Distributing Content Through Social Networks and RSS

Jakob Nielsen's Alertbox for October 12 is now online at:
  > http://www.useit.com/alertbox/streams-feeds.html

Summary:
Users like the simplicity of messages that pass into oblivion over time,
but were frequently frustrated by unscannable writing, overly frequent
postings, and their inability to locate companies on social networks.

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Usability Week 2009 conference

  > Las Vegas, NV: this week
  > Berlin, Germany: November 15-20
  > San Francisco, CA: December 7-11

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

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REGISTRATION DEADLINE

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

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NEW CONFERENCE

Announcing our next conference: San Francisco, December 7-11 (just in time
to do some serious holiday shopping on Union Square after the sessions :-)
	
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STARTUPS AT HIGHER USABILITY MATURITY LEVELS?

After I referred to the model of 8 stages of organizational maturity for
usability in my last column, I received an interesting question: Is it
possible to short-circuit the slow progression through the levels by
starting a new company at a higher level than #1 from the very beginning.

Refresher - the usability maturity model is at:
  > http://www.useit.com/alertbox/maturity.html

The answer is definitely yes. If the founder of a new startup has a strong
background in usability then he or she can certainly inject a newly
informed organization with an approach to integrate usability into the
design and development process at any desired level.

Similarly, a new company's first VP of development or VP of marketing can
define the culture for software design or website design any way they
please, though they typically have less reach than the founder for making
the processes "take" throughout the company.

The two main problems are:

(a) You may *say* that you want to emphasize good user experience and
utilize proven methods, but even as the CEO or VP-in-charge you can only
do so successfully if you understand these methods. Such understanding
mainly comes from experience in your previous job, so you can't have your
new company start out many levels above your old company, because you
wouldn't know how to behave at this higher level. Of course, our
conference aims at helping people move to the next level, but we can only
realistically move you one level up from your current understanding.

(b) Startups tend to be less command-and-control driven than old
companies. Thus, even if management says that it wants things done in a
certain way, this may not happen if employees don't believe in it. To
overcome this problem you have to hire people who are ready to work at the
maturity level you want to introduce in your new organization. For
example, when hiring engineers who are only supposed to program and not do
any user testing, you should still check that they don't hate usability so
much that they would never change a line of code to implement usability
findings.

Third, startups are supposed to move fast, but that's no reason to neglect
usability. We have plenty of case studies showing that Agile methods and
usability can be made to work nicely together. However, you do have to
know how to do so, or you risk leaving usability behind in the rush to
ship:
  > http://www.nngroup.com/reports/agile

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GESTURAL UI IN WINDOWS 7

The long wait will soon be over, and we'll be able to upgrade from Windows
Vista to Windows 7 on Oct. 22. (Disclosure: we did a small amount of
consulting for Vista and had the design lead present a keynote about the
Vista vision at our conference the year before it shipped. Unfortunately,
the software as shipped didn't fulfill the user experience vision as
designed.)

Early reviews mention two interesting features:

(*) "Snap" arranges two windows side-by-side by dragging them to opposite
sides of the screen.

(*) "Shake" hides all other windows when you grab a window's title bar and
shake the mouse.

Both may herald a renaissance for the gestural interaction styles that
briefly made an appearance in handwriting-based systems like the GO tablet
in 1991. Mouse gestures are not as natural as stylus gestures (or even
finger gestures, like the ones in iPhone), so there's probably a limit to
how far we'll go with gestures on the desktop.

Purely based on reading about it, I am not convinced about "Shake", though
I imagine that Microsoft's usability folks have tested it extensively. So
maybe it's a great feature. We'll see when we all start using it.

"Snap" is more interesting to me, for three reasons: 

(1) It's finally an effort to counteract the negative effect the maximize
feature has had on user interfaces.

(2) It's a recognition of the need for new features to support the big
screens that are becoming more common. (I'm telling all my new hires to
buy 30-inch monitors.)

(3) The feature encourages tiled windows, with one on the left and another
on the right. (Instead of the overlapping windows that dominated most GUIs
except for the Xerox Star.) Easy tiling may make more users engage in
side-by-side browsing in two simultaneous windows (instead of using tabs).
This again will make Web usage even more competitive: the competing site
won't be a click away, because it will be on the screen *right now* while
the user is on your site.