Progress in Usability: Fast or Slow?

Jakob Nielsen's Alertbox for February 22 is now online at:
  > http://www.useit.com/alertbox/usability-progress-rate.html
	
Summary:
Over the past decade, usability improved by 6% per year. This is a faster
rate than most other fields, but much slower than technology advances
might have predicted.
	
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Usability Week 2010 conference

  > New York, NY: March 22-26
  > Chicago, IL: April 19-24
  > London, UK: May 16-21
  > San Francisco, CA: June 14-19

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

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SAN FRANCISCO conference announced

The San Francisco Usability Week conference takes place in June, with
35 full-day seminars.
This is our biggest yet: 6% growth over last year's biggest event.

Full program:
  > http://www.nngroup.com/events/san_francisco/agenda.html

New seminars:

  * Principles of Human-Computer Interaction
  > http://www.nngroup.com/events/tutorials/hci_principles.html

Humans, computers, and interactions all have basic characteristics that
tend to be stable over time: learning about them will give you a
vocabulary to analyze user interfaces to derive deeper, more conceptual
and penetrating insights than simply saying "this works" or "this doesn't
work." This course tells you why certain interactions work better for
certain circumstances.

  * Brand as Experience
  > http://www.nngroup.com/events/tutorials/brand_experience.html

In customers' minds, real branding happens in the buildup of experiences
and interactions with the product or service, through time and multiple
touchpoints, leading to perception.

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CELEBRATING THE WINTER OLYMPICS ON WEBSITES

In 2002, we produced a 62-page report on how to celebrate holidays and
special events on websites. This topic was too narrow to be worth further
research - the report was never updated and has been free for some time:

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

I just updated the report with a new screenshot, showing the celebration
of the 2010 Winter Olympics on Google. This makes for an interesting
comparison because Google's logos for the 2002 games were one of our
original examples. It's notable how 2010 mirrors 2002 in concept, even as
the visual execution is very different.

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TELEPHONE USABILITY, revisited

In 1997, I wrote "Telephone Usability: Voice is Just Another Datatype"

  > http://www.useit.com/papers/telephone_usability.html

We have recently been doing lots of phone-based usability studies, so I
took a look at the old article to see how far we have come in the last 13
years.

Some of my predictions have come true, for example visual voice mail that
lists messages in a menu. Most modern phones also have decent directories
where you can click on person's name to call them (instead of entering a
phone number).

There has been much less progress in creating integrated communications.
There are services that will forward calls from one number to another, so
that you only need to give out one "master number" even if you sometimes
want to be reached at the office and sometimes work from home. However,
these services are not standard, and most people don't have them. In the
case of one person I call a lot, I often have to place calls to 3 numbers
before connecting. (Yes, each call only requires touching a button, but
it's still a pain and takes a long time while waiting for each call to
potentially be picked up.)

The new phone system I got last month emails me with new voice mail, which
is a tiny step towards integrating these two types of messaging.

13 years of progress in telephony has advanced usability somewhat, but we
are still far from what I wanted in my old article.

A bigger lesson: advances come faster in stand-alone user interfaces
(e.g., things that can be done within a single product) and much more
slowly in anything that requires integration:

(1) Advances in the total user experience of the overall system moves at
the speed of the least advanced component.

(2) Vendors are less motivated to invest in improvements that will add to
the usability of *another* component.

(3) Some systems-wide advances won't work unless *all* vendors cooperate,
which is almost impossible to achieve. Even when vendors do work together,
standards committees work at speeds that make snails seem like short-track
speedskating champions. (One of my colleagues once claimed that "standards
meetings eat brain cells" and refused to go.)