Posting Date: November 07, 2002

WebWord Comment -- Warm your hands with this hot air! I'm just kidding, of course. I'm sure it will be an interesting an informative session. Talk with a guru!

Reader Comments...

Here are some extracts from the talk:

Another analogy is between editor and writer. Usability edits the design to make it better.

By the way, I am presenting all the results from the Flash study in LOndon on MOnday - hint, hint... www.nngroup.com/events

In a study we just did of Flash designs, we came across one that said "rollover the thumbnails to do X". Many users didn't understand this jargon.

We recently completed a big studyu of a bunch of corporate intranets (info inside companies) and one of the biggest usability problems came from cases where big documents like the employee manual were available purely as PDF files.

Ultimately we need an integrated user experience, which I am calling the "Internet Desktop" that handles both applications (whether PC-based or Internet-based like the Flash apps we studied recently) as well as email, Web browsing, and potential new apps.

As I just mentioned above, we just concluded a big study of 46 different Flash applications and there are a lot of new and different usability guidelines to direct the development of these applications.

Sorry. Wild hair is my trademark.
Also, as long as I have it, I will grow it...

In our recent study of intranet usability, we estimate that the cost of wasted employee productivity is on the order of Ł10M per year for a company with ten thousand employees if they have poor usability of the intranet.

By the way, the question of platform diversity is much worse in the email medium, as we discovered in a recent study of newsletters.

Now that you say so, I do have an entire report on how to do sitemaps (www.nngroup.com/reports/sitemaps ).

Sorry to keep harping on our recent research project, but I have about 200 pages on this topic (www.nngroup.com/reports/flash).

Posted by: Mac on November 9, 2002 09:44 AM

This was a frustrating read. He ignores questions such as whether the clunky, unattractive (and often hard to navigate) design of his website has ever been put to the test, and gibbers on about his own work (going so far as to say "hint hint" conspiratorially), and saying things like:

We collect a big set of current designs (representative of what companies are currently doing on the net) and observe average users as they interact with these designs. This results in a *long* list of problems where people have difficulties. We then classify the individual observations and generate the list of usability guidelines that can be used as design recommendations in new projects.

This is scary. "average users" - what does that mean? "representative of what companies are currently doing on the net" - how does he know?

It went on in this fashion... most comments dealt with either seminars, studies that could be purchased from the group, or reinforcement of principles and methods that went out with the dinosaurs. Ugh.

Posted by: Lydia on November 11, 2002 03:53 PM

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