Nielsen Norman GroupEvidence-Based User Experience Research, Training, and Consulting
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.
When a multinational company produces a localized country site, usability is often lost. Local advertising agencies design good-looking sites that don't communicate.
User testing on 3 continents confirmed that the main usability guidelines hold worldwide, but many other considerations exist to better support international users.
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.
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.
Individual investors are intimidated by overly complex IR sites and need simple summaries of financial data. Both individual and professional investors want the company's own story and investment vision.
As 3 studies of journalists show, they use the Web as a major research tool, exhibit high search dominance, and are impatient with bloated sites that don't serve their needs or list a PR contact.
Users pay attention to details in a site's writing style, and they'll notice if you use the wrong variant of the English language.
Between the ages of 25 and 60, people's ability to use websites declines by 0.8% per year - mostly because they spend more time per page, but also because of navigation difficulties.
User testing shows that business-to-business websites have substantially lower usability than mainstream consumer sites. If they want to convert more prospects into leads, B2B sites should follow more guidelines and make it easier for prospects to research their offerings.
When doing website tasks, the slowest 25% of users take 2.4 times as long as the fastest 25% of users. This difference is much higher than for other types of computer use; only programming shows a greater disparity.
Users from other countries have special needs related to entry fields for names and addresses, measurements and dates, and information about regional product standards.
Lower-literacy users exhibit very different reading behaviors than higher-literacy users: they plow text rather than scan it, and they miss page elements due to a narrower field of view.
Compared with a similar 2001 study, a new study of journalists as they looked for information on corporate websites' PR areas showed significant usability improvements: a 5% higher success rate and 15% increased guidelines compliance.
About half of the users now access the Internet from more than one location. Despite the implications of this for service design, many systems assume that users remain bound to a single computer.
The Internet enriches many seniors' lives, but most websites violate usability guidelines, making the sites difficult for seniors to use. Current websites are twice as hard to use for seniors than for non-seniors.
Corporations spend millions on PR, and yet the press sections of their websites often fail to meet journalists' most basic information needs. In our recent usability study, journalists found answers to only 68% of their questions across a range of corporate sites.
Web usability has focused on ease of learning for the new visitor. While learnability remains important, it is time to also consider expert performance.
Global use of websites leads to international usability problems and coping with the levels of Internet maturity in different countries; many of which are gaining rapidly
Examples from tech support calls show the immense difficulties novice users have in using the Internet: be prepared if you field apps intended for broad usage
The unprecedented international exposure afforded by the Web increases the designer's responsibility for ensuring international usability. Because of the myriad of issues in international usability, I recommend doing international usability testing with users from a few countries in different parts of the world. No guidelines yet published are sufficiently complete to guarantee perfect international usability, so an empirical reality check is always preferred.
When working on a product intended for use abroad your best bet is to conduct international usability testing. You may need to engage a translator or even a local usability consultant, depending on the complexity of the test.