25 Years in Usability

Jakob Nielsen's Alertbox for April 21 is now online at:
  > http://www.useit.com/alertbox/25-years-usability.html
			
Summary:
Since I started in 1983, the usability field has grown by 5,000%.
It's a wonderful job - and still a promising career choice for new people.
				
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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

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I WON'T DO YOUR HOMEWORK

Last week I got this email:

"My name is Donald Duck, and I am currently a junior psychology major at
Duckburg College. For my senior thesis, I would like to conduct some
usability studies in the process of redesigning my old high school's
website. In making this my senior thesis, part of what I have to do is
find out what research is currently being done in the field, in order to
build upon it. I do not know much about usability or interface design from
a research perspective. I am wondering if you might be able to point me in
the right direction for where I can get started learning about this
field."

Sorry - I am not going to do your homework for you. Even today, there is
such a thing as the library. Or search engines that rapidly will turn up
articles such as "Usability 101" to serve as a starting point for online
research if you can't be bothered to crack open a book or research
journal:

  > http://www.useit.com/alertbox/20030825.html

I like getting email from readers with their problems, though I get so
much that I can't always answer. At least questions from real projects
serve as inspiration for my columns and for new topics at my seminars.

But students who get an assignment to learn what's going on in the field
shouldn't expect me to give them a personalized summary of the research.

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FILE SYSTEM OUTAGE HITS ALERTBOX

You may have had trouble reading the last Alertbox column, if you followed
the link shortly after the newsletter came out.

Unfortunately part of the file system (an area where the Alertbox articles
are stored) was unavailable for about 30 minutes on our webserver. The
hosting company fixed the problem quickly enough, but sadly the outage
came about an hour after I sent out the email newsletter, and thus at a
time when many people were trying to read that week's article.

My apologies to anybody who couldn't get through. Please try again:

  > http://www.useit.com/alertbox/bad-design.html

This is a good opportunity to revisit the distinction between user
interface and user experience. While storage is not part of the UI (i.e.,
it's not page design, IA, or such), it's most definitely part of the UE,
and when files are not available, you don't get *any* user experience, if
you're trying to read pages stored there.

The total user experience is what determines usability, so you have to
consider uptime. With my hosting provider, site availability is better
than 99.9% across the year. Just my bad luck that the 0.1% came shortly
after the newsletter went out.