'About Us' Information on Websites

Jakob Nielsen's Alertbox for September 29 is now online at:
  > http://www.useit.com/alertbox/about-us-pages.html

Summary:
We found a 9% improvement in the usability of "About Us" information on
websites over the past 5 years. But companies and organizations still
can't explain what they do in one paragraph.
	
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User Experience 2008 conference

  > Chicago, November 2-7
  > Amsterdam, November 16-21

In-depth training:
  > 31 full-day tutorials

Keynote presentations:
  > Don Norman: Sociable Design
  > Chris Nodder: Usability for Evil

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

DEADLINE to save 10% on Amsterdam registration: next Friday, Oct. 10

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DAMIEN HIRST IN AMSTERDAM

During our Amsterdam conference, one of the more controversial objects of
modern art is on temporary exhibit at the Rijksmuseum: Damien Hirst's
platinum cast of a human skull encrusted with 8,601 diamonds.

I think I'll like the Rembrandts better, but since I am going to the
museum anyway the day before our event, I'll take in the skull as well.

  > http://www.rijksmuseum.nl/tentoonstellingen/hirst?lang=en

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READING STYLES AND LEARNING

The Chronicle of Higher Education:
"Online Literacy Is a Lesser Kind"

  > http://chronicle.com/free/v55/i04/04b01001.htm

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FEWEST CLICKS - NOT ALWAYS BEST

2009 will clearly be the year when we finally see a decent number of
websites, intranets, and applications develop a mobile-optimized
component.

In selecting the research results to present in the "Research Update 2008"
seminar, we found a huge number of studies of mobile usability that have
already been done, and we can only include the most interesting ones in
the seminar. We also need time to cover advances in areas like social
networking, encouraging users to participate with reviews or
knowledge-management-style Q&A, login hints, revisitation/returning users,
faster usability methods, and remote testing:

  > http://www.nngroup.com/events/tutorials/research_update.html

Our selection criteria were the intrinsic interestingness of the research
plus its applicability to real-life design projects.

Here's an interesting study we had to drop. Note in particular two
conclusions:

(a) Even though one design required more keystrokes, it was still faster,
because it was easier to understand.

(b) In another case, a design with fewer steps lost because there was too
big a risk of user errors.

This is an important lesson for all design, whether for mobile or desktop:
don't just count steps, keystrokes, or pageviews. It's just as important
to minimize the cognitive load and error-proneness of your design.

** Keijzers, J., den Ouden, E., and Lu, Y. 2008. Usability benchmark study
of commercially available smart phones: cell phone type platform, PDA type
platform and PC type platform. In Proceedings of the 10th International
Conference on Human-Computer Interaction with Mobile Devices and Services
(Amsterdam, The Netherlands, September 2-5, 2008).

Comparison between three different smart phones: Nokia E61i, HTC S710,
Palm Treo 680: they want to evaluate which of these are more usable (in
terms of efficiency, effectiveness, user satisfaction) for new users. 
They look at 4 different  tasks (call a number, retrieve info from a web
site, enter an appointment in the calendar, set up a push mail account and
send mail).

They found that it was harder to call a number on the Palm (due to a
number of usability problems of the interface), the HTC was worst at the
Internet task, for the calendar task Nokia was best in spite of needing
the highest number of key presses to perform the task; for the push mail
account the Palm outperforms the others. Note that for email account
set-up, none of the phones had a task completion rate over 70%.

Sometimes task complexity can be overcome by good instructions: calendar
task has a higher number of strokes on Nokia, but was still fastest on
Nokia due to good guidance; Palm users are detoured in the calendar task
by pressing a wrong key that turns the phone off instead of going up in
the navigation menu, so Palm loses in spite of requiring just a small
number of steps to complete the task.