Tabs, Used Right

Jakob Nielsen's Alertbox for September 17 is now online at:
  > http://www.useit.com/alertbox/tabs.html
		
Summary:
13 design guidelines for tab controls are all followed by Yahoo Finance,
but usability suffers somewhat due to AJAX overkill and difficult
customization.
			
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User Experience 2007 conference

  > Barcelona, November 4-9
  > Las Vegas, December 2-7

31 full-day tutorials
2 keynotes: e-commerce, the state of usability

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

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HIGH-ROI vs. LOW-ROI INTERNET MARKETING

MarketingSherpa has released the results of a survey of 3,186 Internet
marketers, who were asked about their ROI from various marketing
techniques. (Yes, it's a survey, which is a bad way to get information
about users and design, but this is about sales vs. expenses, not about
use.)

Highest scoring was house email marketing, with 4 times as many
respondents saying that they got strong or good ROI than people
who said that it was a low-value tactic or hard to gauge.

Lowest scoring Internet tactic was banner advertising, with 
3 as many people saying "low" (or "hard to gauge")
vs. respondents who said "good" (or "strong").

Email is about 12 times higher rated than banner advertising for ROI.
Allocate your budget accordingly: unless you spend many times more on your
newsletters then on online advertising, you probably have ROI problems.

These numbers don't surprise me, because our empirical observations of
users' actual behavior show strong positive effects of email newsletters
and extremely strong banner blindness.

Still, it's nice to see marketing managers come to the same conclusions as
the user research, regarding what works on the Internet.

Email newsletters, user research findings:
  > http://www.useit.com/alertbox/newsletters.html
 
Banner blindness, user research findings:
  > http://www.useit.com/alertbox/banner-blindness.html

Marketing managers' ROI experience, survey findings:
  > http://www.marketingsherpa.com/article.html?ident=30128