Nielsen Norman GroupEvidence-Based User Experience Research, Training, and Consulting
Quality assurance impacts the user experience: when things don’t work, users question their understanding and develop superstitions and inefficient workarounds.
What's worth the most: field studies or user tests? Depends on your company's usability maturity, but user testing is the safe bet if you can do only one thing.
When a multinational company produces a localized country site, usability is often lost. Local advertising agencies design good-looking sites that don't communicate.
3 approaches to better design: each has its uses, but the costs, benefits, and risks differ dramatically.
User testing on 3 continents confirmed that the main usability guidelines hold worldwide, but many other considerations exist to better support international users.
3 methods for increasing UX quality by exploring and testing diverse design ideas work even better when you use them together.
Although successful websites typically have high usability, average sites can hurt their business by copying design elements that don't work well in other contexts.
Users hate change, so it's usually best to stay with a familiar design and evolve it gradually. In the long run, however, incrementalism eventually destroys cohesiveness, calling for a new UI architecture.
Usage goes down as interaction costs increase. User motivation determines how fast demand drops, following an elasticity curve.
User experience research methods can answer a wide range of questions. Know when to use each method by mapping them in 3 key dimensions and across typical product development phases.
Bad content, bad links, bad navigation, bad category pages... which is worst for business? In these examples, bad content takes the prize for costing the company the most money.
The average business metrics improvement after a usability redesign is now 83%. This is substantially less than 6 years ago, but ROI remains high because usability is still cheap relative to gains.
AJAX, rich Internet UIs, mashups, communities, and user-generated content often add more complexity than they're worth. They divert design resources and prove that what's hyped is rarely what's most profitable.
Several usability findings lead directly to higher sales and increased customer loyalty. These design tactics should be your first priority when updating your website.
Although the gains don't fall into traditional profit columns, there are clear arguments for improving usability of non-commercial websites and intranets. In one example, a state agency could get an ROI of 22,000% by fixing a basic usability problem.
An organization that reaches the managed usability stage still has far to go to reach usability nirvana. Attaining these higher maturity levels requires many years of effort.
As their usability approach matures, organizations typically progress through the same sequence of stages, from initial hostility to widespread reliance on user research.
The fads and big deals that get the press coverage are not important for running a workhorse website. To serve your customers, it's far better to emphasize simplicity and quality than to chase buzzwords.
Clear content, simple navigation, and answers to customer questions have the biggest impact on business value. Advanced technology matters much less.
The Internet is growing at an annualized rate of 18% and now has one billion users. A second billion users will follow in the next ten years, bringing a dramatic change in worldwide usability needs.
Users often convert to buyers long after their initial visit to a website. A full 5% of orders occur more than 4 weeks after users click on search engine ads.
Usability's job is to research user behavior and find out what works. Usability should also defend users' rights and fight for simplicity. Both aspects have their place, and it's important to recognize the difference.
Formal reports are the most common way of documenting usability studies, but informal reports are faster to produce and are often a better choice.
The evangelism strategies that help a usability group get established in a company are different from the ones needed to create a full-fledged usability culture.
The last 200 years have driven centralization and changed the human experience in ways that conflict with evolution. The Internet will reestablish a more balanced, decentralized lifestyle.
User research offers a learning opportunity that can help you build an understanding of user behavior, but you must resolve discrepancies between research findings and your own beliefs.
The average difference in measured usability between competing websites is 68%. This is smaller than expected, but makes sense given the dynamics of design within individual industries.
On average across many test tasks, users fail 35% of the time when using websites. This is 100,000 times worse than six sigma's requirement, but Web usability can still benefit from a six sigma quality approach.
Misconceptions about usability's expense, the time it involves, and its creative impact prevent companies from getting crucial user data, as does the erroneous belief that existing customer-feedback methods are a valid driver for interface design.
Small websites get less traffic than big ones, but they can still dominate their niches. For each question users ask, the Web delivers a different set of sites to provide the answers.
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.
Development projects should spend 10% of their budget on usability. Following a usability redesign, websites increase desired metrics by 135% on average; intranets improve slightly less.
To save costs, some companies are outsourcing Web projects to countries with cheap labor. Unfortunately, these countries lack strong usability traditions and their developers have limited access -- if any -- to good usability data from the target users.
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.
Usability is a well-paying profession these days: A usability specialist in California with five years' experience had an estimated cash compensation of $90,118 a year in 2001, not counting stock options or other benefits. This number is at the high end of our detailed survey, which analyzes salary data from 1,078 professionals who attended the User Experience World Tour from November 2000 to April 2001. The survey respondents represent a response rate of 40% of the 2,682 conference attendees. Because we surveyed people at a high-end professional conference, the data probably reflects the salaries of good user experience professionals.
Advertising-supported websites will soon be a thing of the past. As I predicted a year ago, sites began charging for services in 2001. Although most sites are still not handling payments right, two innovative European projects hold much hope for 2002.
Software bugs and system crashes result in huge productivity losses and undermine users' ability to form good models of how computers work. Website designers can help improve user confidence by prioritizing quality and robustness over features and the latest technology.
Web services will free individual site designers from having to program and design common features. This will decrease business costs, increase usability, and let designers focus on and improve features that are unique to each site.
A survey of 1,078 user experience professionals finds that usability specialists make more money than designers and writers in the same field. In all three areas, salaries are highest in the U.S., lower in Canada and Asia, and much lower in Europe and Australia.
Never listen to what people say in response to a survey: asking high-tech employees what will keep them in their jobs provides very different answers than the factors that actually drive retention.
Jakob Nielsen's trip report for the 2001 World Economic Forum. World Economic Forum (Davos, Switzerland, 2001).
Offering free services on websites is not a sustainable business model, nor is advertising, which doesn't work on the Web. Most Internet companies are now pursuing an enterprise strategy to make money, but they'll soon begin turning to individual customers for revenue as well.
Microsoft's .NET strategy is a brilliant counter-move that reduces the Justice Department's proposed penalty to a victory in the previous war. Integrating the user experience at the network level opens the door to new and exciting services while diminishing the importance of traditional isolated websites.
Instead of rushing new websites to a premature launch that will scare away your best customers forever, it is better to run a few fast usability studies in the beginning of the project.
Instead of maximizing the profits from an individual visit it is better to encourage loyal users and establish non-monetary differentiation and frequent-user programs.
Increased user impatience will make new websites fail unless they are twice as usable as existing sites. Revolutionary Internet services must explain why users should care in no more than two lines.
4% of users upgraded to a new version each month in 1998. By 2008, upgrade speeds were only 2%/month. It takes 3 years for 3/4 of users to embrace a new version.
Unique visitors are a poor measure of user loyalty. Also, future users are late adopters and not likely to all patronize current popular sites. So beware of over-valuing Internet stock.
Personalized Web interfaces are over-hyped: users don't want to be stereotyped and it is too much work for them to enter detailed preference settings.
Web design is a core competency for the network economy and should not be outsourced, even though certain specific components may be outsourced.
Treating the Web as a strategic industry driver will lead to a patent bonanza where companies sew up entire ways of doing business. Distribution networks are discussed as one example of such a change
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
Jakob Nielsen reviews Esther Dyson's book Release 2.0: useless, yet ultra-strategic; a tool to envision the network economy and the Web's eventual effect on our lives.
Loyal users who return to a site many times are more valuable than 'site tourists' who simply check out a few pages. Loyalty is built by fresh content, update notifications, and customization and other ways of rewarding repeat visits
Web project management impacts usability significantly. Mistakes include having site structure mirror your orgchart, outsourcing to multiple agencies, generic links from offline collateral, and lack of strategic thinking
Common conclusions about Yahoo, Wall St. Journal, Disney, The WELL, and Amazon.com are wrong: generalizing Web trends from popular examples featured in the press is dangerous; spectacular case studies are often outliers.
How much better is it to be a *big* website? Large sites can use their own hyperlinks to drive even more traffic, but small sites generate more value through focused content and microtransactions. (Updated 2005.)
Welcome to 1996. What will be the key to web-site survival this year? My bet is the establishment of relationships between the site and its users.
You need to hire someone to design your Web site. What should you look for before signing on the dotted line? Let's look at a few different types of consultants.
Using Discount Usability Engineering to Penetrate the Intimidation Barrier,' paper by Jakob Nielsen on simpler and cheaper ways to a better UI;with examples of fast usability projects.