Ten Best Intranets of 2006

Jakob Nielsen's Alertbox for January 23 is now online at:
  > http://www.useit.com/alertbox/intranet_design.html
	
Summary:
This year, we saw increased use of multimedia, e-learning, internal blogs,
and mobile access. Winning companies also encouraged consistent design by
emphasizing training for content contributors.

------------

Usability Week 2006 conference

  > New York, March 26-31
  > London, May 21-26
  > San Francisco, June 19-24
  > Sydney, July 16-21

In-depth training:
   > 3-day Intensive Camp: Usability in Practice
   > 3-day Immersion: Tog on Interaction Design

Specialized tutorials:
  > Eyetracking Web Usability
  > B2B Websites
  > Fundamental Guidelines for Web Usability
  > Presenting Company Information on Corporate Websites
  > Wish Lists and Gift-Giving in E-Commerce
  > Writing for the Web (two days)
  > E-Mail Newsletter Usability
  > Intranet Usability (two days)

More info and full program:
  > http://www.nngroup.com/events

------------

In my last newsletter, I complained about the webcast of Bill Gates' CES
keynote: we didn't get to hear the speaker until 8 minutes and 57 seconds
into the video. Too drawn-out (thus boring) for Web video. In contrast,
Apple's video of Steve Jobs' recent Macworld keynote had him talking after
only 36 seconds of intro. They could have tightened this a bit, but
basically, that's the way to go. The video image was the same size as
Microsoft's (320x180), which is too small to see demos well. For long
videos, better quality is needed to keep users' attention, even when you
are webcasting from a reality distortion field.

------------

Kudos to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration for a rare example of a
government agency employing usability guidelines to save lives. The FDA
has changed the rules for the "prescribing information" which is the
leaflet that goes into medication packages. Now, the leaflets will place
the information that patients and doctors need first, in a highlights
section. Not exactly a new idea in usability, but in the past, these
leaflets were dominated by useless warnings that served no practical use
for the vast majority of readers; the first several pages of stuff didn't
do any good except act as a defense against predatory trial lawyers.

The new FDA rules state that, "Overwarning, just like underwarning, can
similarly have a negative effect on patient safety." Exactly: if you bury
useful info in masses of useless info, then users won't see the truly
important warnings.

Poor usability of drug information = dead patients.

The FDA has finally recognized the need to save lives by fighting back
against the lawyers and writing drug info for users instead of courts. The
new regulations explicitly prohibit several types of law suits where trial
lawyers have harassed the medical system into making the prescribing
information harder to understand.

More info (registration required):
  > http://www.nytimes.com/2006/01/19/national/19label.html

See also my article, "Regulatory Usability":
  > http://www.useit.com/alertbox/20000903.html

------------

Several readers have asked me to comment on a recent research study
showing that people are capable of rendering judgment on the design of a
Web page after having seen it for only 50 ms.

While it's probably a demonstrable effect in the laboratory, I don't
believe that it transfers to the real world because of the vast
differences in context.

In the lab, users are primed to watch a short flash of a picture of a
random website and know that they have to render an opinion. Apparently,
they can do this. So what. That's not how people use websites.

Some key differences in real life:

First, a web page doesn't appear fully-rendered all at once. Instead, it
downloads slowly and renders a bit at a time. Even with a fast server and
a broadband connection, most pages take a second or two. And with a slow
server, a bloated page design, or a dial-up connection, a page may take
ten seconds or more, with each element filling in one at a time.

Second, users scan Web pages, using eye movements that are fairly slow (on
the order of 100-200 ms). Just taking the eyes away from the last place
they looked on the previous page to the first thing they want to look at
on the new page takes about 300 ms. People don't sit staring out in space,
waiting to take in a snapshot of a site as a gestalt. They look for
specific elements on the page. Thus, they are going to need multiple
fixations before they have seen the general appearance of a page.

Third, users don't see random Web pages. Instead, they arrive at a website
with a purpose that they have some reason to believe that the site will be
able to satisfy. Usually, the user has just clicked a search result or
followed a link from another website or an email newsletter. In all cases,
users acted on a recommendation that the site will solve, or address,
their current problem. This means that users are primed to look for the
part of the page that is pertinent to their current problem and to judge
whether the site will be useful for this purpose. This is another reason
we see them scan the page and look around the parts that seem most
relevant before making a judgment about the page.

Fourth, it takes 1,200 ms to execute the mental operation to begin
leaving, followed by about 1,100 ms to move the cursor to the back button
(depending on the distance), followed by 100 ms to click it. This doesn't
count the time to ponder whether to leave, just the "M" operator for the
mental time to fire up the leaving steps. Humans are slow creatures, so it
takes us more than two seconds to leave a Web page, once we have finished
the even slower work of evaluating it. We know from our current
eyetracking studies that the eyes flitter all over the page during these
two seconds and that the user continues looking *after* clicking until the
next page starts rendering. During these additional fixations, users
sometimes decide to stay and terminate their "leave" operation.

Empirically, users spend half a minute on average on the first page they
visit on a website - six hundred times as much as 50 ms. Certainly, some
times I see users reject a site in 10 seconds, if it's truly bad, and
sometimes it takes people a minute to decide whether leave or to click
into the site. But in any case, we are talking multiple seconds. This is
not very much time, and designers are well-advised to remember that users
only have a few seconds to read the text and understand the navigation on
their first visit. But people do multiple seconds to decide on how they
feel about websites.

(All of this is no excuse to design confusing pages - you still only have
a few seconds to talk to your prospective new customer. But you do have
seconds, not mere milliseconds.)

  > http://money.canoe.ca/News/Other/2006/01/22/1406472-cp.html