsure where to start? Use this collection of links to our articles and videos to learn how to write and present information that aligns with users’ needs and online reading behaviors.

Overlays often need to be dismissed in a manner that goes against users’ expectations.