Designing behaviour, not just appearance — research, information architecture, prototyping, and heuristics that catch failures.
11 topics · 19 curated works
No prior grounding assumed.
10 Usability Heuristics for User Interface Design
Jakob Nielsen · 1994
Lists ten broad rules of thumb, from visibility of system status to error prevention, for catching most of an interface's serious usability problems…
+8 more at this level
Assumes you know the vocabulary.
The Design of Everyday Things
Don Norman · 1988
Argues that when people struggle to use an object the fault lies with its design, not the user, and lays out affordances, signifiers, mappings and…
+5 more at this level
Primary sources and full treatments.
A Mathematical Model of the Finding of Usability Problems
Jakob Nielsen & Thomas K. Landauer · 1993
Derives from pooled study data that usability problems are found with steeply diminishing returns after a handful of test participants, giving the…
+3 more at this level
12 of 19 works
Jakob Nielsen
Lists ten broad rules of thumb, from visibility of system status to error prevention, for catching most of an interface's serious usability problems without running a full study.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Jesse James Garrett
Lays out user experience as five stacked planes, from strategy to surface, arguing that each plane's decisions are constrained by the choices already made in the plane below it.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Harry Brignull
Coins 'dark pattern' for an interface deliberately designed to trick a user into an action they did not mean to take, and starts a public list to name specific examples in the wild.
Luke Wroblewski
Argues that designing for mobile constraints first, rather than shrinking a desktop design afterward, forces the prioritisation that produces better interfaces on every screen size.
Steven Hoober
Reports original observational research finding most people grip a phone one-handed and operate it with a thumb, contradicting the two-handed typing assumption much mobile design had been built on.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Abby Covert
Treats information architecture as a learnable skill for turning a confusing pile of content into something findable, breaking the work into naming, organising and structuring around how people actually look for things.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Kara Pernice
Argues fidelity should be chosen deliberately rather than maximised: low-fidelity prototypes change fast and test concepts, while only high-fidelity ones surface problems that live in realistic detail.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Brad Frost
Proposes assembling interfaces from five nested levels, atoms through pages, so a design system stays consistent because every screen is built from the same small, reusable parts.
link checked 17 Sept 2026UK Government Digital Service
Argues that a public service should be designed end to end around the user's whole task rather than around a department's internal structure, and sets out standards and patterns for doing so consistently across government.
Don Norman
Argues that when people struggle to use an object the fault lies with its design, not the user, and lays out affordances, signifiers, mappings and feedback as the vocabulary for finding and fixing that failure.
John Brooke
Introduces a ten-item questionnaire for scoring an interface's perceived usability, arguing that a short, cheap, technology-independent scale gives more reliably comparable results than ad hoc surveys.
Bruce Tognazzini
Sets out roughly twenty principles, from consistency to forgiveness of error, that Tognazzini argues any interface should honour regardless of the platform or technology underneath it.
link checked 17 Sept 2026This subject genuinely sits in more than one domain. These fields approach the same ground with different methods.