The Principle of Least Surprise
Consistency is at the heart of good product design. But consistency is often misinterpreted as making things look or behave the same way. This ignores context and can lead to a foolish consistency. Instead of consistency, designers should adhere to the Principle of Least Surprise.
Layout grids for Axure and Pencil
Designed for use with Axure RP Pro 5 and the Pencil extension for Firefox, this resource will help you layout prototype web pages using the 960-grid system.
Tips for writing user manuals
User manuals have a bad reputation. In a recent USA Today poll that asked readers "Which technological things have the ability to confuse you?" user manuals came out top! Increasingly companies are rethinking the way they approach user manuals. Here are some suggestions for improving the usability of user manuals based on our experience writing them.
The A-Z of Usability
Rather than create yet another definition of usability, we decided to take a different approach and work through the alphabet, picking one word for each letter to capture the flavour of the field. So we proudly present the A-Z of usability or usability in 26 words.
Filter articles by keyword
- accessibility •
- axure •
- benefits •
- careers •
- case study •
- css •
- discount usability •
- ecommerce •
- ethnography •
- expert review •
- fitts law •
- focus groups •
- forms •
- guidelines •
- heuristic evaluation •
- ia •
- iso 9241 •
- iterative design •
- layout •
- legal •
- metrics •
- mobile •
- moderating •
- morae •
- navigation •
- personas •
- prototyping •
- questionnaires •
- quotations •
- roi •
- selling usability •
- standards •
- strategy •
- style guide •
- survey design •
- task scenarios •
- templates •
- tools •
- usability testing •
- user manual
User Experience Articles & Videos
Our most recent videos
Our most recent articles
- Dec 2: Usability task scenarios: The beating heart of a usability test
- Nov 4: Common traps in user needs research and how to avoid them
- Oct 7: Transitioning from academic research to UX research
- Sep 2: The minimalist field researcher: What's in my bag?
- Aug 5: The future of UX research is automated, and that's a problem