You might consider yourself knowledgeable, but you’ve probably never heard of this powerful communication and design technique that I’m about to share. I’m sure you’ve seen it in practice but never knew it was working on you — that’s how good it is. I’m here to shed light on this technique so that you can use it as an approach to your design or writing.

See what I did there? I introduced you to dissonance by using the technique itself. If used correctly, it can enhance your approach to design and copywriting in certain projects. Welcome to designing with dissonance!

A typical Web form usually enables several “final” actions. Actions like “Submit”, “Save”, or “Continue” are intended to enable form completion –the primary goal of just about anyone who has started filling in a form. Because they enable the most important action on the form (completion), they are often referred to as primary actions.

Quite rare is the Web application that doesn’t make extensive use of forms for data input and configuration. But not all Web applications use forms consistently. Variations in the alignment of input fields, their respective labels, calls to action, and their surrounding visual elements can support or impair different aspects of user behavior.

In using eyetracking to evaluate the usability of search forms for my previous article for UXmatters, “Evaluating the Usability of Search Forms Using Eyetracking: A Practical Approach,” we discovered much interesting data. I’ll provide an in-depth analysis of that data here.

UX Myths collects the most frequent user experience misconceptions and explains why they don't hold true. And you don't have to take our word for it, we'll show you a lot of research findings and articles by design and usability gurus.

Ubuntu is phasing out the notification area (a.k.a. “system tray”), because of its ineffectiveness at notifying people of things, and its inconsistent behavior. Many programs that previously used the notification area should use other notification mechanisms instead. Some notification area items will be replaced by various system status menus we’re introducing. For a few programs, it will be appropriate to use custom status menus.