I'm a psychologist by training and education. So the part of the elephant I experience applies what we know about people and how we apply that to UX design. I take research and knowledge about the brain, the visual system, memory, and motivation and extrapolate UX design principles from that.

Recently, I’ve come across several sites who have done away with the credit card type field. Both Amazon and GitHub don’t require you to select a credit card type in their form. As you fill in the credit card number, the user interface changes to show the type of credit card being used.

The most exciting engineering challenges lie on the boundary of theory and the unknown. Not so unknown that they're hopeless, but not enough theory to predict the results of our decisions. Systems at this boundary often rely on emergent behavior — high-level effects that arise indirectly from low-level interactions.

Slides from a talk by Whitney Hess.

People who understand user experience, user psychology, and interaction design are going to design great user interfaces in any medium. There is nothing special about the web that makes it more or less challenging than designing on an iPad. They are just different. And good designers know the differences, understand the limitations, and will design something great for each.

This is a short piece concerned only with the different behaviours when closing tabs in Google Chrome, as I think these behaviours are fantastically thought through.

We hear plenty usability tips and techniques from an incalculable number of sources. Many of the ones we take seriously have sound logic, but it’s even more validating when we find actual data and reports to back up their theories and conjectures.

Attention to detail, like most facets of truly good design, can’t be (and never is) added later. It’s an entire development philosophy, methodology, and culture.

The short answer is that OpenID is the worst possible "solution" I have ever seen in my entire life to a problem that most people don't really have.  That's what's "wrong" with it.

For months, I’ve been trying to figure out why Google Maps’s city labels seem so much more readable than the labels on other mapping sites.

As the distance between the maker and user increases, so does the difficulty of designing a great user experience. 

“A complex system that works is invariably found to have evolved from a simple system that worked.” - John Gall

We spend a whole lot of time making shit flashy and making it feel fast. That’s good, it provides a more pleasant user experience. But it should never be disingenuous. Sometimes it takes a second or two for an operation to complete.

Creating great experiences is all about control. For the user, control is knowing and understanding the options and being able to make the “right” decision. For the designer, control is about refining the interface until the user can always take the next step. 

Traditionally, as designers, we would interpret this to mean our users will always make mistakes and when we “forgive” them (help them get back on their way) we are exhibiting the divine. However, I would argue that we, the designers and developers, need to ask forgiveness from our users. 

If so you’ve probably hit what Andrew Chen calls the “Local Maximum”. The local maximum is a point in which you’ve hit the limit of the current design…it is as effective as its ever going to be in its current incarnation. Even if you make 100 tweaks you can only get so much improvement; it is as effective as its ever going to be on its current structural foundation. 

One of the greatest qualities in most creative problem solvers is a thirst for learning. Most designers and user experience professionals I know have some level of post-graduate education. But if you were to dig a little deeper, you would likely find that many have degrees in either partially or completely unrelated fields. The truth is the greatest thing you learn while getting a college education is that you alone are responsible for what and how you learn. 

But what exactly does it mean to write great copy? How do we know when we achieved it? Is this something that we can learn as part of the design process, or should we have a dedicated copywriter (if we don’t already)?

There’s no complex mechanical mirror assembly swinging upward when the shutter opens. No matter, though. The cigarette box sized camera burps out a faux ka-click anyway. The mechanism producing this noise was quite necessary for its predecessor, the SLR/DSLR camera, but now functionally irrelevant in the newer point-and-shoots. This design cue (audible in this case) inherited from an ancestor is referred to as a skeuomorph, and they can be found everywhere in our daily lives — air intakes on the electric Chevy Volt, window shutters that don’t shut, copper cladding on zinc pennies, nonwinding watch winders. Even the brown cork-pattern on cigarette tips is a holdover from the days when cork was used as a filter.

Whatever a mouse user is doing, he is perpetually hovering. He might be hovering over a specific control, or over several places in the course of another action: dragging a scrollbar, selecting a word, even just idling around the screen. But until he has clicked, this user has taken no positive action. A click is unambiguous: the caveman pointing at the mammoth, the dog scratching at the door to go out. It cannot be done in the course of anything else.

Twitter recently redesigned their sign-up process to boost new user engagement. Though the new sign-up process added one more screen, conversions went up 29%. How? Gradual engagement.

Great interactions and ideas on edit-in-place pages and abstracting away the admin interface for site updates.

Normally when you think of “bad design”, you think of laziness or mistakes. These are known as design anti-patterns. Dark Patterns are different – they are not mistakes, they are carefully crafted with a solid understanding of human psychology, and they do not have the user’s interests in mind.

Some screenshots we’ve discussed recently in Campfire:

So the lesson of Dropbox is this: your existing, passionate customers (the people who have gone through the usage lifecycle) are the most powerful asset you have. They know why your product is great and they can communicate that to their social network better than you can. They can sell it better because they’re experiencing it every day and they’re not biased in the way you are. In short: they tend to be much more influential than you. 

Which, naturally, brings me to A/B testing. That's what Phil spends most of those thirty years doing. He spends it pursuing a woman, technically, but it's how he does it that is interesting:

The history of the beginning of round rectangles on the Mac.

Twitter recently redesigned their sign-up process to boost new user engagement. Though the new sign-up process added one more screen, conversions went up 29%. How? Gradual engagement.

Your app has too many settings, too many things to tweak. API endpoints? Colors of the rainbow? 100 different fonts and font sizes? Temperature in Kelvin? Switch the app to use Esperanto?

A few weeks ago we decided to take a stab at redesigning the Basecamp home page. We liked the current design, but we wanted to see if we could do better. Specifically we were interested in more visuals, less text, and a generally simpler and less dense presentation.

Though Amazon has excellent and proven features, these won’t necessarily work on any e-commerce website. Let’s take their customer reviews for example. Target.com bought Amazon’s customer review software. Though the software and the interface are exactly the same, Target.com basically doesn’t receive any reviews at all: in the first month after Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows came out, Amazon got 1 805 reviews whereas Target got only 3 (both retailers sold about 2 million copies).

Many designers create wireframes and comps with “lorem ipsum” filler text. Using dummy text often results in an aesthetically pleasing but unrealistic design. What’s worse, it creates the illusion that content is secondary.

For many, a redesign means to refresh the look of a website in the hope that it will increase conversions and attract new customers. In fact, such projects are often counterproductive as user feedbacks on numerous redesigns proved that users hate change, even if the new design is clearly superior to the original.

Many researches have shown that icons are hard to memorize and are often highly inefficient. The Microsoft Outlook toolbar is a good example: the former icon-only toolbar had a poor usability and changing the images and their positioning didn’t help much. With the introduction of text labels next to the icons however, everyone quickly understood the buttons’ function and started using them. In another study, the team of UIE observed that people remember a button’s actual position instead of the graphic interpretation of the function.

“The details are not the details. They make the design.” said Charles Eames. Fine details like an informative error message, a reassuring piece of microcopy on a sign up form, or rearranging the products on a category page strongly impacts the user experience.
Small details make a big difference. This is what Apple is all about: obsessive attention to the details down to the smallest bits.

Usability researches and eye-tracking studies show that stock photos and other decorative graphic elements rarely add value to a website and more often harm than improve the users’ experience.
Such images aren’t related to the website’s topic and don’t hold useful information. Users usually overlook stock images or even get frustrated by them.

Though people weren’t used to scrolling in the mid-nineties, nowadays it’s absolutely natural for users to use the browser’s scrollbar. For a continuous long content, like an article or a tutorial, scrolling provides even better usability than slicing up the text to several pages.

They simply don’t. Usability studies proved long ago that people don’t read web content word-by-word. Instead, they scan the pages looking for highlighted keywords, meaningful headings, short paragraphs and scannable lists. 

Here follows a list of engagement metrics that have been used over the years. As you go down the list the metrics go from almost meaningless (hits) to very meaningful (daily active users). This is a spectrum of engagement metrics that you can use for your own projects.

Web users spend 80% of their time looking at information above the page fold. Although users do scroll, they allocate only 20% of their attention below the fold.

Our first contact with a logo, if for a brand we aren’t familiar with, has little associated context. Therefore, we have no associated feelings with the logo and we won’t react strongly. We probably won’t notice it, we may react a little bit, but whatever our feelings about it will soon be overwhelmed by any direct experience. As our context changes over time, as we use the products and associate our experiences with the brand, then our feelings about it change as well. Bierut says:

As we build more and more Ajaxy applications, and our apps reside on a single page, the browser’s native back button can get more and more broken. This episode will show you how to re-enable the back button on your apps.

Welcome! This library shares user interface patterns with the web design and development community. We've got 59 patterns today and more on the way, and we welcome your feedback.

by Frank Chimero