Right-Justified Navigation Menus Impede Scannability

Jakob Nielsen's Alertbox for April 28 is now online at:
  > http://www.useit.com/alertbox/navigation-menu-alignment.html
			
Summary:
Users scan lists by moving their eyes rapidly down the left edge.
Menu items that are right-aligned make scanning more difficult.
				
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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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WHAT RECESSION?

The newspapers are full of whining about the economy, but our data shows
another picture: our conference in New York two weeks ago had several
sold-out seminars and registrations for London are running 39% higher than
the same time last year.

Admittedly, the true story might be that companies are focusing their
resources on matters that bring immediate return on investment, and
usability is certainly in that camp. Instead of spending millions on new
intranet software, spend a little on making the stuff you already have
work better. Or, for an e-commerce site, focus on higher conversion rates
this year and defer fancy features (which often don't pay off) to next
year.

So maybe usability is hot because companies try to save money.

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HIRING DONE FOR NOW

I announced job openings at NN/g some time ago. After many interviews and
test assignments, we have now hired the top-scoring 1% of applicants.

Thus, we don't need any more resumes.

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LIVE MESH - can it do transaction handoffs?

Microsoft announced a new technology called Live Mesh that's supposed to
synchronize files and some aspects of the user experience across multiple
devices.

It sounds like they are implementing a big percentage of the features I
called for in my 2002 column, "Supporting Multiple-Location Users"

  > http://www.useit.com/alertbox/20020526.html

Only 6 years. Not so bad for major technology changes.

However, as far as I can tell from the announcement, Live Mesh may not
support one of the key elements I wrote about: the ability to conduct part
of a transaction on one device and the rest on another device. This is
needed for fully seamless coordination across one or more users' multiple
devices.

Kludges for this exist already on some websites. For example I recently
recommended a particular custom configuration of a Dell computer (with a
30-inch monitor) to one of our new employees. I could use dell.com to
select the recommended components and then transfer that state of the
configurator to my colleague for further customization. This transfer was
done by email and thus required manual intervention and some copy-paste. I
applaud Dell for supporting this essential B2B use case, but in the future
such interactions must become much easier.