The Alertbox:
Current Issues in Web Usability
Bi-weekly column by Dr. Jakob Nielsen,
principal, Nielsen Norman Group
Current Column
Email Alerts
Privacy policy: Email addresses are never sold or given out to anybody.
This is an announcements-only list with very low volume: one short message every two weeks.
Previous Columns
Highlighted text indicates the most popular columns according to the log file statistics.
- Official Winter Olympics Site: Not Even Bronze (February 17, 2002)
- Avoiding Commodity Status (February 3, 2002)
- Field Studies Done Right: Fast and Observational (January 20, 2002)
- Site Map Usability (January 6, 2002)
- User Payments: Predictions for 2001 Revisited (December 23, 2001)
- DVD Menu Design: The Failures of Web Design Recreated Yet Again (December 9, 2001)
- 10 Best Intranet Designs of 2001 (November 25, 2001)
- Beyond Accessibility: Treating Users with Disabilities as People (November 11, 2001)
- Poor Code Quality Contaminates Users' Conceptual Models (October 28, 2001)
- The End of Homemade Websites (October 14, 2001)
- Deferred Hypertext: The Virtues of Delayed Gratification (September 30, 2001)
- Mobile Devices Will Soon Be Useful (September 16, 2001)
- Designing Web Ads Using Click-Through Data (September 2, 2001)
- Did Poor Usability Kill E-Commerce? (August 19, 2001)
- First Rule of Usability? Don't Listen to Users (August 5, 2001)
- Tagline Blues: What's the Site About? (July 22, 2001)
- Helping Users Find Physical Locations (July 8, 2001)
- Error Message Guidelines (June 24, 2001)
- Avoid PDF for On-Screen Reading (June 10, 2001)
- Salary Survey: User Experience Professionals Earn Good Money (May 27, 2001)
- Search: Visible and Simple (May 13, 2001)
- Japanese Products Map the Mobile Road Ahead (April 29, 2001)
- Collect, Compare, Choose: The 3Cs of Critical Web Use (April 15, 2001)
- Corporate Websites Get a 'D' in PR (April 1, 2001)
- Stationary Mobility (March 18, 2001)
- Retaining Key Staff: What High-Tech Employees Say versus What They Do (March 4, 2001)
- Success Rate: The Simplest Usability Metric (February 18, 2001)
- Are Users Stupid? (February 4, 2001)
- Usability Metrics (January 21, 2001)
- Mobile Phones: Europe's Next Minitel? (January 7, 2001)
- The Web in 2001: Paying Customers (December 24, 2000)
- WAP Field Study Findings (December 10, 2000)
- Security & Human Factors (November 26, 2000)
- Drop-Down Menus: Use Sparingly (November 12, 2000)
- Flash: 99% Bad (October 29, 2000)
- Request Marketing (October 15, 2000)
- Content Creation for Average People (October 1, 2000)
- New Devices Augur Decent Mobile User Experience (September 17, 2000)
- Regulatory usability (September 3, 2000)
- Mailing list usability (August 20, 2000)
- Why Doc Searls Doesn't Sell Any Books (August 6, 2000)
- End of Web design (July 23, 2000)
- WAP backlash (July 9, 2000)
- The Network is the User Experience: Microsoft's .NET announcement (June 25, 2000)
- Customers as designers (June 11, 2000)
- Alertbox Five years retrospective (May 28, 2000)
- Eyetracking Study of Web Readers (May 14, 2000)
- Finally progress in Internet client design (April 30, 2000)
- Reset and Cancel buttons (April 16, 2000)
- The mud-throwing theory of usability (April 2, 2000)
- Why you only need to test with 5 users (March 19, 2000)
- Profit maximization vs. user loyalty (March 5, 2000)
- Does the Internet make us lonely? (February 20, 2000)
- Novice vs. expert users (February 6, 2000)
- Saying No: How to handle missing features (January 23, 2000)
- Is navigation useful? (January 9, 2000)
- Predictions for the Web in 2000
(December 26, 1999)
- Voodoo usability (December 12, 1999)
- Usability as barrier to entry
(November 28, 1999)
- When bad design
becomes the standard (November 14, 1999)
- Graceful
degradation of scalable Internet services (October 31, 1999)
- Prioritize: Good content bubbles to the top (October 17, 1999)
- Ten good deeds in web design (October
3, 1999)
- User-supportive
Internet architecture (September 19, 1999)
- Reputation
managers are finally happening (September 5, 1999)
- Do interface standards stifle design
creativity? (August 22, 1999)
- Video and
streaming media (August 8, 1999)
- Metcalfe's Law in reverse (July 25, 1999)
- Web research: Believe the data (includes sidebar on affiliates
programs) (July 11, 1999)
- Content integration (June 27, 1999)
- Disabled accessibility: the pragmatic
approach (June 13, 1999)
- The top ten new mistakes of web
design (May 30, 1999)
- Who commits the "Top Ten Mistakes" in web
design? (May 16, 1999)
- "Top Ten Mistakes" revisited three years later (May 2, 1999)
- Stuck with old
browsers until 2003 (April 18, 1999)
- Intranet
portals: the corporate information infrastructure (April 4, 1999)
- URL as UI (March 21, 1999)
- Trust or Bust:
Communicating trustworthiness in web design (March 7, 1999)
- Details in study methodology can make results irrelevant
(February 21, 1999)
- Why people shop on the Web (February 7, 1999)
- The difference between print design
and Web design (January 24, 1999)
- Give me your billions: Internet stock valuation
and future user characteristics (January 17, 1999)
- Collecting feedback from users of a Web archive (reader
challenge) (January 10, 1999)
- Predictions for the Web in 1999 (December 27, 1998)
- Bill Gates' shopping
list to build the Internet Desktop (December 13, 1998)
- The value of keeping
pages alive forever (November 29, 1998)
- 2D is better than 3D (November 15, 1998)
- Why Yahoo is
good (but may get worse) (November 1, 1998)
- Failure of corporate websites (October
18, 1998)
- Personalization is over-rated (October 4, 1998)
- Does Internet = Web? (September 20, 1998)
- Microcontent: writing headlines, page titles, and
email subject lines (September 6, 1998)
- The end of legacy media (newspapers,
magazines, books, TV networks) (August 23, 1998)
- The Web usage paradox: Why do people
use something this bad? (August 9, 1998)
- Electronic books - a bad idea (July 26, 1998)
- Impact of data quality on the Web user experience (July 12, 1998)
- Should you outsource Web design? (June
28, 1998)
- Fighting linkrot (June 14, 1998)
- Micro-containers and new distribution networks are an example of strategic thinking and the coming Web patent bonanza (May 31, 1998)
- Using "greeked" layouts to test page templates (May 17, 1998)
- Cost of user testing a website (May 3, 1998)
- Global Web: Driving the international network economy (April 19, 1998)
- Nielsen's Law of Internet bandwidth: it grows by 50% per year (April 5, 1998)
- The increasing conservatism of Web users (March 22, 1998)
- Better than Reality: A fundamental Internet
principle (March 8, 1998)
- Tracking the growth of a site (February 22, 1998)
- The Reputation Manager (February 8, 1998)
- The case for micro-payments (January 25, 1998)
- Using link titles to help users predict where they are going (January 11, 1998)
- Predictions for the Web in 1998 (January 1, 1998)
- Changes in Web usability since 1994 (December 1, 1997)
- Book review: Esther Dyson's Release 2.0 gives strategic vision for the network economy (November 15, 1997)
- The Tyranny of the Page: continued lack of decent navigation support in Version 4 browsers (November 1, 1997)
- Functionality applets vs. content applets: when to step outside the Web page (October 15, 1997)
- How people read on the Web (October 1, 1997)
- Difference between intranet and Internet design (September 15, 1997)
- Why advertising doesn't work on the Web (except for classified ads which are better online than in print) (September 1, 1997)
- Community is dead; long live mega-collaboration (August 15, 1997)
- Loyalty on the Web; how to use "frequent-browser points" (August 1, 1997)
- Search usability (July 15, 1997)
- Effective use of style sheets (July 1, 1997)
- Top ten mistakes of Web management (June 15, 1997)
- The fallacy of atypical examples like Yahoo, Wall St. Journal, Disney, and Amazon (June 1, 1997)
- The telephone is the best metaphor for the Web (May 15, 1997)
- The difference between Web design and GUI design (May 1, 1997)
- Do websites have increasing returns? (how important is it to be a big site?) (April 15, 1997)
- Tech support tales show that novice users have immense problems using the Internet (April 1, 1997)
- Be succinct: how to write for the Web (March 15, 1997)
- The need for download speed (March 1, 1997)
- TV vs. computers as Web media (February 15, 1997)
- WebTV usability review (February 1, 1997)
- Trends for the Web in 1997 (January 1997)
- Why frames suck most of the time (December 1996)
- Marginalia of Web design: page titles, colored text, and thumbnail images (November 1996)
- Web access for
disabled users (October 1996)
- The rise of the
sub-site (September 1996)
- International usability (August 1996)
- A review of
Slate Magazine (July 1996;
comments on their redesign added August 16, 1996)
- How to
write inverted pyramids in cyberspace (June 1996)
- Top ten mistakes of Web design (May 1996)
- The
Web backlash of 1996 (April 1996)
- The
Internet Desktop (March 1996)
- In defense of
paper (February 1996)
- Trends for website survival in 1996:
Relationships on the Web (January 1996)
- Guidelines for
multimedia on the Web (December 1995)
- How
much bandwidth is enough? (November 1995)
- Who should you
hire to design your website? (October 1995)
- Trying to kill a
meme for the growth of the Web (September 1995)
- Directions for
online publishing and the
five generations of online services (August 1995)
- The future of Web browsers and their
navigation support features (July 1995)
- Warning against pitfalls in
Java and HotJava user interfaces (June 1995)
History of the Alertbox Column
- 1995: 50,000 page views on an annualized basis (actually 30,000 page views in a 7-month period)
- 1996: 189,000 page views
- 1997: 576,000 page views (all of Useit.com received 826,000 page views)
- 1998: 2.0 million page views (all of Useit.com received 3.0 Mpv)
- 1999: 3.1 million page
views (all of Useit.com received 4.7 Mpv)
- 2000: 5.8 Mpv for Alertbox and 9.0 Mpv for Useit
- 2001: 6.1 Mpv for Alertbox and 10 Mpv for Useit
In addition to the traffic numbers listed here, the Alertbox received about
2.3 million page downloads from PointCast (mainly in 1998). I have not counted
these pages as being traffic since I doubt that very many of the "pushed"
pages were actually seen by users.