Wishlists, Gift Certificates, and Gift Giving in E-Commerce

Jakob Nielsen's Alertbox for January 29 is now online at:
  > http://www.useit.com/alertbox/wishlist-giftcards.html
		
Summary:
Although gift features leverage the online medium and draw new users to a
site, they also introduce many usability pitfalls. Among them are poorly
designed email notifications, which many users simply ignore.
	
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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

DEADLINE to save 10% on Hong Kong registration: THIS FRIDAY, February 2

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This issue is Alertbox #300. 

For a historical perspective, see Alertbox #200:
  > http://www.useit.com/alertbox/20030929.html

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Photos of Award-Winning Teams

Pictures of the teams that won the Intranet Design Annual competition:

  > http://www.nngroup.com/reports/intranet/design/awards.html

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Weblog ROI

A new report about the value for a business in having a blog claims that
the comments customers leave on the blog can substitute for running a
focus group each month, thus saving the equivalent amount of money
($180,000 per year).

  > http://www.agoravox.com/article.php3?id_article=5500

I strongly advise against using weblog comments for market research
instead of focus groups. Participation inequality says that the vast
majority of comments will be left by less than 1% of your customers. You
are hearing from a strongly biased sample, and if you design for them, you
are not satisfying the other 99% of your customers.

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

A good focus group uses a professional recruiter to get a balanced sample
of customers and a skilled facilitator to draw out everybody and get much
deeper insights into their thinking than what they would write in a blog
comment.

Even though focus groups are good for many other things, they are not
recommended for interaction design:

  > http://www.useit.com/papers/focusgroups.html

I am not saying that business blogs are worthless, but the average company
would make much more money from improving its product pages than from
adding a blog. I spent last week watching a bunch of people shop on many
different sites, and most product pages are appalling, even from major
companies like Best Buy.