It’s hard to have a conversation about great design without mentioning Apple. Usually, we’re talking about the design of the iPod, iPhone, or last week’s newly announced iPad.
However, those aren’t the only interesting challenges Apple’s talented designers have tackled. They’ve done an amazing job with something that wouldn’t get a lot of attention otherwise: the [...]

The search log, an often over-looked part of our site analytics, can offer a wealth of great information about how people interact with our design. We know, for example, that users often search for a keyword they don’t find on the screen, in essence creating their own link. Inspecting the search log can tell us [...]

We published a lot of great articles during 2009. We featured guest writers, published interviews, and wrote numerous articles on the research we’ve done.
At year’s end, it’s common to reflect and revisit what you’ve done. We thought about the articles that had the biggest impact and really got people thinking.
Even if some readers didn’t agree [...]

How is a search result like a thoughtful gift? The outcome exceeds the expectation.
Ok, that’s kind of a lame riddle, but it’s accurate nonetheless. When we get a wrapped present, we hope the unwrapping will produce something that delights us.
The same is true clicking on a search result. We anticipate it will serve our needs [...]

“On a web site, the design is represented by two separate yet equally important components. The content users and the links they use. These are their stories.” Doink-Doink.
Ok, really it’s just the story of the links. (We’ll talk about the content later, I promise.)
About 10 years ago, we started looking at how users decided to [...]

We got ourselves into big trouble back in 1996. In our seminal report, Web Site Usability: A Designer’s Guide, we wrote a little sentence that attracted a lot of angry emails from designers everywhere: “Graphic design neither hurts nor helps.”
We’d looked at sites that had made a huge investment in adding graphics to their sites [...]

For years, we’ve known about the importance of completing tasks. Not the items on your to-do list — the users’ tasks.
What we found in our research over the last 10 years is that practically every measure of users’ performance correlates strongly with the users completing their task. Users who achieve their objective believe the web [...]

Sometimes, just adding a mental image to something difficult can make it dramatically easier. I discovered this while helping people learn to become better usability test moderators.
Moderating a usability test is difficult. There’s a lot going on, and you have to keep it all moving. Years ago, when we were privileged to have Carolyn Snyder [...]

Determining how and when to use a PDF on your web site can be tricky. Originally, a PDF was used as a way to view a document regardless of the viewer’s operating system or software used to create the document. It was a way to make a hard copy of a document more accessible. The [...]

Deciding how much content to put on your web pages can be a difficult task. There’s no standard guideline telling you when to use one long page or break your content into several pages. Often the content itself dictates the page length, but should it?
In today’s UIEtips, we continue with part 2 of a [...]