When using today’s complex digital systems, users must frequently navigate through myriad contexts—for example, shifting from dashboards to reports, from design tools to client feedback, and from product catalogs to checkout pages. Each of these transitions involves not merely a physical change in the user-interface context but necessitates a mental recalibration, requiring users to recall or transfer information that is pertinent to their current task. This phenomenon is known as cognitive distance.

Defining Cognitive Distance

Cognitive distance refers to the mental effort that is necessary to transfer or recall information between disparate contexts within a digital system. Its existence underscores the necessity of minimizing cognitive load by facilitating smoother transitions between tasks to enhance the user experience. As users engage with complex systems, they often face the challenge of remembering crucial details from one context to apply them within another context. This can lead to user frustration and inefficiency. Read More

The recent rise of artificial intelligence (AI) has revolutionized the marketing and Web-development industries. Today, 54% of marketers say they use AI in their role, while 22% say they use it daily. This stunning statistic emphasizes the potential power of AI and proves that tools such as ChatGPT and Dall-E are here to stay.

Generative AI can do more than just produce graphics and descriptions for social media. Leveraging AI is key if you work for a firm that prides itself on connecting with clients and customers or relies on repeat purchases. Plus, AI can aid customer-care efforts by collecting additional data relating to the user experience. When used correctly, AI tools can help you personalize user journeys and, thus, deliver more memorable customer experiences. By personalizing the user experience based on accurate customer data that AI algorithms have gathered, sorted, and analyzed, AI can transform your business. Read More

Picture this: You’ve just signed up a new customer, and they’re excited to get going. Everything seems great on paper—until their questions start rolling in.

“How does this feature work?”

“Why can’t I customize my dashboard?”

“Why won’t this integration connect properly?”

Despite the best efforts of your support agents and Customer Success team, confusion about your product might be too much for your customers. Without proper guidance, they could become frustrated and eventually decide to leave. This scenario is all too common. Over 90% of customers believe that companies could do a better job of onboarding, and a UserPilot survey shows that only 24.5% of users adopt a core feature, while the rest abandon it because they don’t immediately understand how to derive value from it. Read More

The right tool makes all the difference in UX and user-interface (UI) design. With hundreds of tools available on the market, selecting the right ones to meet your needs can be challenging. Here’s a look at the top 20 essential tools for UX designers, along with their strengths and drawbacks.

My Framework for Evaluation

I’ll analyze these tools based on five main criteria:

1. Functionality—Core features and capabilities
2. Ease of use—How easy the tool is for new users to learn and use
3. Collaboration features—How well the tool supports team collaboration
4. Integrations—The tool’s compatibility with other tools
5. Value for money—Free or paid—and whether the features justify the price

Let’s get started! Read More

Just a few years ago, UX professionals weren’t talking about topics such as user privacy, technological governance, cybersecurity, or sustainable information technology (IT) as much as we are now. We have come to an inflection point in the history of the Web and are now seeing some unintended implications of the digital innovations that have bubbled up on the Internet—from online fraud to mental-health issues to unsustainable consumerism. However, the ways in which we, as UX professionals, do our work has not yet caught up with these issues.

As I touched upon in a previous column, UX design practices still hinge upon principles that maximize productivity, efficiency, and cognitive ease, in ways that are fundamentally at odds with some of the priorities and values that are emerging today. The formalization of these principles is grounded in the notion of user-centered design (UCD), a paradigm that gained steam at the onset of the Internet era, in the late ’90s. [1]

If people’s attitudes toward and needs for digital experiences are shifting, why are we still using the same UX design methods that made sense for the burgeoning Web? Read More

In recent years, social ecommerce has rapidly emerged across the world by leveraging social interactions to drive online sales. Examples include influencer-driven shopping on Instagram in the US, Line Shopping’s chat-based social ecommerce in Japan and Thailand, and Pinduoduo’s group-buying model in China.

What I’ve found most interesting is the group-buying model in ecommerce, which originated in the West, but has become extremely successful in the East, especially with platforms such as Pinduoduo. I’ve explored how cultural factors influence this space and why they result in such different outcomes in the ecommerce industry. In this column, I’ll examine how Pinduoduo leverages social elements to design user experiences that influence consumers’ decision-making. Read More

Many professionals who focus on User Experience (UX), Customer Experience (CX), and innovation describe the maturity of these practices within their organization as elusive muses that are perpetually out of reach. It’s challenging just to build awareness of these practices much less to bring them to maturity—that is, to get them to the point where they’re woven into the fabric of a company’s charter and business objectives.

At Rockwell Automation, we’re forging a path to UX, CX, and innovation maturity by using several tactics. One of the most impactful tactics has been cultivating communities of practice (CoP) throughout the organization. These communities of practice focus on design, innovation, and related best practices. Making our various communities of practice successful requires a concerted effort—a big part of which is establishing strong, dedicated leadership. Therefore, I’ve asked the following CoP leaders from Rockwell to join me in a Q&A-style discussion for this column:

• Krystal Thibault, Innovation Program Manager and Innovation CoP Leader
• Daniel Zinzow, Senior Lead UX Strategist and Design CoP Leader
• Magda Jagielska, Customer Experience (CX) System Manager and CX CoP Leader   Read More

Generative AI (GenAI) is already changing our digital world. From helping people to write or rewrite their email messages to creating images, GenAI is poised to influence a broad spectrum of product user experiences—even those that are not directly driven by artificial intelligence (AI).

GenAI can alter users’ expectations, shift the ways in which they interact with digital products, and introduce new behavioral patterns. The resulting changes are likely to impact how users engage with products in indirect, but meaningful ways. In Part 3 of our series on UX research (UXR) for GenAI, we’ll share our thoughts on why we think it’s crucial for UX researchers to start updating our approaches to UXR now, even if GenAI isn’t on your near-term product roadmap. Read More

Picture this: You’re starting a new app-design project, and instead of initially staring at a blank screen, you have AI tools at your behest that can generate wireframes that are tailored to your project’s requirements. These layouts aren’t random—they’re based on your users’ data, tailored to users’ preferences, and aligned with what’s working within your industry domain right now. Throughout your design process, an AI can suggest real-time tweaks that are based on user-behavior patterns, helping you refine a product’s design at lightning speed.

This isn’t some distant future—it’s happening now. AI is fast becoming a UX designer’s best teammate, helping us work faster, think smarter, and create more meaningful user experiences. Read More