Short-Term Memory and Web Usability

Jakob Nielsen's Alertbox for December 7 is now online at:
  > http://www.useit.com/alertbox/short-term-memory.html

Summary:
The human brain is not optimized for the abstract thinking and data
memorization that that websites often demand. Many usability guidelines
are dictated by cognitive limitations.
	
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Usability Week 2009 and 2010 conferences

  > San Francisco, CA: this week
  > 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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ACTIONABLE CONTENT

The Washington Post has struck a deal with Amazon to provide links for
users to buy books that are reviewed or mentioned in the newspaper, in
return for referral fees:

  > http://bit.ly/AmazonWP 

This arrangement obviously raises the classic concern about compromising
editorial integrity, and it's certainly possible to go overboard. If the
newspaper ends up sprinkling links to bestselling books through articles
that are only tenuously related to the books, then the user experience
will suffer and the agreement will backfire.

It's worth being aware of the potential downsides. But the upside is much
bigger. I am not even talking about the money, though that's surely
welcome in any news organization these days. I'm talking about the upside
for the user experience: it's actually *good* for users to have a direct
link from an article to a (reputable) place to buy the products that are
discussed.

Use case: you're reading a book review and end up deciding, "yes, I'd like
to read that book." If there's a link, you'll close the order in a few
more clicks. Without the link, you have to copy the book title and/or
author name, go to a book site, paste this into the search, and hope that
you can navigate the resulting listing correctly and not end up in the
wrong spot. (Something that happens to me often, particularly when I am
shopping for music.)

A key insight here is that Web content is *actionable* content. Users
often read because they want to get something done. Linking to a place
that will make this happen should only be seen as positive customer
service.

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CELEBRATING USER ANNIVERSARIES

Last week, I got an email from the Hotmail team, saying "It's been roughly
a decade since you registered your Hotmail account, and we just want to
say thank you."

It would have been better if they had sent the message on the exact
10-year anniversary to avoid the weasel-word "roughly." Still, it's a nice
and easy way to acknowledge loyal users.

Any website that registers users can do the same, and an e-commerce site
could take the usage anniversary one step further and send such loyal
users a particularly good special offer.