Spotlighted Links

Please note that some of these links may have suffered linkrot. They did work as of the date when they were recommended, but the Web is a highly fluid medium.

March 3, 2002
Case Studies Wanted: Measurable Impact of Design Changes

I am writing a report about metrics that quantify the impact of design changes. If you have data you are willing to share, please email Shuli Gilutz at shuli@nngroup.com

We need:
> screenshot of the "before" design
> screenshot of "after"
> why the change was made
> the before vs. after numbers

Any type of user interface is of interest: websites, intranets, mobile devices, traditional software, consumer electronics, etc. Also, the design changes may refer to a complete redesign of the total UI or it could just be a single feature, screen, or design element that was changed.

Measures of interest include anything that measures how the use changed. Could be an improvement, but negative results would be just as interesting. Sample metrics:
> success rate (users' ability to perform tasks)
> conversion rate
> average "sales basket" for e-commerce
> training time to learn a feature or system
> sign-up rate for newsletters or other desired action
> time on task; other productivity measures
> number of times a feature was used
> calls to help desks or tech support
> learning or comprehension scores
> other usage or impact metrics, including new ones you have invented yourself

I can keep your contribution totally anonymous and purely report your numbers as statistics that don't include any indication of what company or design they refer to. Of course, we would prefer to give you full credit if you are willing to be named. Also, if you send us screenshots, please indicate whether we should treat the screens as confidential info or whether you will allow us to publish the images. All contributors will obviously get a free copy of the report.

Please send contributions to Shuli Gilutz (shuli@nngroup.com) who is the member of my team responsible for collecting the data. She can also answer any questions you may have about this project.

February 25, 2002
Interns / Research Assistants Wanted

I am looking for a few of the world's best graduate students in usability/HCI to assist with research projects. Positions are available both for part-time work during the school year and for full-time work during the summer.

Requirements:
> top 2% of the population in brainpower
> extensive experience running user tests
> great writer

Location: anywhere in the world. Projects will mainly be conducted through phone and the Internet.

We also want students who are native speakers of another language than English and interested in running a study in their home country. For such candidates, we can accept less than perfection in written English, even though reports must still be written in English.

Please send resume and writing samples to Luice Hwang: hwang@nngroup.com

February 19, 2002
Nielsen Norman Group is conducting our annual intranet design competition for 2002. Submission deadline: March 20, 2002. Think you have a good intranet design? Enter it for the award! Last year's winners got substantial publicity and recognition from being honored in the 2001 Design Annual.
February 17, 2002
Interview with the head of wsj.com about the recent redesign of Wall Street Journal's website. Notable elements: And, Neil, don't worry about the emails: users always complain about redesigns since nobody likes change. (If most people complain about a single design element, then that's another matter, of course.)
February 13, 2002
The guidelines for improving usability for users with disabilities are now available as an audiobook (CD or tape, as you prefer). Great while commuting or exercising, or if you are looking for a human voice alternative to listening to a screen reader.
February 11, 2002
Dave "DaveNet" Winer relates his experience with linkrot on various websites, prompted by a massive death of links into the San Jose Mercury News. Dave finds the New York Times to have the most robust archives. I have also noted that USA Today, The Guardian, News.com and WIRED keep their old URLs alive. Linkrot impacts the way we write for the Web: I am more motivated to link to a site if I have reasons to believe that the link will continue to work in a few years (let alone a few days or months, which is the lifetime of links on some sites -- forget about linking to them). Since incoming links are the main way to improve ranking in search engines, sites that don't preserve old URLs will not only lose the traffic from the linking sites, they will also place poorly in search engines (one of the main tools of Internet marketing as far as attracting new customers is concerned). For more on linkrot, see my articles from 1998: Fighting Linkrot and Web Pages Must Live Forever (both articles have been live at the same URLs since 1998, so you can feel safe in linking to them for background on this topic - these articles will be there in 2008 as well).
February 5, 2002
Datagloves are back, after having been absent since Nintendo discontinued the PowerGlove in 1988. Much promise for games and for certain vertical applications that involve 3D. Hopefully, the easy availability of cheap gloves will also spark research in gestural interfaces. I don't think special gloves (or VR helmets) will be used in mainstream everyday interactions, but gestures can be supported by video monitoring of the user in the future.
February 1, 2002
WebReference reviews the guidelines for e-commerce usability.
January 30, 2002
The documentary film startup.com is now available on DVD. The film is a great way to relive the memories of the heady times in 1999 and 2000. Just like being there, complete with meetings on Sand Hill Road and all-nighters. I kept saying, “yes, I remember that” when I saw the film. (The link points to Amazon's product page for the film which contains a great example of why user-generated content can be weak: a user who complains about the plot and production values - not surprising since it's a documentary filmed while the company was growing and crashing. Doesn't have a plot or glamorous actors; this is real.)
January 22, 2002
Brewster Kahle's comments on his Wayback Machine include two interesting observations: For many years, we have known that comprehensive services are a win on the Internet, and even though I have mainly thought of this as a content problem (how to write about all aspects of a given problem), Kahle's points are an interesting enabler of certain types of comprehensiveness. Now we just need a way for the comprehensive services to collect money from users and a lot new businesses can bloom.
January 16, 2002
Yahoo announced its quarterly result for Q4 2001. Even though the bottom-line result was a loss, the news is very positive from a fundamental perspective. True customer revenues were $53 million during Q4 (that is, payments received from the actual users of the site). Advertising revenues still accounted for the majority of Yahoo's earnings, but they have started to wean themselves. User-derived revenues accounted for 28% of earnings in Q4 2001 compared to only 13% in 2000. This is a very healthy trend. It is also worth noting that Yahoo is one of the few exceptions to the rule that websites cannot earn significant advertising revenues. First, Yahoo has a significant search and navigation business, and search sites are one of the only web genres where advertising makes sense (after all, you go to a search engine with the one and only goal of finding another site, so if something reasonable is being advertised, you are quite likely to click on it). Second, Yahoo can in fact make it up in volume, even if advertising revenues are only 0.2 cents per page view ($2 CPM), which is my estimate based on their published results.
January 3, 2002
One more company announces its version of the standard survey of websites' email responsiveness: only half of e-commerce sites answer customer service emails within the recommended 24 hours. Even though it is true that speedy email replies are good, these constant surveys miss the two much more important point: I know why we see articles about "how fast companies reply to their email" all the time: it's a metric that is very easy to collect. In contrast, the two more meaningful metrics listed above require more advanced studies that cannot be assigned to an intern. Fine, as far as press releases are concerned, but when it comes to managing websites, it would be dangerous to rely on the metrics that are the easiest to collect as opposed to deeper ones that are more important.

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