10 High-ROI Redesign Priorities

Jakob Nielsen's Alertbox for March 12 is now online at:
  > http://www.useit.com/alertbox/roi.html
		
Summary:
Several usability findings lead directly to higher sales and increased
customer loyalty. These design tactics should be your first priority when
updating your website.

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Usability Week 2007 conference

  > Washington, D.C., April 22-27
  > London, May 6-11
  > San Francisco, June 18-23

* 3-day camp: usability in practice 
* 3-day immersion: interaction design
* 10 full-day tutorials, including 2 new days on application usability

Full program:

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

DEADLINE to save 10% on advance registration for Washington DC:
next Friday, March 23

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Features = Frustration

Mobile phone users rate "function fatigue" as their No. 1 complaint
according to a new survey.

Of course, you should never use surveys as the basis for user interface
design decisions. For that you need behavioral research where you observe
people as they use a design. Surveys don't tell you what's wrong or how to
fix it, the way user testing does. Surveys do tell you about users'
frustrations, and this one says that people are annoyed with the plethora
of features on current mobile phones.

The answer could be better usability for the existing features, fewer
features, or a combination of the two. A survey can't differentiate these
options.

However, note that more features constitute a usability problem in their
own right, because every additional feature adds a burden to the UI and
thus makes the *other* features harder to use.

  > http://tinyurl.com/2mcyt6

The answer could even be better demos and training, as stated in the above
article, but I don't think so. It is a fallacy to believe that more
training is the answer because users complain about training in a survey.
More likely, the answer is *less* training, which can be achieved through
usability improvements.

The survey also found that Americans and Western Europeans are the most
bothered by loud mobile phone conversations. This could be because Asians
are more polite when talking on the phone, but it's more likely to be
because Americans and Europeans are more willing to complain about other
people.

This is another point where empirical research data is better than
gathering survey opinions. For a start, see this study of why Europeans
find other people's mobile phone conversations annoying:

  > http://www.useit.com/alertbox/20040412.html

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Greetings from Shanghai

Last week we kicked off this year's conference tour in Hong Kong. We had a
very successful event and it was invigorating to meet the many Asian user
experience professionals and hear about their projects.

At the time of posting for this newsletter, I have moved on to Shanghai,
though the mailing obviously goes out from our trusty service provider
back in the States. Shanghai is a boom town without comparison and clearly
the exponent for where the world is moving.

I am taking advantage of bringing a crack usability team to Asia: we are
testing a bunch of sites with Chinese users. We're testing both Chinese
sites and Western sites, because we need to generate guidelines for the
audience at our upcoming conferences in the U.S. and U.K.. It's actually
more important to most of our clients how Chinese users use foreign sites
than how they use Chinese sites, since most companies can't afford to
build a fully localized site.

There are certainly interesting differences between Asian users and the
American, European, and Australian users we test in most of our studies.
Details to come at the presentations later in the year once we have
analyzed the data fully. But the most interesting finding from our current
tests is "the dog that didn't bark" to refer to Sherlock Holmes.

For most of the things we tested, there was NO DIFFERENCE in the usability
guidelines between Asia and other parts of the world. This is similar to
findings in our studies in Japan and Korea.

For example, take financial journalists in Hong Kong. A hugely important
group to consider when designing the investor relations (IR) and public
relations (PR) sites for any big multinational corporation, which is why
we tested these users to get material for our upcoming seminar on
presenting information about a company on its website. Most of what Hong
Kong financial journalists need from your website is the same as the
financial journalists we have already tested in New York, London, and
Copenhagen.

In other words, the differences between the peoples of the world are not
as great as they are sometimes made out to be. At least not when it comes
to the usability guidelines for Web design.