Outliers and Luck in User Performance

Jakob Nielsen's Alertbox for March 6 is now online at:
  > http://www.useit.com/alertbox/outlier_performance.html
	
Summary:
Six percent of task attempts are extremely slow and constitute outliers in
measured user performance. These sad incidents are caused by bad luck that
designers can - and should - eradicate.

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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
  > Fundamental Guidelines for Web Usability
  > B2B Websites
  > 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

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Parallel design is used too rarely. I wrote up a measurement study in 1996
that really showed how much you can improve a user interface by testing
several alternative designs early in the project:

  > http://www.useit.com/papers/parallel_design

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Don Norman has been awarded the 2006 Benjamin Franklin Medal in Computer
and Cognitive Science. More info:

  > http://www.fi.edu/tfi/exhibits/bower/06/ccscience.html