UX & Usability Articles from Nielsen Norman Group - NN/G

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Six tips for designing better tab controls: selection indicators, visibility, content connection, tab count, labels, and discoverable advanced features.
An agent harness manages a software loop between an AI model and its tools. Its context, permissions, and limits shape what users can do.
Usability refers to how easily people can complete tasks with a design. Improve it by watching representative users do realistic tasks, early and repeatedly.
Complexity isn't a design failure—complication is. Learn the difference between perceived and operational simplicity for expert users.
AI is expanding UX beyond human users to agents acting on their behalf. Experience design names this broader field, which still centers on people’s goals.
AI-native software development lifecycles reduce UX to AI context. UX must discover user needs, shape what’s built, and evaluate it before and after launch.
Learn what tabs are, when to use them, and how navigation tabs differ from in-page tabs in UI design.
AI saves UX practitioners time on nearly every task, yet most feel lukewarm about it: mandates, unreliable output, and inflated expectations eat the gains.
Definitions of fields related to user experience, including UX design, UI design, visual design, interaction design, service design, UX research, and DesignOps
Jakob Nielsen's 10 general principles for interaction design. They are called "heuristics" because they are broad rules of thumb for UX and not specific usability guidelines.
Empathy maps help UX teams visualize user attitudes and behaviors, building a shared understanding of end users while highlighting gaps in existing user data.
A journey map is a visualization of the process that a person goes through in order to accomplish a goal.
Step-by-step instructions to review your product to find potential usability and experience problems. Download a free heuristic evaluation template.
Modern day UX research methods answer a wide range of questions. To know when to use which method, each of 20 methods is mapped across 3 dimensions and over time within a typical product-development process.
Service blueprints visualize organizational processes in order to optimize how a business delivers a user experience.
Design thinking is a user-centered process that helps teams understand needs, generate ideas, test solutions, and drive innovation.
UX researchers use this popular observational methodology to uncover problems and opportunities in designs.
User interviews have become a popular technique for getting user feedback, mainly because they are fast and easy. Use them to learn about users’ perceptions of your design, not about its usability.
Usability makes designs easy, efficient, and satisfying to use. Improve it through early, repeated user testing with real users
User journeys and user flows both describe processes users go through in order to accomplish their goals, but they differ in scope, purpose, and format.
Use affinity diagramming to cluster and organize research findings or to sort design ideas in ideation workshops.
User research can be done at any point in the design cycle. This list of methods and activities can help you decide which to use when.
Constructing how-might-we questions generates creative solutions while keeping teams focused on the right problems to solve.
iOS 26’s visual language obscures content instead of letting it take the spotlight. New (but not always better) design patterns replace established conventions.
Use this glossary to quickly clarify definitions for key graphical user-interface elements and controls.
Elaborate usability tests are a waste of resources. The best results come from testing no more than 5 users and running as many small tests as you can afford.
In a card-sorting study, users organize topics into groups. Use this research method to create an information architecture that suits your users' expectations.
Open-ended questions result in deeper insights. Closed questions provide clarification and detail, but no unexpected insights.
"User experience" encompasses all aspects of the end-user's interaction with the company, its services, and its products.
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