Write for Reuse

Jakob Nielsen's Alertbox for March 2 is now online at:
  > http://www.useit.com/alertbox/writing-reuse.html

Summary:
Users often see online content out of context and read it with different
goals than you envisioned. While you can't predict all such goals, you can
plan for multiple uses of your text.
	
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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 Usability in Practice

Specialized topics:
  > 14 in-depth tutorials

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

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EXAMPLES WANTED: 
Intranet Collaboration Features and Enterprise Social Networking

We are working on a new whitepaper on this topic, including issues like: 
   - Enterprise blogging, CEO blogs, employee blogs
   - Micro-blogging, mobile postings, Yammer etc.
   - Discussion forums
   - Wikis
   - "Internal Facebook" or "Internal LinkedIn"
   - Collaborative workspaces

Please help if you can contribute examples, screenshots, or case study
insights (whether positive lessons learned, or things to avoid).

More info:
  > http://www.nngroup.com/reports/intranet/social

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MOBILE USABILITY FOLLOW-UP

After the last newsletter's article on mobile usability findings, several
people asked me whether these issues can be addressed by providing a
separate style sheet (CSS) for mobile devices.

Unfortunately not. Mobile requires separate content, separate features,
and separate workflow for optimal usability. Fitting the page layout to a
small screen is the smallest of our worries (though of course you should
still do this). Indeed, many phones automatically adapt page layouts to
their screens, without a special style sheet, and still perform poorly in
testing.
	
Another point: many smartphones tested miserably in the study. I am not
naming names, because our goal was not to rate device vendors but to
discover design guidelines for the mobile content, services, and
applications that users will be accessing on the devices they actually
own. Ideas for improving phones are irrelevant for website owners: you
have to design your site for the phones that exist in the world.

Still, after I observed several truly bad design flaws in some recent
phones, I couldn't help myself but look up the reviews of these phones on
various gadget sites. It's striking that none of these glaring usability
defects were mentioned in any of the reviews I checked. Reviews of new
mobile devices are still too focused on features and don't assess how easy
it is to actually perform tasks on mobile sites with a new device.

  > http://www.useit.com/alertbox/mobile-usability.html

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MISUSE OF MICRO-NEWSLETTER

Microsoft has an initiative offering free technology training for the
unemployed. So far, so good.

  > http://www.microsoft.com/elevateamerica

When you click "View Special Offer", you get a pop-up with no real
additional info. So far, so bad. (Double-bad: pop-up + punishing prospects
for clicking.) At the bottom of the pop-up is this call to action:

"If you would like to receive information when the Elevate America
resources become available in your state, please follow us on Twitter:
http://www.twitter.com/elevateamerica."

This sounds to me like you have to sign up to receive 50 messages to get
the one you care about.

For this application, it would be much better to have people enter their
email address and state abbreviation to get one message when there's
something in your state. Then the site could promote its micro-newsletter
as offering daily or weekly tips or other useful info, as opposed to
updates about Ohio for residents of Virginia.

Users are protective of their time. Just because you're using the current
tech fad (here, Twitter), you're still subject to such age-old facts of
human behavior. Newsletters and other updates must respect this:

  > http://www.nngroup.com/reports/newsletters
	
To notify people when an initiative becomes available locally, use
request marketing, as I discussed 9 years ago:

  > http://www.useit.com/alertbox/20001015.html