Usability in the Movies - Top 10 Bloopers

Jakob Nielsen's Alertbox for December 18 is now online at:
  > http://www.useit.com/alertbox/film-ui-bloopers.html
		
Summary:
User interfaces in film are more exciting than they are realistic, and
heroes have far too easy a time using foreign systems.
	
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Usability Week 2007 conference

  > Hong Kong, March 5-9
  > Washington, DC, April 22-27
  > London, May 6-11
  > San Francisco, June 18-23

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

10 specialized full-day tutorials:
  > Fundamental Guidelines for Web Usability
  > Application Usability (2 days)
  > Intranet Usability (2 days)
  > B2B Sites
  > Websites That Sell
  > Presenting Company Information on Corporate Websites
  > E-Mail Newsletter Usability
  > Writing for the Web

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

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Interruptions Are Costly

A variety of studies found that office workers are interrupted every 11
minutes and that it takes 5 minutes to recover from an interruption and
return to the original task.

  > http://news.com.com/2100-1022_3-6143663.html

Total cost to the economy: $588B/year in the U.S. alone.

Huge productivity gains would come from taking these simple steps for two
hours per day, as you focus on your primary work: close the door, route
phone calls to voice mail, shut down IM, and quit your email program.

More on cleaning up information pollution:

  > http://www.useit.com/alertbox/20040105.html

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From the Mouths of Babes - But Which Ones?

Venture capitalists are asking their children to try out new websites and
social software services to help them decide where to invest, according to
a front-page article in the Sunday NY Times.

  > http://tinyurl.com/yzycaq

While it's always an improvement to get feedback from *some* users,
listening to your own kids is wrong for two reasons:

a) The collaboration technologies we need for business are not the same as
the ones teenagers like for the very different task of hanging out online.
There are trillions to be gained in enterprise collaboration, and yet most
vendors overlook this field even though it's ripe for innovation and new
products.

b) Even if you specifically want to create services for children or
teenagers, you need to collect data from a broad spectrum of mainstream
users in those age groups. Kids in elite high-tech families in Silicon
Valley are a highly biased sample with much greater skills than average
users of the same age. We have found over and over again in testing
children and teens that most of them don't have anywhere near the computer
skills of the elite.

Findings from testing "real" children and teenagers (outside the Valley):

  > http://www.nngroup.com/reports/kids
  > http://www.nngroup.com/reports/teens

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Another article in the same issue of the newspaper exposes yet another
fallacy of neglecting the biased nature of the so-called Web 2.0:

  > http://tinyurl.com/y6dk6m

Some companies supposedly track what "their customers" think of them by
analyzing the distribution of terminology on blogs. For example, Lexus is
said to collect info on "the young urban and suburban consumers who write
and read blogs and could buy Lexus vehicles."

First, very few bloggers can afford a Lexus. Their paying customers are
mainly executives and senior professionals who spend their time running
their business.

Second, even beyond luxury brands, the comments you find on the Web are
not representative of the paying customers, for the simple reason that
almost all user-generated content is posted by a tiny minority of 1% of
the users. See:

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

Listening to 1% of your customer base probably does more harm than good,
when that 1% is a self-selected biased sample. That's also why it
backfires to put a huge customer survey on your website: if there are too
many questions, the response rate drops, and you can't rely on the answers
for anything. If you do, you're likely to be deceived. More on surveys:

  > http://www.useit.com/alertbox/20040202.html

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Happy Holidays. Next Alertbox January 2, 2007.