10 Best Intranets of 2008

Jakob Nielsen's Alertbox for January 7 is now online at:
  > http://www.useit.com/alertbox/intranet_design.html
		
Summary:
Consistent design and integrated IA are becoming standard on good
intranets. This year's winners focused on productivity tools,
employee self-service, access to knowledgeable people (as opposed to
"knowledge management"), and better-presented company news.
				
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Usability Week 2008 conference

  > New York, April 7-12
  > London, May 19-24
  > San Francisco, June 16-21
  > Melbourne, July 21-26

In-depth training:
  > 3-day Intensive Camp: Usability in Practice
  > 3-day Immersion: Tog on Interaction Design

Specialized full-day tutorials:

  > Fundamental Guidelines for Web Usability
  > Application Usability (two days)
  > Intranet Usability (two days)
  > Websites That Sell
  > E-Mail Newsletter Usability
  > Writing for the Web
  > B2B

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

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NEW SEMINAR

Announcing a new day at Usability Week in New York and London:

"B2B Experiences in a Consumer-Oriented Web World"

Running a B2B or corporate web presence holds many complex challenges
not known to the B2C web world. Learn how to meet the high expectations
users bring from their experience from much simpler consumer sites.

Presented by Martin Hardee (Director of User Experience Design for
Cisco.com) and Marliyn Salzman (Manager of Web Experience Design at
Sun Microsystems).

  > http://www.nngroup.com/events/tutorials/b2b.html

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PERSONALIZATION OFTEN FAILS

Disney recently released the third DVD in the collected series of Donald
Duck cartoons. After reading the review in The New York Times, I promptly
ordered a copy from Amazon.com.

I had read through Amazon's page of personalized recommendations for me,
but it never told me that Donald Duck 3 was out. That's despite the fact
that I bought vol. 1 from Amazon when it was released in 2003 and I also
bought vol. 2 from them shortly after its release date in 2005.

A customer who bought both vol. 1 and vol. 2 should be an obvious
candidate for being told about vol. 3. Especially for something that's
only published every two years, so that the customer is unlikely to
remember to seek out the product on their own accord.

Yet, I had to learn about this new product from reading dead trees that
are dumped in my driveway in the morning, not from Amazon's famed
personalized recommendations.

What does Amazon care? I bought from them anyway. But that's because I am
an exceedingly loyal customer, having bought 521 items there since 1996.
Most users are less loyal and could easily have decided to pick up their
cartoons elsewhere.

(Overly meticulous disclosure: Disney is one of our consulting clients.
But I have liked Donald Duck cartoons for 45 years, starting long before I
became a usability consultant.)

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PHYSICAL PRESENCE CAN ENHANCE USER LOYALTY

A good colleague gave me a nice bottle from Wine.com for the holidays. The
packing slip was printed on adhesive paper and included a peel-off sticker
with info about the wine, the purchase date, and (most important) the
giver's name.

I stuck this label on the bottle. Now, when I drink the wine (possibly
weeks after getting it), I will be reminded about the giver and her good
taste and kind wishes.

The business value for the website is high, given the tiny cost of
printing a few more lines on the packing slip:

(*) Givers are more likely to buy their gifts on this site, when their
recipients are reminded about them when consuming the gift.

(*) Recipients will like the wine more, when they're reminded of when and
how they got it. In Don Norman's emotional design model, sticking gift
info on a bottle makes it better on the reflective level (where people
think about what something means to them).

(*) The sticker includes the site logo, so the recipient is also reminded
of where they can go to get more, if they really like the wine. Plus, of
course, they're reminded about the site every time they look at the
bottle.

One of the guidelines for enhancing user loyalty is to extend the
physicality of your website, so that people encounter it in the real
world, not just in the virtual world. Wine.com implemented this guideline
well.

User loyalty is a key topic in our course on Fundamental Guidelines for
Web Usability:
  > http://www.nngroup.com/events/tutorials/usability.html

In our studies of business-to-business buyers, we saw many cases where a
site got the sale because the user was reminded of it through physical
cues, sometimes left as remnants of a previous employee's purchase years
before.

More details on the B2B research:
  > http://www.useit.com/alertbox/b2b.html