IxDF Blog: The World's Largest Free Online Resource on UX Design

Dive into 1,760 free articles packed with 730 videos, illustrations, and hands-on templates by 209 industry experts, bestselling authors, and Ivy League professors.

Learn Design and AI From the Best Get one powerful email each week, like 315,252 others.

Next email in:

Most Shared and Trending
UX / UI Articles

You can use design skills to make a meaningful impact on your own career, your company and the people you help. Dive into the articles and videos that millions of other people love.

Read full article
The 5 Stages in the Design Thinking Process - Article hero image

The 5 Stages in the Design Thinking Process

Design thinking is a methodology that provides a solution-based approach to solving problems. It’s extremely useful when used to tackle complex problems that are ill-defined or unknown—because it serves to understand the human needs involved, reframe the problem in human-centric ways, create numerou

Social shares
2k
Published
Read Article
Read full article
What is Design Thinking and Why Is It So Popular? - Article hero image

What is Design Thinking and Why Is It So Popular?

Design Thinking is not an exclusive property of designers—all great innovators in literature, art, music, science, engineering, and business have practiced it. So, why call it Design Thinking? What’s special about Design Thinking is that designers’ work processes can help us systematically extract,

Social shares
1.6k
Published
Read Article
Read full article
Personas – A Simple Introduction - Article hero image

Personas – A Simple Introduction

Personas are fictional characters, which you create based upon your research to represent the different user types that might use your service, product, site, or brand in a similar way. Creating personas will help you understand your users’ needs, experiences, behaviors and goals. Creating personas

Social shares
1.6k
Published
Read Article
Read full article
Bad Design vs. Good Design: 5 Examples We Can Learn From - Article hero image

Bad Design vs. Good Design: 5 Examples We Can Learn From

Looking at examples of bad design alongside counter-examples of good design is not only fun but also draws important lessons for designers. They highlight pitfalls for designers to avoid and let us understand how to translate design theories into solutions that work in the real world. Jared Spool, t

Social shares
1.5k
Published
Read Article
Read full article
What is Interaction Design? - Article hero image

What is Interaction Design?

Interaction design is an important component within the giant umbrella of user experience (UX) design. In this article, we’ll explain what interaction design is, some useful models of interaction design, as well as briefly describe what an interaction designer usually does.A simple and useful unders

Social shares
1.5k
Published
Read Article
Read full article
Apple’s Product Development Process – Inside the World’s Greatest Design Organization - Article hero image

Apple’s Product Development Process – Inside the World’s Greatest Design Organization

Apple’s Product Development Process may be one of the most successful design processes ever implemented. With a valuation that exceeds $2 trillion, there’s a lot that designers can learn from Apple and introduce into their own design environments.Apple is a notoriously secretive business. In Steve J

Social shares
1.4k
Published
Read Article
Read full article
Stage 2 in the Design Thinking Process: Define the Problem and Interpret the Results - Article hero image

Stage 2 in the Design Thinking Process: Define the Problem and Interpret the Results

An integral part of the Design Thinking process is the definition of a meaningful and actionable problem statement, which the design thinker will focus on solving. This is perhaps the most challenging part of the Design Thinking process, as the definition of a problem (also called a design challenge

Social shares
1.4k
Published
Read Article

Latest UX / UI Design Articles

Combine AI skills with timeless skills in User Experience (UX) and User Interface (UI) design. Skills like empathy, user-centered design, and creative problem-solving are deeply human, and no technology can replace them.

Read full article
Object-Oriented UI Design: How You Can Collaborate Seamlessly with Developers and Build Better Products - Article hero image

Object-Oriented UI Design: How You Can Collaborate Seamlessly with Developers and Build Better Products

You’re at your routine health checkup, sipping an iced coffee on a hot day. Suddenly, you get a sharp pain in your head. The doctor looks up from her notes, a sympathetic expression on her face. “You’re experiencing sphenopalatine ganglioneuralgia.” Your heart sinks. The coffee cup drops to the floo

Social shares
94
Published
Read Article
Read full article
Copy These 3 Industry-Leading Apps and Turn Object-Oriented Design into Your Secret Career Advantage - Article hero image

Copy These 3 Industry-Leading Apps and Turn Object-Oriented Design into Your Secret Career Advantage

Which apps do you use throughout your day? Maybe you manage your projects on Trello, use Notion as an internal docs site, and maybe, just maybe, you do some swiping on Tinder during your lunch break. Despite looking nothing alike, these three highly successful apps are organized around the same idea

Social shares
92
Published
Read Article
Read full article
7 Reasons Object-Oriented UI Design Will Grow Your Career - Article hero image

7 Reasons Object-Oriented UI Design Will Grow Your Career

Vacation time! You book your flight. You have a reservation. It's real. You paid for it. And yet, when you open the airline's app to look at it, it's surprisingly elusive. You don't want to check in, you don't want to change it, you just want to find it and check the details. It's not on the home sc

Social shares
93
Published
Read Article
Read full article
What are the Stages of Creativity? - Article hero image

What are the Stages of Creativity?

Let’s explore the various stages of creativity so you can get a firmer idea of its true nature as such a powerful human resource. Graham Wallas was the first to create an overview of a creative process back in 1926. As you can imagine, lots of iterations have emerged since then. Some of these theori

Social shares
1.1k
Published
Read Article
Read full article
Plug, Play, Persona: Your Free Template and Step-by-Step Guide - Article hero image

Plug, Play, Persona: Your Free Template and Step-by-Step Guide

You've searched for the perfect persona template, downloaded dozens, yet none quite hit the mark. Here's the problem: Most templates fail you because they focus on demographics, fancy sliders, and irrelevant details. None of these things help drive decisions or create solutions that improve lives. B

Social shares
126
Published
Read Article
Read full article
Keyboard Navigation and Data Entry - Article hero image

Keyboard Navigation and Data Entry

Forms are an essential part of many interactions, but good form layout and clear labels are only part of the picture. Forms also need to work in all the ways users interact with them. Not everyone uses a mouse. Many users rely on keyboards, whether by preference, motor impairments, or because they u

Social shares
156
Published
Read Article
Read full article
Expert Evaluation: Identify Problems Before You Recruit Users - Article hero image

Expert Evaluation: Identify Problems Before You Recruit Users

Before you have a single real user in a testing session, you can already find a significant proportion of the usability problems in a design. Expert evaluation, also known as heuristic evaluation, is one of the most cost-effective methods available to UX practitioners. It requires no recruitment, fa

Social shares
157
Published
Read Article

The Encyclopedia of Human-Computer Interaction, 2nd Ed.

Free textbooks written by more than 100 leading designers, bestselling authors, and Ivy League professors. We have assembled our textbooks in a gigantic encyclopedia, whose 4,000+ pages cover the design of interactive products and services such as websites, household objects, smartphones, computer software, aircraft cockpits, and what have you. Name an item of design interest, and you'll probably find it discussed inside.

Book's cover image: The Encyclopedia of Human-Computer Interaction, 2nd Ed.
First Chapter
Don Norman

Highly recommend the Encyclopedia of Human-Computer Interaction […] the breadth and the depth of the invited contributions are quite impressive […] all with highly qualified authorities as authors.

– Don Norman

Table of Contents

Open-Source Textbooks on Design

Dive into all of IxDF open-source textbooks. Feeling a little lost in books and articles? Then try our engaging video-based courses.

Fast-Track Your Promotion
With IxDF Template Bundles

Fully licensed for commercial use—so you can impress clients, boost your brand, and take the next big step in your career.

Get ready-made, professional templates you can drop straight into your next project.

Download the Templates

IxDF Research Bibliography for Academia

If you're a researcher in academia, we've compiled a comprehensive bibliography on human-centered technology for you, comprising 138,678 authors in more than 127,278 publications.

Browse By

39% of Today's Skills Will Change by 2030

The World Economic Forum expects 39% of today's skills to be transformed or become outdated by 2030.

The good news is that jobs in UX / UI design and AI are among the fastest-growing professions globally.

Build Skills That Keep You Relevant

Privacy Settings

By using this site, you accept our Cookie Policy and Terms of Use.
Customize
Accept all

Join the Community That Cares ❤️

IxDF Members can download the PDF version of this book.