Bridging the Designer?User Gap

Jakob Nielsen's Alertbox for March 17 is now online at:
  > http://www.useit.com/alertbox/designer-user-differences.html
			
Summary:
Depending on how representative designers are of the target audience, a
project might need more or less user testing. Still, usability concerns
never go away completely.
				
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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 (2 days)
  > Intranet Usability (2 days)
  > Websites That Sell
  > E-Mail Newsletter Usability
  > Writing for the Web
  > B2B

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

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Call for PORTALS

We are looking for organizations to participate in an upcoming report on
intranet portals, both US and non-US companies and organizations across
the spectrum of big and small companies, non-profit, and government.

In recruiting for this study people often say, "I don't know if our
intranet has a portal," so we offer this definition to help you decide:

An intranet "portal" is defined not merely by the technology platform that
makes it run. A portal supports an organization and its employees by
aggregating and organizing all the information and applications that users
want and need to function effectively in their jobs into a single point of
entry.

This definition is the ideal, of course. To participate in the study,
organizations do not need to have already achieved a magnificent portal
that does everything the definition says. Often the best learning comes
from companies at different points along the continuum and we are
interested in speaking with participants who are at those different points
to hear about their experiences.

All participants get a complimentary copy of the final report.

If you are interested please contact Patty Caya: [email protected]

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Advertising Age: "Maybe the Web's Not a Place to Stick Your Ads"

  > http://adage.com/digital/article?article_id=125741

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CALL FOR PAPERS, uxTV 2008

First International Conference on Designing Interactive User Experiences
for TV and Video:

  > http://uxtv2008.org

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IMPORTANCE VS. TIMELINE FOR CONTENT SORTING

Dave Winer (a respected inventor of outliners, blogging software, etc.)
argues that sites should present their content in a chronological listing,
with the newest material on top, pushing older stuff off the page.

  > http://tinyurl.com/3x4zvn

This is in contrast to the normal editorial approach, where the homepage
is prioritized based on the estimated importance of each story. A big
story is shown with more prominence, and sticks around longer than a small
story.

The Economist sites a study from HP Labs that compared these two design
approaches. The study concluded that a timeline display is best when the
half-life of a story is less than 6 hours, but that it's better to
prioritize by importance when the half-life is more than 6 hours.

(The half-life of content is the time it takes for users' interest to drop
in half, for example as measured by clickthroughs.)

  > http://www.economist.com/science/displaystory.cfm?story_id=10804121
    Full academic paper at http://ssrn.com/abstract=1087132
I wouldn't necessarily believe in 6 hours as a sacred number, because the
research is based on various assumptions plus data collected from the Digg
website, which is dominated by weirdos.

But the general conclusion is credible:

  * Prioritize content by timeline if it's short-duration news
  * Prioritize by importance for longer-duration content

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WHY WE BOUGHT FROM DELL, NOT HP

One of the members of Nielsen Norman Group needed a new computer last
week. We originally wanted an HP model, but ended up buying from Dell.com
instead. Here's why:

Employee productivity is enhanced so much by big monitors that you should
always buy the largest you can get, especially for high-paid staff like
our people. Thus we needed a 30-inch monitor (2560x1600 pixels).

HP.com carries such a monitor, but it only seems to be available in their
"business" store. The desktop we wanted was listed in HP.com's home-user
store (since we work from home).

With this annoying enforcement of HP's customer segmentation, we needed to
use two shopping carts in order to buy one system. Who knows if the
products would have worked together and which part of HP would have
answered a support call. Worst of all, scattering one capital expenditure
across two shopping carts would have added a lot of hassle to our internal
review, approval, and accounting procedures. (Processes that any B2B site
should facilitate not block.)

ONE FACE TO THE CUSTOMER - that was one of the main guidelines from a B2B
project I was involved with 15 years ago.

Dell.com also employs annoying customer segmentation, where you have to
tell it what type of customer you are before you're allowed to look at the
products. And sure enough, the stuff we needed was listed in two different
segmentation areas. But Dell.com offered a single shopping cart,
INTEGRATED across their useless customer segmentation, and also offered a
single set of tools to support the customer's internal business processes.

Several hours of our time to overcome the hassle of doing business with
HP's website? Not worth it. We bought Dell.

Our report on B2B usability has a long discussion about whether and how to
do customer segmentation, based on research with users from many other
companies. I found it interesting that my colleague and I were hit by
exactly the kind of usability problem we already documented so vividly.

  > http://www.nngroup.com/reports/b2b