Articles

Jakob Nielsen's Alertbox articles about interface usability and website design.

Audience Types

Teenage Usability: Designing Teen-Targeted Websites

February 4, 2013

Teens are (over)confident in their web abilities, but they perform worse than adults. Lower reading levels, impatience, and undeveloped research skills reduce teens’ task success and require simple, relatable sites.

Why Country Sites Are So Bad

June 18, 2012

When a multinational company produces a localized country site, usability is often lost. Local advertising agencies design good-looking sites that don't communicate.

College Students on the Web

December 15, 2010

Students are multitaskers who move through websites rapidly, often missing the item they come to find. They're enraptured by social media but reserve it for private conversations and thus visit company sites from search engines.

Children's Websites: Usability Issues in Designing for Kids

September 13, 2010

New research with users aged 3-12 shows that older kids have gained substantial Web proficiency since our last studies, while younger kids still face many problems. Designing for children requires distinct usability approaches, including targeting content narrowly for different ages of kids.

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Research Reports