Fast, Cheap, and Good - Yes, You Can Have It All

Jakob Nielsen's Alertbox for January 2 is now online at:
  > http://www.useit.com/alertbox/fast-methods.html
		
Summary:
The sooner you complete a usability study, the higher its impact
on the design process.
Slower methods should be deferred to an annual usability checkup.
	
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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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Doomed Approach to Search

The New York Times has a nice roundup of sacrificial lambs that are trying
to unseat the current market leader in search.

I completely believe that the current leader can be beaten, because our
user studies show that people fail in their searches again and again.
There's much room for improvement, and once something significantly better
comes out, users will move as fast as they can click their mice. There's
not much loyalty on the Web.

Sadly, most of the new search engines take the wrong approach and
emphasize natural language. As I pointed out in my last column on movie
bloopers, natural language seems so, well, natural, but it's not a great
UI.

In search, we know that users type in one, two, or sometimes three words,
and that's what you have to work with. People are not going to type a full
sentence to get an answer.

The best approach to better search is to work within the constraints of
user behavior and improve the quality of the results, both in terms of
ranking and in terms of the description (current blurbs leave much to be
desired). Also, anybody who invents a working design for query
reformulation will have a big advantage.

Here's one simple idea for improving relevance (in this case of the ads,
but sponsored and organic links combine to form the total user experience,
so better ads is one way a search engine can improve):

Instead of just targeting on physical geography, target ads based on
cyberspace geography as well. Find out what company the user is connecting
from. Many B2B advertisers would pay much more for ads that were only
displayed to business users so that they would never have to pay for
clicks from students or home users. (Conversely, other advertisers would
pay more to only have ads displayed to .edu users.)

NY Times article on misguided (thus doomed) search contenders:

  > http://tinyurl.com/v2q8h