Best Font for Online Reading: No Single Answer
Summary: Among high-legibility fonts, a study found 35% difference in reading speeds between the best and the worst. People read 11% slower for every 20 years they age. A large new study of the best fonts for online reading is ultimately disappointing, because it doesn’t answer the most burning question: what font should you use for your website? But it still provides many intriguing findings, inc
Left-Side Vertical Navigation on Desktop: Scalable, Responsive, and Easy to Scan
Summary: Vertical navigation is a good fit for broad or growing IAs, but takes up more space than horizontal navigation. Ensure that it is left-aligned, keyword front-loaded, and visible. Every time I talk about broad hierarchies in our UX Conference course on information architecture, two questions come up: Is it okay to have more than 7-9 top-tier categories in the global navigation? (Spoiler al
Opening Links in New Browser Windows and Tabs
Summary: Carefully examine the user’s context, task at hand, and next steps when deciding whether to open links to documents and external sites in the same or a new browser tab. Since 1999, it's been a firm web-usability guideline to refrain from opening new browser windows for several reasons. All of these also apply to opening new browser tabs and are still valid today: More windows or tabs incr
PDF: Still Unfit for Human Consumption, 20 Years Later
Summary: Research spanning 20 years proves PDFs are problematic for online reading. Yet they’re still prevalent and users continue to get lost in them. They’re unpleasant to read and navigate and remain unfit for digital-content display. Jakob Nielsen first wrote about how PDF files should never be read online in 1996 — only three years after PDFs were invented. Over 20 years later, our research c
Listboxes vs. Dropdown Lists
Summary: Listboxes and dropdowns are compact UI controls that allow users to select options. Listboxes expose options right away and support multi-selection while dropdowns require a click to see options and support only single-selection. Many UI controls allow users to select options; they include checkboxes, radio buttons, toggle switches, steppers, listboxes, and dropdowns. In this article, I’l
How People Read Online: New and Old Findings
Summary: Looking back at findings from a series of eyetracking studies over 13 years, we see that fundamental scanning behaviors remain constant, even as designs change. The more things change, the more they stay the same. We recently published the 2nd edition of our How People Read Online report, almost 15 years after the 1stedition was published. Looking back over the findings from the 5 eyetrac
Videos as Instructional Content: User Behaviors and UX Guidelines
Summary: Instructional video content is helpful as supplementary information, though not all users will watch it. Videos should be easily discoverable, consistent in style across the site, and with thumbnails that accurately represent the type of content they provide. When you need to learn how to do something — whether it’s caulking a sink, troubleshooting a new piece of software or learning a ne
‘Contact Us’ Page Guidelines
Summary: Users still expect to see company addresses, phone numbers, and email addresses on ‘Contact Us’ pages. Don’t hide or replace these elements with automated tools such as ‘Contact Us’ forms or chat. To update our About Us report, we recently conducted a qualitative usability study with 20 business professionals. During this research, we observed participants’ behavior as they tried to compl
Large Devices Preferred for Important Tasks
Summary: Despite substantial improvements in mobile UX over the past decade, people still tend to do their most important online activities on larger screens. Since the iPhone was introduced in 2007, mobile usability has made tremendous strides: we use our phones to do a wide variety of tasks. In fact, according to Pew Internet, in 2019 17% of Americans depended on their mobile phone as their onl
The 3-Click Rule for Navigation Is False
Summary: While it is important to keep key information easily accessible, the 3-click rule is an arbitrary rule of thumb that is not backed by data. The 3-Click Rule The 3-click rule is a persistent, unofficial heuristic that says that no page should take more than 3 clicks (or taps on a touchscreen) to access. A variation pronounces that the most important information should take no more than 3 c
Carousels on Mobile Devices
Summary: Carousels on touch screens are plagued by low discoverability and sequential access, and not all designs implement swipe as a carousel control. On desktop, the carousel has always been a popular way to stick multiple pieces of content on the front page without taking up too much space. On mobile, carousels increased in popularity when the iPad was first introduced. (Original iPad designs
Banner Blindness Revisited: Users Dodge Ads on Mobile and Desktop
Summary: Users have learned to ignore content that resembles ads, is close to ads, or appears in locations traditionally dedicated to ads. Banner blindness is a long-known web user behavior: it describes people’s tendency to ignore page elements that they perceive (correctly or incorrectly) to be ads. And, while webpage patterns and types of advertisements have evolved, banner blindness is still p
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Derailed Design Critiques: Tactics for Getting Back on Track
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Workshop Facilitation 101
How to Respond to Skepticism of Testing Small Groups of Users
Web Page Footers 101: Design Patterns and When to Use Each
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