Articles

Practical UX articles on interface design, usability and research — from form validation to dark mode, each answering one question with evidence.

What is a Toast Notification?

Reading Time – 2 min. A toast notification is a non-modal, unobtrusive element to display a short message and it appears on the screen when an event occurs.

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Guidelines for Currency Formatting (with ISO 4217 Table)

Reading Time – 3 min. If you're designing the UX for a web or mobile application that contains monetary data for different locales, you might have questions about the…

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Dropdown vs. Radio button vs. Checkboxes: Which one to use?

Reading Time – 2 min. Radio button vs checkbox: radios allow one choice, checkboxes allow any number, including none. A comparison table, plus when a dropdown beats both.

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Designing tables with lots of data

Reading Time – 2 min. Data table design for big, dense tables: column order, number alignment, frozen headers, sorting, filters, accessibility and mobile, plus a checklist.

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Hamburger menu icon: should it be on the left or right?

Reading Time – 2 min. Hamburger menu left or right? Left in apps with a side drawer, right on most mobile sites, or a bottom tab bar if you have five or fewer sections.

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Why do door knobs still exist?

Reading Time – 2 min. Most believe that it's for the same reason that exterior doors open inwards – it has always been done that way.

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Delay before the tooltip shows up

Reading Time – 2 min. What tooltip delay should you use? Usually 300 to 500ms on hover, none on keyboard focus, and instant for the next tooltip. Examples from design systems.

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Are the ‘close’ button and ‘X’ on a popup redundant?

Reading Time – 2 min. In dialog boxes, the 'close' button is usually used even if there is an 'X' icon on the top left/right of the window.

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Resources for testing UI design for color blind users

Reading Time – 2 min. Testing for color blindness is important if you're trying to make your website or app accessible. In this article, I will highlight some of the…

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Disable the Submit button if form validation is incomplete

Reading Time – 2 min. For the UX of web and mobile forms, you have to keep several things in mind. One of them is error prevention by disabling the Submit or Continue button.

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