Velocity of Media Consumption, TV vs. the Web

Jakob Nielsen's Alertbox for November 24 is now online at:
  > http://www.useit.com/alertbox/media-velocity.html

Summary:
The granularity of user decisions is much finer on the Web, which is
dominated by the instant gratification of the user's needs in any given
instant. Content must cater to this rapid pace.

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Usability Week 2009 and 2010 conferences

  > San Francisco, CA: December 7-11
  > Miami, FL: January 25-29
  > Atlanta, GA: February 22-26
  > New York, NY: March 22-26

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

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REGISTRATION DEADLINE

San Francisco: NEXT Friday, Dec. 4 - save $200 on advance registration 

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ANNOUNCING Usability Week 2010

Our first-ever conference in Florida will take place in late January: just
the time for getting out of the snow and into the sun.

If you have money left in this year's budget, you can secure a spot now
for the Miami event - or go to San Francisco in December, which is also
pretty nice, though not as warm.

Also conferences in Atlanta (February) and New York City (March).

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NEW SEMINARS

I am particularly pleased to announce 3 new topics that we are working on
for the New York conference:

From Print to Web:
  > http://www.nngroup.com/events/tutorials/print_to_web.html

Big, Famous Sites: Which Design Patterns are Good Enough to Borrow?
  > http://www.nngroup.com/events/tutorials/big_famous_sites.html

iPhone Apps Design:
  > http://www.nngroup.com/events/tutorials/mobile_apps.html

Regarding the iPhone Apps seminar: Nielsen Norman Group is committed to
staying vendor-neutral. We are not turning into Apple fanboys. The only
reason we have an iPhone-oriented seminar is that this is currently the
platform with the most mobile applications.

It's a plus and a minus of our approach that we always present the
empirical truth (as opposed to many competing conferences, where speakers
tend to present their personal opinions, as opposed to user data). The
plus is that we know what design ideas work and which ones don't work.
(Finding out what works for real users is also the core idea behind the
"big and famous sites" seminar.)

The minus is that we can only test those user interfaces that actually
exist in the world. For mobile apps, this currently means a focus on
iPhone apps.

I expect that we will change the next edition of the seminar to cover
application design for all the high-end mobile platforms. That's why I
picked a URL ending in "mobile_apps" instead of "iphone_apps" for the
seminar description page.

It's a key principle to design URLs that stay live forever. This sometimes
means predicting what you'll have on a page in the future, and this can
obviously not be done perfectly. Thus, one sometimes ends up with URLs
that are a bit off, as the content evolves. That's OK, and much better
than letting old URLs die and generate 404 errors.

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SEARCH MARKETING 10 YEARS

It's 10 years since the first search marketing conference:

  > http://bit.ly/SEM10years

I remember speaking at that conference which took place at a fairly small
hotel in San Francisco. Compared to the huge exhibit halls in use for more
recent search events, it was a modest beginning.

But it's important to remember that many prominent people questioned the
importance of search back in those days. This makes Danny Sullivan that
much more of a pioneer for organizing the 1999 conference.

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Best comment I have seen on AOL's new "Aol." logo: Lol.

From Florian Schmitt, quoted in The Guardian:
  > http://bit.ly/AolLol