Someone please shoot me now. Or please tell me that I didn't really just read a paper where Jakob Nielsen was doing a cost benefit projection (generalizing to the world!!) on the basis of differences observed in various groups of people carved from a subsets of employees from a total of fourteen companies!

As someone with a serious background in statistics, to read Nielsen's estimates without any confidence intervals on these figures is revolting... And should we assume that the 14 companies are a random selection of the companies that have intranets? And that there was a high co-operation rate among the companies he asked to participate?

I'm not from Missouri, but I still need to see more before I take this on faith.

Posted by: Frank on November 10, 2002 04:17 PM

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Spanking Jakob Nielsen (WebWord) -- "The purpose of this article is to critically review Jakob Nielsen's article, Intranet Usability: The Trillion-Dollar Question. In summary, Jakob Nielsen makes some fantastic claims about intranet usability that must be weighed against other business needs and constraints. For example, there might be better ways to spend money than on usability, not all usability improvements are created equal, and it can be hard to apply the changes dictated by a usability study. The criticisms can be applied to many other usability articles."

This is a start. I wish I was a better writer so I could make more of an impact.

Posted by: John S. Rhodes on November 11, 2002 12:52 AM

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