Use Old Words When Writing for Findability

Jakob Nielsen's Alertbox for August 28 is now online at:
  > http://www.useit.com/alertbox/search-keywords.html
	
Summary:
Familiar words spring to mind when users create their search queries. If
your writing favors made-up terms over legacy words, users won't find your
site.

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User Experience 2006 conference

  > Seattle, October 22-28 
  > London, November 5-11 

3 keynotes:

  > Don Norman's latest insights on the future of design 

  > How We Designed Windows Vista, with the head of Windows' UE design
team, Tjeerd Hoek

  > Mobile Usability, with Yahoo!'s VP of Global Mobile Products,
Christian Lindholm (who was previously with Nokia where he invented the
Navi-key, which is used by more than 400 million people)

Full conference program, with list of the 29 full-day tutorials:

  > http://www.nngroup.com/events

STUDENT volunteers needed for the conference. If interested, send a short
resume and the name of your main HCI professor to
  > [email protected] if you want to volunteer for Seattle
  > [email protected] if you want to volunteer for London
Duties are light (pass out handouts, etc.) and you get to assist and hear
some of the world's leading experts.

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Dave Winer has produced some interesting mobile services with headlines
from major news outlets. See, for example, http://nytimesriver.com with
The New York Times.

While nicely boiled down for the small screen, I have two suggested
changes:

(*) Delete the bylines, except for columnists. Every extra word pushes
other stories off the small screen.

(*) Add word count (or other length indicator) for the full article. Yes,
this takes extra space, but more predictive information helps users decide
whether it's worth to click through to a story.

Designing mobile services is very much a word-by-word series of
micro-decisions as to what to include and what to leave out. Can you give
people enough info right on the first screen so that they don't need to
navigate to another screen? Leave it in. Can you help them decide whether
to click? Leave it in. Otherwise, cut it.

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Abusing Interested Customers

I received an email from Microsoft adCenter, asking me to participate in a
survey ("should take no more than 6 minutes of your time" - a smart thing
to state explicitly in the invitation). Since I have an interest in search
marketing, I decided to participate.

I clicked through to the survey, and entered my email address on the first
screen. The next screen said, "this survey is now closed" -- this despite
the fact that I visited the survey site only 45 minutes after the
invitation email had arrived.

Result: if I ever get another email from Microsoft adCenter inviting me to
participate in user research, I'm going to delete it immediately. In fact,
it's only because I know many good usability people in other parts of
Microsoft that I am not going to assign the same fate to research requests
from the rest of the company.

If you only need a small number of respondents, don't deluge your entire
customer list with requests. Send to a small sample and then accept all
their input.

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Amazon has launched an interesting feature, where you can build your own
bookstore. Here's my attempt:

  > U.S. site: http://astore.amazon.com/useitcomusablein
  > U.K. site: http://astore.amazon.co.uk/useit-21	

This could be very useful for bloggers. I am less sure it's good for
bigger sites. In any case, it's nice to have scaled-back pages with no
junk to interfere with what you need to buy a book.