Nielsen Norman GroupEvidence-Based User Experience Research, Training, and Consulting
What makes a website good will also give it a high SERP rank, but overly tricky search engine optimization can undermine the user experience.
Users pay close attention to photos and other images that contain relevant information but ignore fluffy pictures used to 'jazz up' Web pages.
Showing summaries of many articles is more likely to draw in users than providing full articles, which can quickly exhaust reader interest.
The granularity of user decisions is much finer on the Web, which is dominated by the instant gratification of the user's needs in any given instant. Content must cater to this rapid pace.
Usability studies of corporate content distributed through Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, and LinkedIn: users like the simplicity of messages that pass into oblivion over time, but were frequently frustrated by unscannable writing, overly frequent postings, and their inability to locate companies on social networks.
Information foraging shows how to calculate your content strategy's costs and benefits. A mixed diet that combines brief overviews and comprehensive coverage is often best.
To demonstrate world-class expertise, avoid quickly written, shallow postings. Instead, invest your time in thorough, value-added content that attracts paying customers.
Weblogs are often too internally focused and ignore key usability issues, making it hard for new readers to understand the site and trust the author.
Unless you have explicit links to product pages from article content, users who visit articles directly from search engines might never realize that you sell related products.
Fancy media on websites typically fails user testing. Simple text and clear photos not only communicate better with users, they also enhance users' feeling of control and thus support the Web's mission as an instant gratification environment.
Even small holiday decorations can increase joy of use and make websites feel more current and more connected to users' lives and physical environment. The key is to commemorate without detracting from your users' main reasons for visiting the site.
To take the Internet to the next level, users must begin posting their own material rather than simply consuming content or distributing copyrighted material. Unfortunately most people are poor writers and even worse at authoring other media. Solutions include structured creation, selection-based media, and teaching content creation in schools.
If everything is emphasized, then nothing stands out. Prioritized design helps users focus on the most promising choices first.
Most streaming video is useless; instead use higher-quality downloadable clips and short segments that can be chosen from a menu. All multimedia needs plain-page previews.
Web services often collect content from separate sources and present it to users in a single interface. Making such integration usable requires unified meta-content.
Keeping old content alive will more than double the value of a site and only cost a small investment in content gardening. Removed pages equal lost users.
Online headlines must be absolutely clear when taken out of context. They should be written in plain language (no puns or clever headlines). 5 additional guidelines + examples of bad microcontent.
In 5-10 years, newspapers, magazines, books, and TV will cease being separate media forms and will be integrated into unified multimedia Web services.
Errors in data records destroy the usability of a site and make it difficult to find info. Guidelines for preventing, correcting, and surviving errors.
6% of the Web's links are broken, diminishing its usability. All old URLs should be kept working indefinitely - otherwise you throw away business.
Instead of emulating the real world, websites should build on the strengths of the medium and go beyond what's possible in physical reality: be non-linear, customize service, ignore geography.
Micropayments prevent annoying Web ads and encourage site-design for users' needs. Subscription fees discourage new users, search engines, and links.
The Web will become more international (but will overseas sites or American sites benefit?), sites will outsource services, content will adapt to usage patterns in real time.
Slate fails due to its inability to adjust to the online medium: too long articles, too little hypertext, scrolling home page (though redesigns have improved later issues)
Paper remains the optimal medium for some forms of writing, especially for long works like a book. It is an unfortunate fact that current computer screens lead to a reading speed that is approximately 25% slower than reading from paper. We have invented better screens and it is just a matter of time before reading from computers is as good as reading from paper, but for the time being we have to design our information for the actual screens in use around the world.
Online publishing of newspapers, magazines, and books is really a meaningless concept. We have to leave the legacy publications behind as we invent the world of online publishing. Information will have to be organized in new ways that match the properties of the new medium rather than being derived from the way the physical limitations of the old medium caused information to be split up among specific publications.