Can Hated Design Elements Be Made to Work?

Once users reject a design technique due to repeated bad experiences it's
almost impossible to use it for good because people will avoid it every
time.
		
Jakob Nielsen's Alertbox for March 14:
  > http://www.useit.com/alertbox/hated-design.html
	
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Usability Week 2011 conference

  * London: April 3-8
  * Washington, DC: April 18-22
  * Minneapolis: May 9-13
  * San Francisco: June 13-18

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

DEADLINE: 
  * This Friday, March 18
  * save 10% on advance registration for WASHINGTON DC

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CASE STUDIES WANTED: MEASURABLE IMPACT OF DESIGN CHANGES

Please share your improved usability examples, and get a free NN/g report:

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

DEADLINE:
  * Next Thursday, March 31

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USABILITY WEEK TWITTER FEED

Attendee reports from last week's conference, complete with comments on
my lunch-eating habits:

  > http://twitter.com/#search?q=%23nnguw

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USER SKILLS – HUGE RANGE

We did a lot of user testing during our recent Asia-Pacific lecture tour.
Websites, of course, but also a lot of mobile sites and apps, to update
the two seminars on these topics with lessons from this region which has a
very strong mobile tradition:

  > http://www.nngroup.com/events/tutorials/mobile.html (sites)
  > http://www.nngroup.com/events/tutorials/mobile_apps.html (apps)

The detailed findings will be reported in these seminars. But one session
was so striking that I'll mention it here: This was a Chinese user who was
pretty savvy with her new iPhone and had plenty of apps. She was highly
search reliant, as we've seen with most other mobile users recently.

But this user got into trouble every time she encountered an input field
that already contained some text. (Whether it was left over from her own
prior use or supplied by a website in violation of the mobile design
guideline to leave fields blank.)

Every single time (probably about 20 times during the study session) the
user laboriously backspaced over all the existing text. Never once did she
use the "clear field" button that's luckily found in most mobile apps and
sites these days.

Of course, it's not really news to me that user skills vary and that many
people don't know the various fancy shortcuts that are supposed to smooth
their path through longwinded interactions. But I thought it was
interesting to be reminded of this fact in a painful manner while
observing this poor user struggle again and again. At least she know how
to backspace: it just took forever.