Extreme Usability - How to Make an Already-Great Design Even Better

Jakob Nielsen's Alertbox for June 23 is now online at:
  > http://www.useit.com/alertbox/extreme-usability.html

Summary:
The 1% of websites that don't suck can be made even better by
strengthening exceptional user performance, eliminating miscues, and
targeting company-wide use and unmet needs.

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

Usability Week 2008 conference

  > 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

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

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

CALL FOR ENTRIES: Intranet Design Annual

Think you have a good intranet? Enter it for the design competition.

Deadline: July 11

How to enter:
  > http://www.nngroup.com/reports/intranet/2009

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

READING RESEARCH FOLLOW-UPS

Slate Magazine: "Lazy Bastards: How We Read Online"
  > http://www.slate.com/id/2193552/

The Atlantic Monthly: "Is Google Making Us Stupid?"
  > http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200807/google

Internet News: "Writing for the Web - and Getting It Read"
  > http://www.internetnews.com/webcontent/article.php/3754506

It's unfair to blame Google for the facts of information foraging. The
easier it is to get around an information space, the earlier people will
leave any one location and surf to the next beckoning hit. That's a fact,
and Google is just designing the best product it can.

If we didn't have Google, it would be Yahoo and Live Search that were
making us stupid, even though maybe they wouldn't make us quite as stupid,
because they would make it a little harder to find the next promising
place to go, and thus make people dig a bit deeper at each site.

Also, I have observed the same reading behavior in user research since
1997 (the year before Google was founded) so it's definitely not Google's
fault that the very nature of the Web makes users treat individual
websites contemptuously. Yes, the behavior is stronger now, with more
people that ever using search and diving into sites for very short dips,
but fundamentally it's the same style of behavior.

After all, I talked about the importance of designing and writing for
search long before Google, and the guidelines are pretty much the same.
It's simply become more important to follow them.

The guilty party is not Google, it's the Web.

It's interesting how the word "Google" is getting to be synonymous with
"The Web", something we certainly see among many 4th graders who'll say
things like "I looked it up on Google." Please try to be smarter than a
4th grader.

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

INFORMATION OVERLOAD

New York Times on the productivity impact of incessant interruptions by
email, IM, etc.:
  > http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/14/technology/14email.html

See also my article on Information Pollution:
  > http://www.useit.com/alertbox/20030811.html