Hyped Web Stories Are Irrelevant

Jakob Nielsen's Alertbox for April 3 is now online at:
  > http://www.useit.com/alertbox/hype.html
	
Summary:
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.

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Usability Week 2006 conference

  > 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

10 specialized full-day tutorials

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

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*** Google Finance

Even though most reviewers seem very disappointed with Google's new
finance area, it's worth mentioning that it does one thing very well. No,
I am not referring to the draggable stock chart - it's just as good, and
probably easier, to simply click a button for the time period you want
displayed.

What I really like is the fisheye-type view of the news stories about the
stock. When you are looking at today's trades, you get a detailed listing
of today's news. But when you look at stock prices over three months or a
year, you get an abbreviated listing of only the most important news that
occurred over that period. The date of each story is plotted on the stock
chart so that you can see which events coincided with big movements in the
price.

Currently, the selection of "most important news" seems to be done simply
by relying on a Reuters feed of big stories, which only goes back one year
and probably doesn't work as well for small companies. But it would be
easy to generalize to cover all feeds for all years: simply prioritize by
the number of clickthroughs a story got when it was new. Hopefully Yahoo
has saved this clickthrough data for its many years of finance coverage.
If so, it could make a better display of historical news.

I wrote about prioritization seven years ago:

  > http://www.useit.com/alertbox/991017.html

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*** Maximum Size of PDF Files

Our seminar on B2B usability in New York last week discussed classic B2B
design elements such as white papers, case studies, and detailed product
spec sheets. One of the questions was "what is the maximum file size for
users to download PDF?"

I will repeat my answer here, since this issue is also relevant for many
non-B2B sites.

First, you have to distinguish between two types of "downloading" of PDF
files.

The first is TRUE DOWNLOADS, where the user is downloading a document to
keep it for later (most likely to print out and read offline). In this
case, there is almost no upper size, because users don't have to sit and
wait for the download to finish. It's not a step in a navigation sequence
where users must keep track of their progress in short-term memory.

True downloads are used for major white papers, big reports, product
manuals, and such. It's best to keep these under 10MB in most cases, but
if the document is truly enhanced by, say, more or bigger photos, then do
include them, so that the document can be complete and comprehensive and
remain one download. (It's a much bigger usability problem if users have
to piece together their reading materials from multiple downloads.)

The second scenario is when the PDF file is READ ON THE SCREEN as part of
the user's navigation of the website. This will often be the case for spec
sheets. It's recommended to *avoid* PDF for anything that's used
interactively, because PDF is bad for on-screen reading.

For on-screen reading, the standard guidelines for page downloads apply if
you want to use PDF despite this recommendation:

   < 1 second for pleasant navigation = 100 KB
   < 10 seconds to keep users' attention = 1 MB

(Max document sizes calculated for typical cable modem connections.)