Novice vs. Expert Users

Web usability has traditionally been focused on increasing ease of learning for the novice users. This makes great sense and should continue to be the main goal. Remember Jakob's Law of the Internet user experience: users spend most of their time on other sites than your own. Thus, users rarely learn enough about any given site to become true expert users.

Nielsen, Jakob. Alertbox (2000). Articles>Web Design>Usability

Official Winter Olympics Site: Not Even Bronze

An early tweaking raised the Salt Lake City website to 70% compliance with homepage usability guidelines. Inside the site, however, task support falls far below medal contention.

Nielsen, Jakob. Alertbox (2002). Design>Web Design>Usability

Offshore Usability

To save costs, some companies are outsourcing Web projects to countries with cheap labor. Unfortunately, these countries lack strong usability traditions and their developers have limited access -- if any -- to good usability data from the target users.

Nielsen, Jakob. Alertbox (2002). Articles>Usability>Outsourcing>Offshoring

OK-Cancel or Cancel-OK?

Should the OK button come before or after the Cancel button? Following platform conventions is more important than suboptimizing an individual dialog box.

Nielsen, Jakob. Alertbox (2008). Articles>Human Computer Interaction>User Interface>Usability

One Billion Internet Users

The Internet is growing at an annualized rate of 18% and now has one billion users. A second billion users will follow in the next ten years, bringing a dramatic change in worldwide usability needs.

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

One Hundred Million Websites

The early Web's explosive growth rate has slowed, but even the mature Web is still expanding and recently crossed the 100 million websites mark.

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

Open New Windows for PDF and other Non-Web Documents

When using PC-native file formats such as PDF or spreadsheets, users feel like they're interacting with a PC application. Because users are no longer browsing a website, they shouldn't be given a browser UI.

Nielsen, Jakob. Alertbox (2005). Articles>Web Design>Usability>Adobe Acrobat

Outliers and Luck in User Performance

6% of task attempts are extremely slow and constitute outliers in measured user performance. These sad incidents are caused by bad luck that designers can -- and should -- eradicate.

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

Paper Prototyping: Getting User Data Before You Code

With a paper prototype, you can user test early design ideas at an extremely low cost. Doing so lets you fix usability problems before you waste money implementing something that doesn't work.

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

Participation Inequality: Encouraging More Users to Contribute

In most online communities, 90% of users are lurkers who never contribute, 9% of users contribute a little, and 1% of users account for almost all the action. Your website's design undoubtedly influences participation inequality for better or worse. Being aware of the problem is the first step to alleviating it, and finding ways to broaden participation will become even more important as the Web's social networking services continue to grow.

Nielsen, Jakob. Alertbox (2006). Design>Web Design>Community Building

Passive Voice Is Redeemed For Web Headings

Active voice is best for most Web content, but using passive voice can let you front-load important keywords in headings, blurbs, and lead sentences. This enhances scannability and thus SEO effectiveness.

Nielsen, Jakob. Alertbox (2007). Articles>Web Design>Writing>Grammar

PDF: Unfit for Human Consumption

Users get lost inside PDF files, which are typically big, linear text blobs that are optimized for print and unpleasant to read and navigate online. PDF is good for printing, but that's it. Don't use it for online presentation.

Nielsen, Jakob. Alertbox (2003). Articles>Web Design>Usability>Adobe Acrobat

PDF: Unfit for Human Consumption

Users get lost inside PDF files, which are typically big, linear text blobs that are optimized for print and unpleasant to read and navigate online. PDF is good for printing, but that's it. Don't use it for online presentation.

Nielsen, Jakob. Alertbox (2003). Articles>Usability>Web Design>Adobe Acrobat

Personalization is Over-Rated

Web personalization is much over-rated and mainly used as a poor excuse for not designing a navigable website. The real way to get individualized interaction between a user and a website is to present the user with a variety of options and let the user choose what is of interest to that individual at that specific time. If the information space is designed well, then this choice is easy, and the user achieves optimal information through the use of natural intelligence rather than artificial intelligence. In other words, I am the one entity on the world to know exactly what I need right now. Thus, I can tailor the information I see and the information I skip so that it suits my needs perfectly.

Nielsen, Jakob. Alertbox (2001). Design>Web Design>Personalization>Usability

Poor Code Quality Contaminates Users' Conceptual Models

Software bugs and system crashes result in huge productivity losses and undermine users' ability to form good models of how computers work. Website designers can help improve user confidence by prioritizing quality and robustness over features and the latest technology.

Nielsen, Jakob. Alertbox (2001). Articles>Usability>User Interface>Software

The Power of Defaults

Search engine users click the results listings' top entry much more often than can be explained by relevancy ratings. Once again, people tend to stick to the defaults.

Nielsen, Jakob. Alertbox (2005). Design>Web Design>Usability>Search

Preparing for the Holiday Shopping Season

Reduce the bounce rate for organic landing pages, collect data to manage PPC for maximum ROI, and take five other steps to maximize your site's holiday sales potential before it's too late.

Nielsen, Jakob. Alertbox (2004). Design>Web Design>Usability>E Commerce

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