Usability ROI Declining, But Still Strong

Jakob Nielsen's Alertbox for January 22 is now online at:
  > http://www.useit.com/alertbox/roi.html
		
Summary:
The average business metrics improvement after a usability redesign is now
83%. This is substantially less than 6 years ago, but ROI remains high
because usability is still cheap relative to gains.
				
----------------------------------

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

----------------------------------

APPLICATION DESIGN AWARD: CALL FOR ENTRIES

It's time to direct some glory to the designers responsible for those
substantial applications that do the heavy lifting of actually creating
value for society as opposed to the attention lavished on the Facebook toy
app of the day.

The application design contest will award the 10 best functionality-driven
user experiences of the year. Think you designed a good application UI?
Submit it for the award!

Submission rules:

  > http://www.nngroup.com/reports/applications/design

Deadline: February 29

----------------------------------

"GOOGLE GENERATION" STUDY CONFIRMS TEEN USABILITY FINDINGS

The British Library has released a report on what they call "The Google
Generation" (i.e., teenagers - ironically, snappy report titles are bad
for SEO performance).

Report (warning PDF file):
  > http://www.bl.uk/news/pdf/googlegen.pdf

BL did log file analysis of the behavior of young users vs. grownups, and
also did a longitudinal analysis of a variety of academic studies of
information-seeking behaviors.

Their main conclusion is that teenagers are not as skilled users of the
Web as many people think. In particular, teens have poor online research
skills and a limited "vocabulary" of features they understand and use.

Broadly, these findings are identical to those of our own user research
into how teenage users use websites. It's always nice when supplementary
research confirms our findings, particularly when they use other
methodologies that serve to triangulate the primary observational studies.
The main difference is that we also provide actionable design guidelines
for making your website suitable for young users.

Summary of the usability research:
  > http://www.useit.com/alertbox/teens.html