#11913
Salary Survey: User Experience Professionals Earn Good Money
A survey of 1,078 user experience professionals finds that usability specialists make more money than designers and writers in the same field. In all three areas, salaries are highest in the U.S., lower in Canada and Asia, and much lower in Europe and Australia.
Nielsen, Jakob. Alertbox (2001). Careers>Usability>Salaries>User Experience
#27478
Salary Trends for Usability Professionals
Over the last several years, entry-level salaries have dropped, while pay for experienced usability staff has been more stable.
Nielsen, Jakob. Alertbox (2006). Careers>Usability>Salaries
#28050
Screen Resolution and Page Layout
Optimize Web pages for 1024x768, but use a liquid layout that stretches well for any resolution, from 800x600 to 1280x1024.
Nielsen, Jakob. Alertbox (2006). Design>Web Design>Usability
#26641
Despite posing well-known risks, websites continue to feature poorly designed scrollbars. Among the ongoing problems that result are frustrated users, accessibility challenges, and missed content.
Nielsen, Jakob. Alertbox (2005). Articles>Web Design>Human Computer Interaction>Usability
#23919
This article addresses common aspects of search, including scoped, Boolean and advanced searches.
Nielsen, Jakob. Alertbox (1997). Design>Web Design>Usability>Search
#28052
Search Engines as Leeches on the Web
Search engines extract too much of the Web's value, leaving too little for the websites that actually create the content. Liberation from search dependency is a strategic imperative for both websites and software vendors.
Nielsen, Jakob. Alertbox (2006). Articles>Web Design>Search>Search Engine Optimization
#26623
Search Engines as Leeches on the Web
Search engines extract too much of the Web's value, leaving too little for the websites that actually create the content. Liberation from search dependency is a strategic imperative for both websites and software vendors.
Nielsen, Jakob. Alertbox (2006). Articles>Web Design>Search
#11859
Search is the user's lifeline for mastering complex websites. The best designs offer a simple search box on the home page and play down advanced search and scoping.
Nielsen, Jakob. Alertbox (2001). Articles>Web Design>Usability
#11868
A big lie of computer security is that security improves as password complexity increases. In reality, users simply write down difficult passwords, leaving the system vulnerable. Security is better increased by designing for how people actually behave.
Nielsen, Jakob. Alertbox (2000). Articles>Web Design>Usability>Security
#20858
Traditionally, human-factors specialists have had a rather severe attitude toward human performance with computers: their goal was maximum throughput, often measured in transactions per minute. This attitude was justified when computers were mainly work-related; in some cases it still proves wise. For example, a usability improvement that shaves one second off the time it takes a directory-assistance operator to search a database for a telephone number saves several million dollars per year in the U.S. alone. This performance-obsessed approach to usability led many early user interface experts to condemn the popular term 'user friendly' with the argument that users didn't need "friendly" computers, they needed efficient designs that let them complete their tasks faster.
Nielsen, Jakob. Alertbox (1996). Articles>User Interface>Usability
#20821
Severity Ratings for Usability Problems
Severity ratings can be used to allocate the most resources to fix the most serious problems and can also provide a rough estimate of the need for additional usability efforts. If the severity ratings indicate that several disastrous usability problems remain in an interface, it will probably be unadvisable to release it. But one might decide to go ahead with the release of a system with several usability problems if they are all judged as being cosmetic in nature.
Nielsen, Jakob. Alertbox (1994). Design>Usability>Methods
#28975
Should Designers and Developers Do Usability?
Having a specialized usability person is best, but smaller design teams can still benefit when designers do their own user testing and other usability work.
Nielsen, Jakob. Alertbox (2007). Design>Web Design>Professionalism>Usability
#27168
Show Prices for Common Scenarios
B2B sites often have overly complex pricing structures or can't show prices at all. To help prospects with early research, list representative cases and their prices.
Nielsen, Jakob. Alertbox (2006). Design>Web Design>Usability>E Commerce
#13353
One of the oldest hypertext usability principles is to visualize the structure of the information space to help users understand where they can go. On today's Web, site maps are a common approach to facilitating navigation. Unfortunately, they are often not very successful at it. We conducted a usability study of site maps on 10 websites, and our main conclusion is that users are reluctant to use site maps and sometimes have problems even finding them. Considering that site maps could be particularly useful to people who are lost, it is not good news that they are often hard to find.
Nielsen, Jakob. Alertbox (2002). Articles>Usability>Web Design>Sitemaps
#25084
Make new or follow-up information easily accessible from the location of the original information or transaction.
Nielsen, Jakob. Alertbox (2004). Articles>Usability
#28091
Intranet Information Architecture (IA)
In analyzing 56 intranets, we found many common top-level categories, labels, and navigation designs, but ultimately, the diversity was too great to recommend a single IA.
Nielsen, Jakob. Alertbox (2007). Articles>Information Design>Web Design>Intranets
#26636
The Slow Tail: Time Lag Between Visiting and Buying
Users often convert to buyers long after their initial visit to a website. A full 5% of orders occur more than four weeks after users click on search engine ads.
Nielsen, Jakob. Alertbox (2005). Articles>Web Design>E Commerce>Usability
#10153
One of the mobile Internet's greatest benefits may well come from devices that rarely move at all. Once cellular Internet connectivity becomes ubiquitous and cheap, many devices will connect to the net without wires. Take it out of the box and feed it power, and it is connected. Mobile Internet access will free us from having to connect appliances to telephone jacks and will make smart devices much easier to install. In fact, they may not need a user interface at all, as exemplified by the Japanese i-pot.
Nielsen, Jakob and Marie Tahir. Alertbox (2001). Articles>Usability>Wireless Web
#21325
Statistics for Traffic Referred by Search Engines and Navigation Directories to Useit
The following table shows the number of visits that have been recorded in the Useit server logs as coming from search engines and directory services (so-called 'portals') in a one-month period (March) in each of the years from 1998 through 2003.
Nielsen, Jakob. Alertbox (2003). Design>Web Design>Statistics>Log Analysis
#11862
Success Rate: The Simplest Usability Metric
In addition to being expensive, collecting usability metrics interferes with the goal of gathering qualitative insights to drive design decisions. As a compromise, you can measure users' ability to complete tasks. Success rates are easy to understand and represent usability's bottom line.
Nielsen, Jakob. Alertbox (2001). Articles>Usability>Assessment
#13556
Supporting Multiple-Location Users
About half of the users now access the Internet from more than one location. Despite the implications of this for service design, many systems assume that users remain bound to a single computer.
Nielsen, Jakob. Alertbox (2002). Design>Web Design>Usability
#21020
Tagline Blues: What's the Site About?
A website's tagline must explain what the company does and what makes it unique among competitors. Two questions can help you assess your own tagline: Would it work just as well for competitors? Would any company ever claim the opposite?
Nielsen, Jakob. Alertbox (2001). Articles>Web Design>Writing
#28051
Talking-Head Video Is Boring Online
Eyetracking data show that users are easily distracted when watching video on websites, especially when the video shows a talking head and is optimized for broadcast rather than online viewing.
Nielsen, Jakob. Alertbox (2006). Design>Web Design>User Centered Design>Video
#26625
Talking-Head Video Is Boring Online
Eyetracking data show that users are easily distracted when watching video on websites, especially when the video shows a talking head and is optimized for broadcast rather than online viewing.
Nielsen, Jakob. Alertbox (2005). Articles>Multimedia>Video>Eye Tracking
#22588
Targeted Email Newsletters Show Continued Strength
E-newsletters that are informative, convenient, and timely are often preferred over other media. However, a new study found that only 11% of newsletters were read thoroughly, so layout and content scannability are paramount.
Nielsen, Jakob. Alertbox (2004). Articles>Usability>Mailing Lists>Email
