Interaction Elasticity

Jakob Nielsen's Alertbox for December 15 is now online at:
  > http://www.useit.com/alertbox/interaction-elasticity.html

Summary:
Usage goes down as interaction costs increase. User motivation determines
how fast demand drops, following an elasticity curve.
	
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Usability Week 2009 conference

  > Washington DC, April 5-10 
  > London, May 17-22 
  > San Francisco, June 22-27 
  > Sydney, July 27-August 1

In-depth training:
  > 3-day camp on Fast and Cheap Usability

Specialized topics:
  > 13 in-depth tutorials

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

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MOBILE INTRANET – CALL FOR EXAMPLES

Does your intranet offer mobile access, mobile applications, or special
mobile services?

If so, we would like to include you in a new study of mobile intranet
design.

If you are interested in being a case study, please email Patty Caya at
  > [email protected]
with a short summary of your mobile features, and she will schedule time
for a follow-up interview.

DEADLINE: This Friday, December 19.

(All profiled intranets will receive a free copy of the report – plus, of
course, valuable publicity as leading-edge pioneers.)

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LIQUID LAYOUT

I have always recommended a "liquid" layout for Web pages: allowing the
page to reflow to whatever window size the user prefers.

With ever-bigger monitors, this is becoming more important than in the
past, where it was somewhat feasible to design for one specific size
monitor that most people used.

The latest frontier in liquid design is to go beyond reflowing the same
text to actively *change* the page elements, depending on the available
space. With a smaller screen, you should show less stuff and focus users
on the most important material, instead of simply requiring them to scroll
more. With bigger space, more can be shown.

Amazon.com experimented with an interesting example of
prioritized liquid design last week:

When the window is narrower than about 1200 pixels, the homepage displays
3 "new for you" recommendations of books or videos you might like. But as
you make the window wider, a 4th recommendation pops into view.

(This effect is presumably achieved by some CSS hiding code when the
window is too narrow.)

As more users get big screens, we need to think more about how to utilize
the extra space to show more useful things. Using wide windows better was
a trend among several winners of the Application Design Annual:

  > http://www.nngroup.com/reports/applications/design 

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HOLIDAY GIFT TO SUBSCRIBERS

I have a holiday gift to thank you for being a loyal subscriber to the
Alertbox email newsletter and for your support over the years: a free copy
of our report on the usability of Rich Internet Applications (RIA).

  > http://www.nngroup.com/reports/flash

This report is based on our testing of 46 Flash applications in 2002. Yes,
the technology has moved on, and most Web apps are no longer written in
Flash. But the report focuses on the user experience of these designs, not
their implementation: Most of the 117 usability guidelines and 21
accessibility guidelines are still valid for today's applications, even if
they are done in AJAX, Silverlight, or a newer Flash version than the one
we tested.