Four Bad Designs

Jakob Nielsen's Alertbox for April 14 is now online at:
  > http://www.useit.com/alertbox/bad-design.html
			
Summary:
Bad content, bad links, bad navigation, bad category pages... which is
worst for business? In these examples, bad content takes the prize for
costing the company the most money.
				
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Usability Week 2008 conference

  > 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

DEADLINE to save 10% on London registration: THIS FRIDAY, April 18

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B2B SEMINAR

Due to increased demand and raving feedback from the New York conference,
we have added a session for B2B user experience to the San Francisco
conference. (Also presented in London.)

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POORLY TARGETED MARKETING

I have recently been receiving a large number of direct mail promos for
phone calling plans to India. Indeed, we made a lot of long calls to India
last month when one of my relatives was on a month-long trip to that
country. But now that she left, I don't expect to make any calls to India
until 2009.

The companies mailing me are wasting their money, even though they are
targeting somebody who has just bought a lot of the product they are
selling.

It's very hard to use past behavior to predict current or future
purchases. This is why most attempts at targeting online ads have failed.
They usually don't even know what you have been buying, just what articles
you have glanced at, and maybe some generic demographics, such as what
neighborhood you are connecting from.

Search engine ads are the best, because they target based on the expressed
need you have *right now*. But other targeting systems use much weaker
signals of interest - and signals that often too old to predict your
current interests.