Reduce Bounce Rates, Fight for the Second Click

Jakob Nielsen's Alertbox for June 30 is now online at:
  > http://www.useit.com/alertbox/bounce-rates.html

Summary:
Different traffic sources imply different reasons for why visitors might
immediately leave your site. Design to keep deep-link followers engaged
through additional pageviews.

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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

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STUDENT VOLUNTEERS needed for Melbourne conference

Registrations for our upcoming conference in Australia are very strong and
we will have 19% more people than last time in Sydney. (I don't want any
trouble by commenting on Melbourne vs. Sydney; in any case I mainly think
that the increase is an indication of the growing respect for usability.)

Because we will have a bigger event, we need more student volunteers to
help out.

This is great opportunity for students to get in for free to the most
elite international usability event to visit Australia and to meet several
hundred user experience professionals from all over Australia, New
Zealand, and many other countries. Duties are light: mainly distributing
handouts and managing the microphone.
	
If you are a full-time student and want to volunteer, please contact 
  > [email protected]

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CALL FOR ENTRIES: Intranet Design Annual

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

Deadline: July 11 (NEXT FRIDAY)

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

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INTERNATIONAL DIVERSIFICATION

Our recent conference in San Francisco attracted people from 22 countries.
While not as diverse as our London conference (35 countries), this is
still further evidence of the international growth of the usability field.
Particularly since the countries represented in SF were different from the
ones in London, with many more Asian and Latin American participants.

The biggest numbers did come from the U.S. and Canada, but Japan was #3
and Brazil #4. Indeed, I have seen other evidence of the growth in
usability in both countries.

The current conference series included people from all continents,
including Antarctica if we count the British Antarctic Survey (though
their Web team is based in Cambridge, so these participants didn't really
fly in from the South Pole, sad to say).

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BROWSER USAGE STATS	

Salesforce.com has released statistics for the browsers used to access
their service. This is much more useful than the usual browser stats,
because Salesforce.com users represent enterprise customers and thus the
type of users likely to patronize B2B sites, enterprise services, and
other high-value uses of the Web.

   83% Internet Explorer
   14% Firefox
    0% Safari (actually: 0.4%, which rounds to zero)
    3% Other

  > http://tinyurl.com/5mtzld

Of IE users, 38% use IE7 and 62% are still using IE6.

Remember that IE7 was released in October 2006: 20 months ago.

Thus, the UPTAKE SPEED is slightly less than 2% per month (in terms of IE
users upgrading from the old version to the new one).

Ten years ago, in 1998, I noted that the uptake speed for new browser
versions was 1% per week. Thus, users are now twice as conservative as
they used to be.

  > http://www.useit.com/alertbox/980322.html

The guideline to stay at least one version behind on employing any new
browser or plug-in technology is even more relevant than it ever was.

If we take 2%/month as a rough rule of thumb, it takes slightly more than
3 years for any new release to reach 3/4 penetration, which is the
absolute minimum for you to even consider using it.