World's Best Headlines: BBC News

Jakob Nielsen's Alertbox for April 27 is now online at:
  > http://www.useit.com/alertbox/headlines-bbc.html

Summary:
Precise communication in a handful of words? The editors at BBC News
achieve it every day, offering remarkable headline usability.
	
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Usability Week 2009 conference

  > London, May 17-22 
  > San Francisco, June 22-27 
  > New York City, July 13-17 
  > 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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TEENS' USE OF WEBSITES

The Newspaper Association of America has published a report on a study on
how teenagers use news sites:

  > http://tinyurl.com/naafoundation-teens-know-pdf (warning PDF)

This report doesn't have as many design guidelines as our report on teen
usability, but the findings they do present replicate our findings: young
users like pictures, don't like long text, don't scroll as much as
grownups, don't have much background knowledge. Our report:

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

It's always nice when independent research confirms our results. I have
always said that there are no secrets in usability: anybody who bothers
observing real users will find the same as we have discovered, at least
assuming that they employ a valid methodology. (Sadly, most eyetracking
studies use bogus methodology and can't be trusted.)

Still, no two studies are identical, and there are always new nuances to
be picked up by reading a second report about the same thing. The NAA
report obviously focuses on how to present news and headlines, and
includes several interesting screenshots of alternate designs that were
tested.

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OUT-OF-BOX SCARE

When unboxing a new Casio EX-FS10 camera, the first thing you see, on top
of everything else in the box, is a big red stop sign, screaming:

"STOP. If you are having difficulty operating your new Casio camera,
please do not return to the store. Call XXX for technical support."

Wow, this UI must be uncommonly bad, even for a consumer electronics
company, for them to admit up front that people return the product for
being too hard to use. (Or, just as likely, management simply doesn't
listen to the company's poor lone usability guy.)

Casio should consider the expense of many of the product returns and of
answering all these tech support calls to be the cost of poor usability.
My guess: $10M/year. They could hire quite a large usability group for
that budget and get better reviews in the process.

Sadly, my 5-years old column still holds true, "Why Consumer Products Have
Inferior User Experience":

  > http://www.useit.com/alertbox/20040315.html

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PARODY OF HCI HISTORY

Pretty funny 4-minute video spoofing the history of user interface
research (by Michael Bernstein from MIT and colleagues):

  > http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q3cT-x4yR6U

If you don't know the history of user interfaces, you may find yourself
wondering, who's this Sutherland(*) guy? If so, the film is not as funny.
But if you can recognize the Knowledge Navigator(**) agent in a second
(and know what I mean by this reference), you'll enjoy watching.

I was particularly tickled by the scene of my colleague Tog's
"Starfire"(***) computer displaying the blue screen of death. Something he
didn't include in his original design...

(*)Ivan Sutherland's Sketchpad program from 1963 was the first graphical
user interface.

(**) Knowledge Navigator was Apple's 1987 vision video of an agent-driven
tablet computer, with a silly bowtie-wearing actor pretending to be an AI:
  > http://vodpod.com/watch/1207286-knowledge-navigator

(***) Bruce Tognazzini's Starfire movie from 1992 envisioned the user
experience of a high-end professional workstation in 2004. Five years
later, we still don't have sceens this large.
  > http://www.asktog.com/starfire/