Resource Shelf (Free subscription) | 10/21/2009
From the Article: Usability guru Jakob Nielsen and his team at the Nielsen Norman Group recently released a research report on the design and usability of social messaging and RSS feeds. In the outline of the findings Nielsen posted on his Web site, he bluntly states, “we have a long way to go to improve the [...]
Econsultancy blog (Free subscription) | 10/15/2009
... to present six hours of brand new material onhow to write cost-effective customer care copy at Jakob Nielsen’s Usability Week. This is a credit-crunch friendly course, expounding the virtues of investing in those often overlooked bits of text on websites and email that can actually show enormous ROI if given a bit of attention. So we’re talking transactional and order...
My take on the world (Free subscription) | 10/11/2009
According to Jakob Nielsen there are five rules that journalists should obey when it comes to headline writing, and in particular, headline writing for the web. They are: 1. Keep it short. Don't use too many words because people read quickly on the internet and want headlines that are short and easy to read. Sky Sports' headline here is a good short story that will make people stop and...
AdPulp (Free subscription) | yesterday
... be our accidentally thinking text-only ads are part of the information we're looking for. But as Jakob Nielsen of the Nielsen Norman Group explains it, the nature of the Web itself might be coming into play as well. Unlike television, which is a passive medium, the Web is all about taking action -- searching, clicking, registering, buying, downloading. It might be the case...
Time (Free subscription) | yesterday
... our attention.The findings are presented in a chapter of a new book, Eyetracking Web Usability, by Jakob Nielsen and Kara Pernice of the consultancy Nielsen Norman Group. Don't let the bland title fool you: what Nielsen and Pernice have done is track the eye movements of hundreds of people as they navigate websites, looking up advice on how to deal with heartburn, shopping...
constellations: recent responses (Free subscription) | 11/05/2009
Nielsen s approach is to test usability using one or preferably more real users Unlike the site s designers and other company employees real users don t know what they re supposed to do and often won t take the time to find out One of the main reasons companies need systematic usability studies is to make explicit the fact that outside customers don t find your design as important as you do...
Lone Gunman (Free subscription) | 11/03/2009
In 1996, while discussing the importance of the inverted pyramid style of writing, usability expert Jakob Nielsen wrote that “users don’t scroll”. From there the idea of The Fold as an integral part of web design came into being. But, as Nielsen himself has said, the Internet has evolved and “as users got more experience with [...]
Search Insider (Free subscription) | 10/29/2009
A few years ago, I interviewed usability expert Jakob Nielsen about where search might go in the future. He shared an interesting insight:"I think there is a tendency now for a lot of not very useful results to be dredged up that happen to be very popular, like Wikipedia and various blogs. They're not going to be very useful or substantial to people who are trying to solve problems."...
Sparkplug 9 >> bizhack (Free subscription) | 11/02/2009
... F-Shaped Pattern For Reading Web Content This is a classic eye-tracking study by a classic guru: Jakob Nielsen. If you don’t know who he is and you’re in web design, read his books or get out of the biz. Anyway, this particular eye tracking study reveals that users read content in a “F” pattern. Here are my major takeaways from the study: People read the headline and the first paragraph...
Boiler Wadding (Free subscription) | 10/26/2009
... presentations, especially Stuart Harrison 's Easy Mapping demo , and Paul Canning's reworking of Jakob Nielsen's still-relevant Discount Usability ideas (well, 20 years after the original was published, only one person in the room had done any user testing of any sort!) The chance to get past the GIS departments and speak to the webmasters, PR people, and a whole slew of innovative...
Design Bump - Popular news (Free subscription) | 10/25/2009
In 1998, usability expert Rolf Molich (co-inventor with Jakob Nielsen of the heuristic evaluation method) gave nine teams three weeks to evaluate the webmail application www.hotmail.com . The experiment was part of his series of Comparative Usability Evaluations (CUEs), through which he began to identify a set of standards and best practices for usability tests. In each segment of the...
Design Bump - Popular news (Free subscription) | 10/25/2009
In 1998, usability expert Rolf Molich (co-inventor with Jakob Nielsen of the heuristic evaluation method) gave nine teams three weeks to evaluate the webmail application www.hotmail.com . The experiment was part of his series of Comparative Usability Evaluations (CUEs), through which he began to identify a set of standards and best practices for usability tests. In each segment of the...
Micro Persuasion (Free subscription) | 10/13/2009
Jakob Nielsen studies the usability of RSS feeds and social network streams for professionals and finds that ... "Users like the simplicity of messages that pass into oblivion over time, but were frequently frustrated by unscannable writing, overly frequent postings, and their inability to locate companies on social networks." Some of this is easily fixable, however ... "As...
Common Sense Journalism (Free subscription) | 10/13/2009
It would be worth your while to spend some time with Jakob Nielsen's latest "Alertbox" usability column. In it he details research done to determine how people interact with corporate postings in feeds and on things like Twitter and Facebook. Some interesting stuff: Businesses that post too often crowd out the user's real friends and become unpopular (and thus risk being unfollowed)....
For Immediate Release Podcast (Free subscription) | 10/15/2009
Shel's at BlogWorld Expo; follow-ups on Pepsi iPhone app and employers blocking social media access; Dan York reports; Media Monitoring Minute; News That Fits: Twitter routes around media injunction, results of PRWeek's social media survey, HSBC launches customer opinion website, Jakob Nielsen looks at social media usability; listener comments; the music; and more.
