Corporate Blogs - Front Page Structure

Jakob Nielsen's Alertbox for August 9 is now online at:
  > http://www.useit.com/alertbox/blog-front-pages.html

Summary:
Showing summaries of many articles is more likely to draw in users than
providing full articles, which can quickly exhaust reader interest.

----------------------------------

Usability Week 2010 conference

  * Toronto, Canada: starts today
  * San Francisco, CA: October 3-8
  * Copenhagen, Denmark: October 18-22
  * Edinburgh, Scotland: October 25-29

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

----------------------------------

HIGHER-CONTRAST KINDLE

Amazon has announced a new version of the Kindle to ship later this month.
They have increased 3 of their advantages relative to full-featured tablet
computers: lighter weight, smaller size (while, crucially, maintaining the
same screen size), and longer battery life. It'll be easier to hold and
will now last through a 3-4 week trip on a single charge, which should be
enough for most people.

Leaving the charger at home makes your bag even lighter. A good example of
attending to the total user experience.

The screen is supposed to have "50% better contrast," however that's
measured.

My guess is that better contrast will give the new Kindle maybe 1-2%
better reading speed than the old model, thus nudging it even closer to
printed books. For the final big step up, to fully close the gap, we need
higher resolution in terms of dots-per-inch, preferably around 300 dpi,
which this model doesn't have. (So far, the iPhone 4 is the only computer
with a truly crisp screen.)

I am not going to bother running a measurement study to find out whether
it's 1 or 2 percent we've gained in reading speed. It's not that important
whether it's one or the other. For sure, it would not impact the reason we
study *readers*, which is to generate guidelines for *writers* of
electronic content:

  > http://www.useit.com/papers/webwriting

Also, because the readability improvement is almost certainly tiny, it
would be necessary to test about 2,000 users to gain statistical
significance.

Many people who don't understand statistics complain about usability
studies with a small number of participants (for example, our recent test
of the reading speed of tablets vs. books). The reason small studies work
is that we are usually assessing huge effects. A lot of usability findings
are big enough that websites almost double their business value after
fixing them:

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

To study big effects, small samples are fine. (Especially if you don't
care about the precise size: whether your conversion rate will increase by
90% or 95% doesn't matter – you should improve the design in either case,
so all you need to know is what's wrong with your site, not exactly how
wrong it is.)

----------------------------------

FREE USABILITY TEST OF YOUR INTRANET

We're looking for organizations to participate in our Intranet Research
Study.

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

----------------------------------

SURVEY: EXPLAINING USABILITY TO MANAGEMENT

Have you had had success or failure in convincing managers and colleagues
about usability? We want to hear about your experience. What worked for
you; what didn't. We are looking for responses from UX/design/IA/usability
people, developers, managers, product managers, marketing, and other
functional groups who affect design.

Please answer a short questionnaire (takes about 5-10 minutes) and enter a
drawing to win a Nielsen Norman Group report of your choice. Follow this
link for the questionnaire:

  > http://www.surveymonkey.com/s/PLQGYJT 

----------------------------------

GOOGLE GULLIBILITY AMONG STUDENTS

New study finds that Google Gullibility is rampant among college students:

  > http://bit.ly/ResearchSkills

This echoes our previous findings of the same phenomenon among mainstream
users:

  > http://www.useit.com/alertbox/user-skills.html

One would have hoped that students had sharper research skills, but no.

Google Gullibility is the tendency to assign undue trust to whatever
result is thrown up as the first by the search engine. The problem exists
for all major search engines, and I just named it G.G. because of the
alliteration.