Enterprise Portals Are Popping

Jakob Nielsen's Alertbox for July 14 is now online at:
  > http://www.useit.com/alertbox/portals.html

Summary:
A usability analysis of 23 intranet portals finds strong growth,
increasing collaboration features, and cross-functional governance.

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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

DEADLINE to save $200 by advance registration THIS FRIDAY, July 18

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LONG-TERM THINKING SADLY LACKING

Interesting article about how Yahoo desperately tries to boost its
quarterly numbers to beat off the takeover attempt (by the Wall St.
Journal's Kara Swisher):

  > http://tinyurl.com/6m7plh	

Quick summary: polluting the user experience by both striking more
low-value display deals and by stuffing more irrelevant stuff on each
page.

We know that relevance is one of the key determinants for user acceptance
of online advertising, so accepting any comers in order to boost numbers
before quarter-end is a sure way to undermine the long-term value of the
service, as users will be more likely to depart.

The sad thing is that this probably works, in terms of impressing Wall
Street, because most so-called "analysts" don't understand user experience
or the impact of current design on future use. So they will just look at
the current numbers without realizing that they were derived by lowering
the long-term earnings potential. Robbing Peter twice to pay Paul once.

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REDESIGNING THE MILK JUG	

You might think that the humble milk gallon jug were a tired and
well-established design that cannot be improved further. Wrong, as proven
by Sam's Club (disclosure: one of our consulting clients, but not for
their milk bottles).

A new design (written up in the New York Times) has the following
impressive improvements in business metrics:

  * 180% higher utilization of coolers
  * 125% better delivery truck productivity
  *  50% increased storage space utilization
  *  16% lower milk prices for the end consumer

  > http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/30/business/30milk.html

Sadly, the new design comes with a usability problem: people tend to spill
the first time they pour milk from the new container. The store has a kind
of training program in the form of in-store demos to teach customers how
to pour milk.

I haven't done any studies of the new containers, so I don't know if it
would have been possible to design them better and avoid this new-user
problem. I do know that consumer packaging tends to be designed without
usability research, so it's quite likely that further improvements could
be had.

In any case, the point remains that huge business improvements came from
redesigning something as simple as milk containers. Think of the relative
complexity of your website vs. a milk bottle, and you'll see why the
potential for even bigger ROI remains to this day for Web usability. There
are still enormous value improvements to be squeezed out of the average
online sales funnel.

As an aside, the NY Times article referenced above comes with a
"multimedia" show of the new milk jugs, but unfortunately this is just a
slide show of still photos. Pouring milk with and without spilling is
something that would be much better visualized by a short video clip. They
missed an opportunity to properly webize that article.

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STRONG GROWTH FOR MELBOURNE CONFERENCE 

In my last newsletter I mentioned that registration numbers showed 19%
more people coming for next week's conference than we had at our last
Australia conference. But we keep getting registrations at a
faster-than-expected rate, so it now looks like there will in fact be 27%
more conference participants.
	
Because of the bigger event, we need more student volunteers to help out.
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]