Return on Investment for Usability

Jakob Nielsen's Alertbox for January 7 is now online at:
   http://www.useit.com/alertbox/20030107.html

Summary:
Development projects should spend 10% of their budget on usability.
Following a usability redesign, websites increase usability by 135%
on average; intranets improve slightly less.
	
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Announcing Usability Week 2003

  New York City: March 17-21
  London: March 24-28

More info: http://www.nngroup.com/events

6 brand-new seminars with new research on specialized topics:

  * Investor Relations Website Usability
  * Press Room Design: Usability of the PR Section of Websites
  * Web Metrics: Measuring Website Successes
  * Search Engine Visibility
  * Application Design Bloopers
  * Intranet Portals

4 seminars about basic topics that we have covered before, but which are
eternally important:

  * User Testing
  * The Usability Life Cycle
  * E-Mail Newsletter Usability
  * Intranet Usability

Why this agenda? Usability has finally become sufficiently established
that we can move beyond standard advice like "test your users" and
"remove annoying splash screens."
We can look at very specialized topics and become more constructive:
not just "avoid bad design" but "do the following good things."

In investor relations we now know so much that we can provide a
recommended standard information architecture to support investors'
information needs on any publicly traded company's website. For other
topics, we can't go quite that far since the users' tasks will differ
between companies, but usability recommendations are definitely getting
more detailed and positive from the studies we are currently conducting
and will be presenting in March.

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