Jakob’s Law
A principle stating that users spend most of their time on other websites and prefer your site to work the same way as all the other sites they already know. Crucial for designing user-friendly and familiar interfaces.
137 topics found for:
“user navigation”
Visual Hierarchy
The arrangement of visual elements in a way that signifies their importance, guiding users' attention to the most critical parts of a design. Essential for creating effective and intuitive user interfaces that enhance usability and user experience.
Nielsen’s Heuristics
A set of ten general principles for user interface design created by Jakob Nielsen to improve usability. Essential for evaluating and improving user interface designs.
Fitts’s Law
A predictive model of human movement that describes the time required to move to a target area, used to design user interfaces that enhance usability. Important for designing efficient and user-friendly interfaces.
Decision Paralysis
A state of overthinking and indecision that prevents making a choice, often due to too many options or uncertainty. Important for designing interfaces that simplify decision-making processes for users.
Continuity
A Gestalt principle that describes the tendency of the human visual system to perceive lines or patterns that follow a smooth, continuous path rather than a disjointed or abrupt one. Essential for creating designs that guide the user's eye smoothly and logically.
Layer Cake Pattern
A reading pattern where users scan a page in horizontal stripes, focusing on headings and subheadings. Important for structuring content in a way that facilitates quick scanning and information retrieval.
Cross-Platform Consistency
Ensuring that user experiences are consistent across different platforms, such as web, mobile, and desktop. Essential for creating a seamless and cohesive user experience across multiple devices.
Principle of Scale
A design principle that involves using relative size to indicate the importance of elements, creating visual hierarchy and focus. Crucial for guiding user attention and creating effective visual communication.
Five Hat Racks
A method for organizing information based on five categories: category, time, location, alphabet, and continuum. Useful for creating clear and effective information architectures.
Clickability
The perceived affordance of an element to be clickable, indicating that it can be interacted with. Essential for improving user interface design and guiding user actions.
Faceted Search
A search system that allows users to narrow down search results by applying multiple filters based on different attributes or categories. Essential for improving user search experience and efficiency.
External Cues
Environmental signals that influence behavior and decision-making, such as signage, prompts, or notifications. Useful for designing environments and systems that effectively guide user behavior.
POUR
Perceivable, Operable, Understandable, and Robust (POUR) are the four main principles of web accessibility. These principles are essential for creating inclusive digital experiences that can be accessed and used by people with a wide range of abilities and disabilities.
Uniform Connectedness
A Gestalt principle stating that elements that are visually connected are perceived as more related than elements with no connection. Essential for creating designs that effectively group related elements.
Iconic Representation
The use of icons or graphical symbols to represent objects, actions, or concepts, enhancing usability and visual communication. Crucial for creating intuitive and accessible user interfaces.
Bottom-Up IA
An approach to information architecture that starts with the details and builds up to a comprehensive structure. Useful for designing flexible and detailed systems that can adapt to user needs.
Marking Pattern
A reading pattern where users quickly scan for specific markers or keywords within the content. Important for optimizing content for quick search and retrieval.
Limited Attention
The concept that humans have a finite capacity for attention, influencing how they perceive and interact with information. Crucial for designing user experiences that are not overwhelming and facilitate focus.
Right Rail Blindness
A specific form of banner blindness where users ignore content placed in the right-hand rail of a web page. Important for optimizing web page layouts and placing critical information where it will be seen.
Decision Staging
The process of breaking down decisions into smaller, manageable stages to simplify the decision-making process. Useful for guiding users through complex decisions in a structured manner.
Product Sense
The ability to intuitively understand what makes a product successful, including market needs, user experience, and competitive landscape. Important for making informed decisions that lead to successful product development.
Similarity
A Gestalt principle that states that objects that are similar in appearance are perceived as being more related than objects that are dissimilar. Essential for creating visually cohesive and intuitive designs.
External Consistency
The degree to which a product's elements are consistent with external standards or other products. Important for ensuring compatibility and user familiarity across different systems.
Regulatory Focus Theory
A theory that describes how individuals pursue goals using either a promotion focus (seeking gains) or a prevention focus (avoiding losses). Crucial for designing motivation strategies and understanding user behavior in goal pursuit.
Information Bias
A cognitive bias where people seek out more information than is needed to make a decision, often leading to analysis paralysis. Crucial for designing decision-making processes that avoid information overload for users.
Principle of Repetition
A design principle that involves repeating elements to create consistency and unity, making the design more cohesive and understandable. Crucial for creating visually appealing and user-friendly designs that enhance readability and usability.
Consistency
The quality of being uniform and coherent across different elements and touchpoints in design. Crucial for creating predictable and reliable user experiences.
Connectedness
A Gestalt principle suggesting that elements are perceived as a single unit or group if they share an organizing visual cue like bullet points, or connecting lines. Essential for creating designs that organize and define related elements through grouping.
Focal Points
Elements in a design that draw the viewer's attention and create a visual hierarchy. Essential for guiding user attention and improving the effectiveness of visual communication.
Overconfidence Effect
A cognitive bias where a person's subjective confidence in their judgments is greater than their objective accuracy. Crucial for understanding user decision-making and designing systems that account for overconfidence.
Conspicuity
The ability of an object to stand out and attract attention within its environment. Important for designing elements that need to be easily noticed by users.
Infomediary
An intermediary that gathers and provides information to users, typically in an online context. Important for helping users make informed decisions based on aggregated data.
Common Region
A Gestalt principle where elements that are located within the same closed region are perceived as being grouped together. Essential for creating designs that are easily understood and visually organized.
Form Follows Function
A design principle that states the design of a product or interface should primarily serve its intended purpose or functionality. Important for creating digital designs that are both practical and user-friendly.
Minimalism
A design approach that emphasizes simplicity, using only the necessary elements to create a clean and uncluttered look. Essential for creating intuitive and user-friendly interfaces.
Proximity
A Gestalt principle that states objects that are close to each other tend to be perceived as a group. Crucial for creating intuitive and organized visual designs that align with natural perceptual tendencies.
Bounce Rate
The percentage of visitors to a website who navigate away from the site after viewing only one page. Important for understanding user engagement and the effectiveness of a website's content and design.
RWD
Responsive Web Design (RWD) is an approach to web design that makes web pages render well on a variety of devices and window or screen sizes. Essential for creating flexible, adaptive web experiences that maintain functionality and aesthetics across different platforms and devices.
Assistive Technology
Hardware and software designed to assist people with disabilities in using computers and digital content. Essential for understanding and designing for a diverse range of user needs.
Aria Roles
Specific roles assigned to HTML elements to define their purpose and behavior in an accessible manner. Crucial for improving the accessibility and usability of web applications.
Design Leadership
The practice of guiding and inspiring teams to create effective, user-centered design solutions that align with business goals. Crucial for fostering a culture of innovation, collaboration, and excellence in design practices within organizations.
Uncanny Valley
The phenomenon where a humanoid object that appears almost, but not exactly, like a real human causes discomfort in observers. Important for understanding user reactions to lifelike robots and avatars.
ARIA Properties
ARIA attributes that define additional characteristics of elements, such as roles and relationships. Important for enhancing the accessibility and usability of web applications.
CES
Customer Effort Score (CES) is a metric that measures how much effort customers have to put in to interact with a product or service. Crucial for identifying friction points and improving user experience in digital products.
Ethical Data Use
The practice of collecting, processing, and using data in ways that respect privacy, consent, and the well-being of individuals. Essential for building trust and ensuring compliance with legal and ethical standards.
Design Ethics
The principles and guidelines that govern the moral and ethical aspects of design, ensuring that designs are socially responsible and beneficial. Crucial for creating designs that are ethical, inclusive, and socially responsible.
Bounded Rationality
A concept that humans make decisions within the limits of their knowledge, cognitive capacity, and available time, leading to satisficing rather than optimal solutions. Crucial for designing systems and processes that account for human cognitive limitations and decision-making processes.
First Touch
The initial interaction a customer has with a brand. Important for understanding the beginning of the customer journey.
Dual Self Model
A behavioral economics model that explains decision-making as a conflict between a present-oriented "doer" and a future-oriented "planner". Useful for understanding user decision-making and designing interventions that balance short-term and long-term goals.
Probability Matching
A decision-making strategy where individuals allocate resources proportionally to the probability of an outcome occurring, rather than optimizing the most likely outcome. Important for understanding decision-making behaviors and designing systems that guide better resource allocation.
Change Enablement
The process of preparing, equipping, and supporting individuals to successfully adopt change to drive organizational success and outcomes. Crucial for ensuring smooth transitions and effective implementation of new processes or systems.
Behavioral Finance
The study of how psychological influences affect financial behaviors and decision-making. Essential for understanding and influencing financial decision-making and behavior.
Scanning Pattern
Common reading patterns users follow when scanning web content, such as the F-pattern, where users read across the top and then scan down the left side. Important for designing layouts that align with natural reading behaviors, improving content engagement and usability.
Gestalt Theory
A set of principles describing how the human mind organizes visual information into meaningful wholes. Crucial for designing intuitive digital interfaces and cohesive user experiences that align with natural human perception patterns.
SEO Friendly URL
A URL that is structured in a way that is easily readable by both users and search engines, often including keywords to improve search engine optimization. Essential for improving a website's visibility and ranking in search engine results.
Top-Down IA
An approach to information architecture that begins with high-level structures and breaks them down into detailed components. Helps in creating a clear and organized framework from the outset, ensuring consistency and coherence.
Design Tradeoffs
The compromises made between different design options, balancing various factors like usability, aesthetics, and functionality. Essential for making informed decisions that optimize overall design effectiveness.
KOS
Knowledge Organization System (KOS) refers to a structured framework for organizing, managing, and retrieving information within a specific domain or across multiple domains. Essential for improving information findability, enhancing semantic interoperability, and supporting effective knowledge management in digital environments.
Common Fate
A Gestalt principle stating that elements moving in the same direction are perceived as a group or a single entity. Crucial for creating visual designs that effectively convey movement and relationships.