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Research library

Original digests of studies and books, each with the question, method, findings, limitations — and a link to the source. Summaries, not substitutes.

Study digests

Baymard Institute · 2023

Premature inline validation hurts checkout UX

Live validation that fires while users are still typing measurably increases frustration and error rates; validate after field completion.

Moderated usability testing of e-commerce checkouts, large-scale test series
Google Research (Rodden, Hutchinson, Fu) · 2010

HEART: metrics for user-centered products at scale

Five metric families — Happiness, Engagement, Adoption, Retention, Task success — operationalized through a goals → signals → metrics process.

Framework paper from applied metrics work across Google products, CHI 2010
Nielsen Norman Group · 2000

Why you only need to test with 5 users

Five users uncover ~85% of the usability problems a test can find; additional users mostly re-observe known issues.

Mathematical model over usability problem data (Nielsen & Landauer, 1993)

Book digests

Steve Portigal · 2023

Interviewing Users

The field manual for research interviews: framing, guides, question technique, field behavior and analysis — from someone who has run thousands.

Who it's for: Anyone about to run their first (or fiftieth) interview; the fastest single upgrade to research quality.
Don Norman · 2013

The Design of Everyday Things

The conceptual foundation of the field: affordances, signifiers, mapping, feedback, constraints, mental models, and human error as design failure.

Who it's for: Everyone in product work — it installs the vocabulary the rest of the literature assumes.

Guideline digests

PlannedApple HIG, Material 3 and WCAG 2.2 walkthroughs will live here — until then, see the Platform Guidelines track plan and Resources.