Are home page carousels actually helpful to users? Or are they simply popular because they are an easy tool for solving internal discussions in large organizations about who gets to put their banner on the home page?
The short answer is that home page carousels can work, but in practice the vast majority of implementations perform poorly with end users. Read More
What is the best UX pattern to display products on an e-commerce website: pagination, a “Load more” button or infinite scrolling? At Baymard Institute, we’ve conducted several year-long large-scale usability studies of more than 50+ leading e-commerce websites. We tested (among other things) these three design patterns for loading products, both on desktop and mobile.
Pagination is still... Read More
Noah was concerned. He was the "UX guy" for the corporate office of a regional Quick Service Restaurant (a fast food chain) that was in the process of creating a mobile app to allow patrons to customize their meals, place orders and earn rewards.
Note: This is an experiment in a slightly different format for Smashing Magazine – using a storytelling approach to convey the same lessons... Read More
Chances are you’ve seen it: a child glued to a tablet or smartphone, swiping fearlessly with small, sticky fingers. From airports and restaurants, to homes and even schools, mobile devices are a ubiquitous part of childhood today. Apple launched a curated ‘Kids’ category in the App Store last year that already has more than 80,000 apps.
With so many apps for kids out there, you may have... Read More
A company proves that it has a strong creative process by developing successful products repeatedly. We see this in companies like Apple, BMW and Google. Founders such as Steve Jobs formed a corporate culture with an intense focus on creativity and design. This culture highlights two core elements in the creative process: the ideas and the team.
The creative process can be described in... Read More
You probably have a great product. You’ve done your usability deeds and you have a few core customers who regularly use your product. However, it just doesn’t stick out from the competition. It has a high bounce rate, only few users return, users abandon your product faster than you would like and, in general, users never get far enough to experience all that your product has to offer.
... Read More
As UX professionals, we know the value of conducting usability research. But UX research initiatives — even when designed well — are not perfect. A lab study to test a website, for example, would never perfectly capture a user’s actual behavior in the wild. This is because, inevitably, the research protocol itself will influence the findings.
A lab environment can never replicate the... Read More
If you’re a UX designer, you’ve probably designed a lot of forms and web (or app) pages in which the user needs to choose between options. And as a designer, you’re likely familiar with best practices for designing forms. Certainly, much has been written and discussed about this topic. So, you probably know all about how best to label and position form fields and so on for optimal usability.
... Read More
Editor’s Note: This article contains many video examples that show functional animation. Therefore, it may take longer to load on slow connections. A good UX designer can easily explain the logic behind each decision in a design concept. This includes the information architecture, the content hierarchy, the flow and the assumptions made.
Sooner or later, animation will be introduced to... Read More
