Creating Intuitive User Interfaces: The Primacy of the Mental Model
Nov 18,
2015
“Intuitive” doesn’t have to be a buzzword. It can, instead, be a genuinely useful way of thinking about your UX design…provided you give “intuitive” a real meaning that begins with how your users think about their problems. The word “intuitive” gets tossed around a lot, but it’s often used without any real meaning. Jef Raskin […]
Designing the Steps in the User Interface for a Difficult Task
Jul 9,
2015
Breaking down a difficult task into bite-sized steps is a good first step to making a task simpler…but only if you build each step correctly. Here’s how to make a difficult process for your users into something much easier. In a previous column on creating user interfaces for difficult tasks, I discussed how a difficult task […]
User Interface Design for Difficult Tasks
Jul 8,
2015
A well-designed user interface design can make even difficult tasks appear to be simple. And the good news is that creating that UI is not, itself, a difficult task. In fact, here’s how to do it. After users have completed some task, it’s easy to identify whether it was a “difficult task”: It’s one where […]
Six Rules for Successful Usability Testing
Jul 2,
2015
You don’t need a usability lab, special software, or a horde of people to test your UI design. There are, however, six rules that you need to follow to get usable results. I recently worked on an application where, when users first saw it, they couldn’t find the “Add New Item” button. That was because, […]
Three Things You Need to Create a Great Search UI Design
Jun 23,
2015
When using search there’s more going on in your user’s mind than just typing in some random keywords (and it’s all about two numbers: relevancy and precision). Here’s how to support how your users use search. A few days ago, I went looking for a book I had read as a child. While knowing the title would […]