Prioritize: Good Content Bubbles to the Top

If everything is equally prominent, then nothing is prominent. It is the job of the designer to advise the user and guide them to the most important or most promising choices (while ensuring their freedom to go anywhere they please). On today's Web, the most common mistake is to make everything too prominent: over-use of colors, animation, blinking, and graphics. Every element of the page screams 'look at me' (while all the other design elements scream 'no, look at me'). When everything is emphasized, nothing is emphasized.

Nielsen, Jakob. Alertbox (1999). Articles>Usability>Information Design

Productivity and Screen Size

A study of the benefits of big monitors fails on two accounts: it didn't test realistic tasks, and it didn't test realistic use. Productivity is a key argument for workplace usability, but you must measure it carefully.

Nielsen, Jakob. Alertbox (2006). Articles>User Interface>Usability

Productivity in the Service Economy

Yes, it is possible for white-collar workers to work smarter and become more productive. While intranet usability provides substantial initial gains, workflow usability can go much further and will save millions of jobs.

Nielsen, Jakob. Alertbox (2004). Articles>Web Design>Intranets>Workflow

Progressive Disclosure

Progressive disclosure defers advanced or rarely used features to a secondary screen, making applications easier to learn and less error-prone.

Nielsen, Jakob. Alertbox (2006). Articles>Usability>User Centered Design

Protecting the User's Mailbox

Email is a powerful way to reach customers, but overdoing it is risky. Let users know up front that you'll respect their mailboxes. Otherwise, they won't give their email addresses, and you'll lose a unique channel for marketing and customer service.

Nielsen, Jakob. Alertbox (2002). Articles>Business Communication>Correspondence>Email

Public Relations on Websites: Increasing Usability

Compared with a similar 2001 study, a new study of journalists as they looked for information on corporate websites' PR areas showed significant usability improvements: a 5% higher success rate and 15% increased guidelines compliance. Why has guidelines compliance improved so much more than the success rate for actual task completion? Obviously there is more to usability than simply following the letter of a guideline. It's also necessary to follow its spirit, and company websites are still not sufficiently forthcoming: they often fail to use plain language that simply says what they're doing and gets to the point quickly.

Nielsen, Jakob. Alertbox (2003). Design>Web Design>Journalism>Usability

Putting A/B Testing in Its Place

Measuring the live impact of design changes on key business metrics is valuable, but often creates a focus on short-term improvements. This near-term view neglects bigger issues that only qualitative studies can find.

Nielsen, Jakob. Alertbox (2005). Articles>Web Design>Assessment

Quantitative Studies: How Many Users to Test?

We can define usability in terms of quality metrics, such as learning time, efficiency of use, memorability, user errors, and subjective satisfaction. Sadly, few projects collect such metrics because doing so is expensive: it requires four times as many users as simple user testing. Many users are required because of the substantial individual differences in user performance. When you measure people, you'll always get some who are really fast and some who are really slow. Given this, you need to average these measures across a fairly large number of observations to smooth over the variability.

Nielsen, Jakob. Alertbox (2006). Articles>Usability>Testing>Methods

R.I.P. WYSIWYG

Macintosh-style interaction design has reached its limits. A new paradigm, called results-oriented UI, might well be the way to empower users in the future.

Nielsen, Jakob. Alertbox (2005). Articles>User Interface>Human Computer Interaction

The Real Costs of "Free" Search Site Services

When owners of the big money tree use their excess profits to subsidize unrelated services, independent software vendors (ISVs) are driven out of business. Although such behavior got Microsoft into trouble in the past, ISVs shouldn't expect relief from search-engine-sponsored software from the U.S. Justice Department or the European Commission any time soon. These government agencies are notoriously behind the times, as proven by the fact that they attacked Microsoft only after it had won the browser war by cutting off Netscape's air supply.

Nielsen, Jakob. Alertbox (2006). Articles>Web Design>Search

Recruiting Test Participants for Usability Studies

Easy test user recruiting is crucial to an effective usability process. The average per-user cost is $171, but varies greatly depending on location and the targeted profession.

Nielsen, Jakob. Alertbox (2003). Articles>Usability

Reduce Bounce Rates: Fight for the Second Click

Different traffic sources imply different reasons for why visitors might immediately leave your site. Design to keep deep-link followers engaged through additional pageviews.

Nielsen, Jakob. Alertbox (2008). Design>Web Design>Usability>User Centered Design

Reduce Redundancy: Decrease Duplicated Design Decisions

User interface complexity increases when a single feature or hypertext link is presented in multiple ways. Users rarely understand duplicates as such, and often waste time repeating efforts or visiting the same page twice by mistake.

Nielsen, Jakob. Alertbox (2002). Design>User Interface>Collaboration

Regulatory Usability

Regulatory requirements often reduce the usability of Web content and end up damaging the exact goals they were trying to promote. Regulatory agencies usually base their rules and regulations on design criteria that are appropriate for paper-based documents but which don't work in the online medium.

Nielsen, Jakob. Alertbox (2000). Articles>Usability>Writing

Relationships on the Web

What will be the key to web-site survival in 1996? My bet is the establishment of relationships between the site and its users.

Nielsen, Jakob. Alertbox (1996). Design>Web Design>Community Building

Remote Control Anarchy

The six remote controls required for a simple home theater illustrate the problems caused by complexity and inconsistency in user interfaces.

Nielsen, Jakob. Alertbox (2004). Design>User Interface>Usability

Report From a 1994 Web Usability Study

This reports summarizes results of a usability study of several Web sites I conducted in the beginning of December 1994. Users were observed as they browsed the Web sites of Hewlett-Packard, IBM, Microsoft, Sun Microsystems, and Time Warner. The report has only been very lightly edited and thus represents my thinking about Web usability in 1994. In fact, the report was originally written for distribution to the rest of the Web team on paper since we were not heavy intranet users in 1994, despite having designed SunWeb a few months before this study.

Nielsen, Jakob. Alertbox (1994). Articles>Web Design>Usability

Response Times: The Three Important Limits

The basic advice regarding response times has been about the same for almost thirty years: 0.1 seconds, 1.0 seconds and 10 seconds.

Nielsen, Jakob. Alertbox (1994). Articles>Usability

Retaining Key Staff: What High-Tech Employees Say Versus What They Do

Getting and keeping good people is one of the greatest problems facing Internet companies. Even with the latest slump in the industry, we still face negative unemployment among people who understand the Internet. We have all seen the clueless ads looking for Java programmers with ten years' experience. Indeed, those ads started appearing back when not even James Gosling would have qualified. The real issue is not so much number of years as it is amount of insight and skills which translate into real experience. In the human interface field experience is largely driven by the number and diversity of user tests somebody has observed. Some usability professionals run a test per week; others may only get exposure to real people a few times per year.

Nielsen, Jakob. Alertbox (2001). Careers>Management

Return on Investment for Usability

Ease of use doesn't come from wishful thinking. It comes from conducting systematic usability engineering activities throughout the project lifecycle. This is real work and costs real money, though not as much as some people fear. You can conduct simple forms of user testing in a few days and gain extensive insights into both user behavior and recommended design improvements. Still, before most people will commit to a lifecycle approach to usability, they want to know what it will cost and what they will gain. We set out to find the answers.

Nielsen, Jakob. Alertbox (2003). Articles>Usability>Management

Return on Investment for Usability

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.

Nielsen, Jakob. Usability News (2003). Articles>Usability>Assessment

Reviving Advanced Hypertext

To manage a huge, worldwide information space, users need proven features like fat links, typed links, integrated search and browsing, overview maps, big-screen designs, and physical hypertext.

Nielsen, Jakob. Alertbox (2004). Articles>Web Design>Hypertext

Right-Justified Navigation Menus Impede Scannability

Users scan lists by moving their eyes rapidly down the left edge. Menu items that are right-aligned make scanning more difficult.

Nielsen, Jakob. Alertbox (2008). Articles>Web Design>Usability>Typography

The Rise of the Subsite

Web users need structure to make sense of the many and varied information spaces they navigate. The fundamental nature of the Web does not support any structure beyond the individual page which is the only recognized unit of information. For information spaces that cannot easily be hierarchically structured, the subsite can be used as a helpful additional structuring mechanism. Subsites can also be used in hierarchical information spaces to give particular prominence to a certain level of the hierarchy which is used as the subsite designator.

Nielsen, Jakob. Alertbox (1996). Design>Web Design>Usability>User Centered Design

Risks of Quantitative Studies

There are two main types of user research: quantitative (statistics) and qualitative (insights). Quant has quaint advantages, but qualitative delivers the best results for the least money. Furthermore, quantitative studies are often too narrow to be useful and are sometimes directly misleading.

Nielsen, Jakob. Alertbox (2004). Articles>Usability>Methods