40 Fun Facts About UX Design

Which fairy tale names the breadcrumb trail showing visitors where they are in a website?

Hansel and Gretel left a trail of crumbs to find their way home, and breadcrumb links let a visitor retrace a route up a site. The trail usually runs across the top of a page, split by greater-than signs.

Which character was the standard Office Assistant until Office XP turned it off by default?

Clippy, officially named Clippit, was a paperclip character that arrived with Office 97. At the Office XP launch in 2001, a man in a Clippit costume begged for his job back before being dragged off stage.

Which company patented one-click ordering, then licensed the idea to Apple for its online store?

Amazon was granted the patent in September 1999 and licensed one-click ordering to Apple the following year. Apple paid $1 million for it and later added the feature to the iTunes Store.

Which US state used the confusing butterfly ballot that may have cost Al Gore votes in 2000?

Florida's Palm Beach County used the layout, and many voters who meant to pick Gore marked Pat Buchanan or spoiled their ballots. The state was settled in favour of Bush by a margin of just 537 votes.

Which food names the three-line icon that Norm Cox drew for the 1981 Xerox Star workstation?

Hamburger is the nickname for its accidental likeness to a burger, though the lines were meant to look like the text of a small printed menu. The icon returned in 2009, when phone apps were short of screen space.

Which Roman statesman wrote the text that was scrambled to make the Lorem ipsum placeholder copy?

Cicero wrote De finibus bonorum et malorum, and Lorem ipsum is a corrupted version of two of its sections. Words were altered, added and removed until the Latin meant nothing at all.

Which design tool did Adobe agree to buy for $20 billion before the deal collapsed in 2023?

Figma and Adobe called off the merger in December 2023, saying they saw no clear path to approval from European and UK regulators. Adobe paid a $1 billion breakup fee.

Which printed product gave web designers the phrase above the fold, for content seen on page load?

Newspapers sit folded in half on the stand, so the upper half of the front page is where editors put the most important story. Advertisers prize that space too, because it stays visible on the rack.

Which touchscreen gesture did Loren Brichter create for Tweetie, his iPhone app for reading Twitter?

Pull-to-refresh first appeared in Tweetie 2.0, where dragging the screen downward and letting go told the app to load new content. Brichter built Tweetie as his own project after quitting his job at Apple.

Which children's story names the prototyping method in which a hidden human plays the computer?

The Wizard of Oz fits because, in the story, an ordinary man hides behind a curtain and uses technology to pose as someone powerful. The term was coined around 1980 at Johns Hopkins University.

Which term did Harry Brignull coin for interface tricks that push users into unintended choices?

Dark patterns got their name in 2010, when Brignull registered darkpatterns.org to name and shame deceptive interfaces. One, the roach motel, makes a service easy to get into but hard to leave.

Which type of experiment did Google first run in 2000 to pick how many search results to display?

A/B testing shows two versions of a page to randomly chosen users and keeps whichever performs better. Google later ran it on dozens of link colours to see which hue drew the most clicks.

Which form control lets a user pick only one option from a group, clearing any earlier choice?

Radio button copies the station preset buttons on old radios, where pressing one made the others pop back out. On screen, picking one option clears the rest in the same way.

Which street feature, built for disabled people, names the effect where accessible design helps everyone?

Curb cut ramps were made for wheelchair access but were soon welcomed by people pushing strollers, carts or luggage. Hearing viewers who switch on closed captions are another example.

Which German school of psychology gave designers the laws of proximity, similarity and continuity?

Gestalt psychology, founded by Max Wertheimer, Kurt Koffka and Wolfgang Köhler, holds that people grasp an object as a whole rather than as the sum of its parts. That is why items placed close together on a screen read as one group.

Which low-detail page blueprint, drawn before any styling, takes its name from skeletal 3D models?

Wireframe comes from fields that use a skeletal framework to show three-dimensional shape and volume. A page version usually leaves out colour, type styling and graphics to focus on function and priority.

Which visual language did Google introduce in 2014, built on a metaphor of layered paper and ink?

Material Design was announced at the Google I/O conference in June 2014 under the codename Quantum Paper. Shadows and seams between its layers signal what a user can touch.

Which approach, named by Ethan Marcotte, lets a single page adapt to phones, tablets and desktops?

Responsive web design, as Marcotte defined it in a 2010 article for A List Apart, combines fluid grids, flexible images and media queries. The layout rearranges itself to suit each screen.

Which phenomenon, named in 1998, describes web users ignoring anything that looks like an advert?

Banner blindness was named after website studies in which most subjects, consciously or not, ignored information presented in banners. Ads that seem to carry useful information are more likely to be looked at.

Which design style did Apple officially move away from when it announced iOS 7 in 2013?

Skeuomorphism keeps ornamental cues from older objects, and under Steve Jobs Apple was known for using it widely. Designer Jonathan Ive had made his distaste for the ornament known inside the company.

Which professor joined Apple in 1993 with the first job title to use the phrase User Experience?

Don Norman left the University of California, San Diego to become an Apple Fellow and later a vice president there. He is best known for his book The Design of Everyday Things.

Which designer drew the Happy Mac and the Command key symbol for the original Apple Macintosh?

Susan Kare also designed Chicago, the bold typeface used in the Mac's menus, which was initially named Elefont. She later drew the playing deck for Solitaire in Windows 3.0.

Which law from a 1954 paper on human movement predicts that big, close targets are fastest to hit?

Fitts's law says the time to reach a target depends on its distance and its width. Screen edges make ideal spots for controls because the pointer stops there, which makes the target effectively endless in one direction.

Which law, named after a British psychologist, says decisions slow as the number of choices grows?

Hick's law, also credited to the American Ray Hyman, found that each added choice slows a decision, though logarithmically rather than in a straight line. It is sometimes cited to justify shorter menus.

Which psychologist wrote the 1956 paper on the magical number seven and short-term memory limits?

George Miller published it in Psychological Review, and it became one of the most highly cited papers in psychology. It is often read as saying people can hold about seven items in mind, give or take two.

Which Danish consultant popularised the rule that five users are enough for one usability study?

Jakob Nielsen made the case in the early 1990s, arguing that small sessions let a team run many rounds at different stages of development. He also invented heuristic evaluation.

Which Steve Krug bestseller argues that a good website lets visitors get things done without effort?

Don't Make Me Think has sold more than 700,000 copies since it came out in 2000. It was revised in 2005 and again in 2013, when a section on mobile was added.

Which fictional user profiles did Alan Cooper popularise in The Inmates Are Running the Asylum?

Personas are semi-fictional characters, each standing for a typical customer segment. Cooper recommended that software be designed for single archetypal users.

Which research method has participants group labelled topics so designers can plan a site's menus?

Card sorting has people arrange terms written on index cards or sticky notes. In an open sort they also invent their own names for the groups, which shows how users expect content to be labelled.

Which term, coined by psychologist James Gibson, do designers use for the actions an object allows?

Affordance is the word Gibson used in his 1966 book The Senses Considered as Perceptual Systems. A door knob shaped to show how it is used is a classic example of one that people can perceive.

Which letter names the scanning pattern that a 2006 eye-tracking study found in how people read web pages?

F is the shape because readers sweep across the top of the content, sweep again a little lower over a shorter line, then run down the left side. The 2006 eye-tracking study recorded 232 people looking at thousands of pages.

Which Braun designer, an influence on Apple's Jonathan Ive, set out ten principles of good design?

Dieter Rams joined Braun in 1955 and led its design team from 1961 to 1995. Apple's iOS calculator references the Braun ET66 calculator of 1987.

Which Xerox PARC computer scientist developed cut, copy and paste with his colleague Tim Mott?

Larry Tesler also argued that software should be modeless, with every action available at all times. He held the view so firmly that his car carried the licence plate NOMODES.

Which British Design Council process model runs through discover, define, develop and deliver?

Double Diamond was popularised by the council in 2005, adapted from a divergence-convergence model that the linguist Béla Bánáthy proposed in 1996.

Which Palo Alto firm, formed in a 1991 merger, counts Apple's first mouse among its designs?

IDEO was formed when David Kelley's studio merged with firms founded by Bill Moggridge and Mike Nuttall. Kelley's team had worked on the mice for the Apple Lisa and the original Macintosh.

Which ten-item questionnaire did John Brooke devise at Digital Equipment Corporation in 1986?

System Usability Scale results come out as a single score from 0 to 100, so even very different products can be compared. Brooke built it for the usability engineering of electronic office systems.

Which interface did Hitachi researchers build 26 ways to show that looks sway ease-of-use ratings?

A cash machine was the subject: 252 participants rated 26 ATM designs for looks and for ease of use. Looks tracked how easy a design seemed more closely than how easy it actually was.

Which memory bias, named after a German psychiatrist, favours the odd one out in a list?

The Von Restorff effect comes from Hedwig von Restorff's 1933 study, in which one distinctive item in a list of similar ones was recalled better. A single entry highlighted in bright green on a shopping list is the stock example.

Which Japanese term for mistake-proofing did Shigeo Shingo adopt in the Toyota Production System?

Poka-yoke was first called baka-yoke, but that meant fool-proofing, so the name was softened. A car that will not start until the clutch pedal is pressed is a simple example.

Which memory quirk, first noticed in a waiter recalling unpaid orders, says unfinished tasks linger?

The Zeigarnik effect is named after Bluma Zeigarnik, who studied it after Kurt Lewin noticed the waiter's knack. Once everyone had paid, the same waiter could no longer recall the details of the orders.