Blah-Blah Text: Keep, Cut, or Kill?

Jakob Nielsen's Alertbox for October 1 is now online at:
  > http://www.useit.com/alertbox/intro-text.html
		
Summary:
Introductory text on Web pages is usually too long, so users skip it. But
short intros can increase usability by explaining the remaining content's
purpose.
			
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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

DEADLINE to save 10% on Barcelona registration: THIS FRIDAY, Oct. 5

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BUBBLE 2.0

Much talk about whether Facebook is worth a fortune. The numbers being
bandied about are a good sign that Bubble 2.0 is getting close to its
peak.

  > http://online.wsj.com/public/article/SB119065193646437586.html

The above article says that Facebook hopes to improve by better matching
ads to users' personal info. This is the perennial dream of Web
advertisers, but has always failed so far, except for search ads.

The difference is that search ads are not based on a profile where the
computer is trying to guess the user's interests. For search ads, the user
him/herself has just stated their specific current goal by entering
appropriate keywords. The second difference is that people go to search
engines with the explicit goal of finding someplace *else* to go, meaning
that they are more likely to (a) look at the ads and (b) click them, when
they are ready to buy.

Even if Facebook could target ads better, it's not going to do them any
good, because users won't see those ads due to banner blindness.

  > http://www.useit.com/alertbox/banner-blindness.html

The WSJ also says that Microsoft spent hundreds of millions of dollars on
search, only to see its market share drop. It dropped, because their
search is still not as good as Google's (it's certainly pretty good, but
that's not enough; you have to be *better* to gain market share).

Google spends about $1B/quarter = $4B/year, of which about half is
reportedly devoted to search (the other $2B being spent on money-losing
hobbies). So if Google invests $2B per year in search, it's no surprise
that Microsoft hasn't been able to catch them by a miserly investment of a
few hundred millions.

In addition to going full scale and investing $2B/year in search, there is
one deal that would make sense for Microsoft: to integrate their
advertising network with Yahoo's, so that an advertiser on either network
could have its ads run on the other by one click on a checkbox.

One reason the search user experience on both Microsoft and Yahoo is worse
than Google is that they have smaller databases of ads to show on the
SERP, meaning that users get less relevant ads and less good offers. This
is partly because these two search engines now have so small market shares
that it's not worth it for many small advertisers to go through the hassle
of setting up campaigns on both platforms. If you could do it once and get
your ads displayed in both places, more companies would do so, improving
the user experience (and revenues) for both search engines.

Final point about Facebook: It doesn't matter to you whether or not it's
worth the inflated numbers. Focus your site on your customers' needs
Ignore hyped sites, which have different user experience requirements
than average business sites (including government sites).

The very fact that a site gets a lot of press coverage is usually
proof that it's different than a workhorse site and that the press
coverage is thus irrelevant to your strategy.

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