Does SharePoint Destroy Intranet Design?

Jakob Nielsen's Alertbox for June 7 is now online at:
  > http://www.useit.com/alertbox/sharepoint.html

Summary:
As intranet projects benefit from powerful implementation platforms, teams
should focus on optimizing the user experience for specific organizational
needs, as 4 winning examples show.

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Usability Week 2010 conference

  * San Francisco, CA: June 14-19
  * Toronto, Canada: August 9-14

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

DEADLINE to save $200 on advance registration for San Francisco:
  * THIS FRIDAY, June 11

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OLD USABILITY GUIDELINES ARE NEW AGAIN

Guideline #11 in my 2001 book about Homepage Usability talks about how to
maintain a unified face to the customer, by not giving the website a
separate name:

  > http://www.useit.com/homepageusability/guidelines.html

There's no reason for a company named Foo to call its site something like
"Foo Online", or "eFoo," because people already *know* that they are
online (indeed, on the Web), when they visit www.foo.com. Just call your
homepage "Foo" and show your regular logo.

9 years later, most corporate websites comply with this guideline. (But
it's in the book for a reason: the guideline was frequently violated back
then.)

Sadly, I now see the same problem again, on a new platform: the iPad. But
most usability guidelines tend to stay the same, from one platform to the
next, just like most 1970s guidelines for mainframe design transferred to
Mac/PC design in the 1980s and again to the Web in the 1990s.

The iTunes name for the Financial Times' iPad app is "Financial Times iPad
Edition." Well, if I'm downloading an FT app to my iPad, I *know* it'll be
on an iPad. Just call the app "Financial Times." Shorter, and thus more
scannable.

Worse, the actual icon name on the iPad itself is "Mobile Edition." First,
as mentioned, these words contain no added info. Second, the title doesn't
even mention the name of the newspaper. But at least the icon says "FT"
with big letters (on a nice facsimile of their trademark paper color), so
it's recognizable enough.

Another bad iPad icon design comes from The New York Times. Their app
title is "Editors' Choice." No mention of *which* editors. The app icon is
the single letter "T", which is pretty obscure, even if it is rendered in
the newspaper's logotype.

Our good old guidelines for icon recognizability are also current again.
(See section 2.3 in my 1993 book "Usability Engineering.")

If iPad use evolves anywhere like what we found for iPhones, users will
soon have pages upon pages filled with icons for apps that they rarely
use. For people to pick out your app in that crowd, they better recognize
its icon, or rare use will turn into no use.

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SPLASH SCREENS REDUX

By the way, what's with the splash screens in iPad apps? Just take us
straight to the content. One more old usability guideline made current
again.

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iPAD INCONSISTENCY DEMO

3-minute video where I discuss some questionable iPad user interfaces:

  > http://bit.ly/iPadDemos

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JACK SCHOFIELD RETIRES

Jack Schofield, who was the computer editor at The Guardian newspaper, is
retiring after 25 years, during which he wrote lots of interesting
articles, including several about usability. Good luck Jack.

The newspaper's weekly podcast includes a segment where he remembers
highlights from these 25 years, and has a somewhat surprising pick for
person he would have liked to interview. (I won't give the name away here,
but I'll say that I would have liked to read that interview much more than
the 527th interview with Steve Jobs.)

The history segment starts 31 minutes into the podcast, but (correctly
done) there's an easy-enough scrollbar to fast-forward to this spot:

  > http://bit.ly/JackReminiscing

As it turns out, I must have been one of Jack's last interviews, when we
met during the London Usability Week conference:

  > http://bit.ly/9DcUK9

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INTRANETS NEEDED

We're looking for organizations to participate in our Intranet Design
Annual Competition and our Intranet Research Study. You can submit your
company's intranet for either or both of these. Please follow the
submission guidelines for each.

** Design Annual

We're looking for the world's 10 best intranets. Winners will be featured
in an in-depth case study in NN/g's Intranet Design Annual 2011

Deadline: July 1, 2010

  > http://www.nngroup.com/reports/intranet/2011

** Research Study: Free intranet usability test

Experts from NN/g will conduct a usability test of your intranet at your
offices and give you the results in a post-test meeting with your team,
for no fee.  We will use your screenshots and stories to update our report
series and our seminars.
	
Deadline: August 13, 2010

  > http://www.nngroup.com/reports/intranet/freetest