The Best Articles in UX
The most useful articles in UX 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 UX Articles
At a glance: these are the articles that have been most read, shared, and saved in UX by Refind users.
Videos
Watch a video to get a quick overview.
Thinking on ways to solve TOOLTIPS
In today's GUI Challenge, @Adam Argyle builds a tooltip with a custom element (no web component!), :has(), transforms, and logical properties. Besides a smal...
What is ...?
New to UX? These articles make an excellent introduction.
A beginner’s guide to customer journey maps
A look into the makings of and reasoning behind customer journey maps.
How to ...?
How to design delightful dark themes
Dark themes are the latest trend in app design. Here we share how to design dark themes that are readable, balanced, and delightful!
How to evaluate the UX maturity of a company
I was presented with this opportunity in the summer of 2015. Until that point, I had spent two years living in Germany and working for an early-stage startup in Luxembourg. It was the job that I moved…
Trending
These links are currently making the rounds in UX on Refind.
Navigating the Discovery Phase
Kicking off a big design project? Ashley shares tips and tricks for the all-important discovery phase.
What it means to design a platform
Editor’s note: This essay was adapted from a post I wrote on an employees-only blog at Stripe. After four months of parental leave, I came back to work and noticed something different. Many of the…
The UX of Banking: 900 days of progress
A unique opportunity to revisit 12 UK banks, re-benchmark them, and highlight what 900 days of progress looks like.
User onboarding: best practices
Simple rules that will help you design a streamlined first-time users experience
Why do users prefer certain design? Insights from the landscape theory
How evolutionary factors of environment perception affect our preferences for a particular design.
Short Articles
Short on time? Check out these useful short articles in UX—all under 10 minutes.
The heuristics of Neurodesign
A guide to design for the brain with intention and results.
«Neurodesign is an emerging field of design practice that accounts for how our brains are wired to create designs that promote simplicity, emote joy, and drive action»
It’s visual delight that you’re looking for, not gamification
You are in a product meeting that has been going on for the entire day, and now all the discussions are almost loopy. The meeting is…
«Before we get into the full breakdown of how to look at this decision, it’s important to know one thing: Visual delight is in itself a crucial part of gamification — without it, gamification can feel watered down. Just some food for thought.»
Spotify’s Embodiment Of Emotional Design
On average, each smartphone user has 80+ apps on their phone, but only really launch around 9 apps per day. Curiously, I checked my own phone - which somehow holds 148 apps, with only 10 being used…
Typeform: How to offboard users the right way
This offboarding case study shows how Typeform's cancellation experience could be improved. You'll also learn a key retention strategy that can reduce churn.
Down the wrong path: the disaster of the latest Duolingo UI update
The world’s largest language learning platform recently rolled out a major update to its 50M active users, and it has major usability…
Long Articles
These are some of the most-read long-form articles in UX.
Designing The Perfect Mobile Navigation UX — Smashing Magazine
When designing navigation on mobile, we don’t have to rely on slide-in-menus or nested accordions. We can also use the curtain design pattern, and show multiple levels of navigation at once.
A Conversation With ChatGPT
Matthias Ott is an independent user experience designer and developer from Stuttgart, Germany. Besides design practice he teaches Interface Prototyping at the Muthesius Academy of Fine Arts and…
Design Principles: why a design works
Cognitive ease happens when there is no cognitive strain. When a design works, people experience cognitive ease.
8 mental model design heuristics
Rules of thumb for producing learnable designs
The colors of game design
What if game design could be summed up into four “primary colors” and their mixtures? This simple tool might help you organize your ideas.
Thought Leaders
We monitor hundreds of thought leaders, influencers, and newsletters in UX, including:

Ryan Singer
Software designer, builder, product strategist. Author of Shape Up: Stop Running in Circles and Ship Work That Matters. Email rjs@hey.com

Meng To
Founder at @designcodeio. I teach designers code and developers design.

zeldman
Author. Designer. Web Standards Godfather. Employer Brand at @Automattic. Publisher, @AListApart, @ABookApart. Ava’s dad. Pete’s brother. He/him.
Brad Frost
Design system consultant, web designer, speaker, writer, & musician. Author of Atomic Design. Mastadon: https://mastodon.social/@brad_frost
🎆 🌸 Samuel Hulick 🌸 🌄
Helping companies grow revenue at http://SelfServeSaaS.com | prev @UserOnboard | they/them
Publications
We monitor hundreds of publications, blogs, newsletters, and news sources in UX, including:
UX Collective
Curated stories on user experience, usability, and product design. By @fabriciot and @caioab.
Nielsen Norman Group
User advocates offering evidence-based user experience (UX) research, training, consulting. Jakob Nielsen, Don Norman, Tog, and colleagues.
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.
UX Magazine
Defining and informing the complex field of user experience (UX) through frequent publication of high-quality articles for experts and newcomers alike.
GV
Launched as Google Ventures in 2009, GV supports innovative founders moving the world forward.
What is Refind?
Every day Refind picks 5 links from around the web for every user, tailored to the user’s interests. 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 5 links every day, tailored to their interests. They provide feedback via implicit and explicit signals: open, read, listen, share, add to reading list, save to «Made me smarter», «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 in UX?
We monitor hundreds of sources in UX, including UX Collective, Nielsen Norman Group, Smashing Magazine 🇺🇦 🏳️🌈, UX Magazine, GV, and many more.
Who are the thought leaders in UX?
We follow dozens of thought leaders in UX, including Ryan Singer, Meng To, zeldman, Brad Frost, 🎆 🌸 Samuel Hulick 🌸 🌄.
Missing a thought leader? Submit them here
Can I submit a link?
Indirectly, by using Refind and saving links from outside (e.g., via our extensions).
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