Powers of 10 - Time Scales in User Experience

Jakob Nielsen's Alertbox for October 5 is now online at:
  > http://www.useit.com/alertbox/timeframes.html

Summary:
From 0.1 seconds to 10 years or more, user interface design has many
different timeframes, and each has its own particular usability issues.

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Usability Week 2009 conference

  > Las Vegas, NV: October 11-17
  > Berlin, Germany: November 15-20

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

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REGISTRATION DEADLINES

Las Vegas: THIS FRIDAY, Oct. 9 - save $200 on advance registration

Berlin: next Friday, Oct. 16 - save 10% on early registration

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MOBILE SERVICES HELP DEVELOPING COUNTRIES

Impact of mobile devices in developing countries (long, but interesting)
from The Economist:

  > http://bit.ly/11f80z

(To page through this story, click "Next article" links at the bottom of
each section. Not a great interface for a long report; The Economist
should study micro-IA).

The article reports a World Bank study on the economic impact of
communications technologies. The increase in GDP growth is as follows, per
10-percentage point increase in technology penetration:

Mobile phones:      +0.8%
Broadband Internet: +1.4%

These are the numbers for developing countries. The GDP impact is 0.2%
less in advanced countries. The reason for this discrepancy is that
communications technologies help countries grow by making markets more
efficient, by reducing transaction costs, and by increasing productivity.
In all 3 areas, developing countries are further behind and thus have more
to gain from the improvements offered by technology.

Even though Internet use provides the biggest economic growth in percent,
mobile phones provide the biggest absolute benefit to developing countries
because they are so much more widely used there.

In developing countries, information services may be much more widely used
on mobile devices than on desktop computers. This again means that they
should be developed according to the guidelines for mobile usability:

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

And within these guidelines, pay special attention to the ones for low-end
devices, because most of the growth will be in very cheap phones.