http://www.useit.com/alertbox/ Current Issues in Web Usability Jakob Nielsen 2010-01-25T14:58:55+09:00 http://www.useit.com/alertbox/experienced-users.html It's more difficult to conduct usability studies with experienced users than with novices, and the improvements are usually smaller. Still, improving expert performance is often worth the effort. Jakob Nielsen 2010-01-25T00:00:00+00:00 http://www.useit.com/alertbox/intranet_design.html Intranet design is maturing and reaping the rewards of continuous quality improvement for traditional features, while embracing new trends like mobile access, emergency preparedness, and user/employee-contributed content. Jakob Nielsen 2010-01-04T00:00:00+00:00 http://www.useit.com/alertbox/anybody-usability.html Usability is like cooking: everybody needs the results, anybody can do it reasonably well with a bit of training, and yet it takes a master to produce a gourmet outcome. Jakob Nielsen 2009-12-21T00:00:00+00:00 http://www.useit.com/alertbox/short-term-memory.html The human brain is not optimized for the abstract thinking and data memorization that websites often demand. Many usability guidelines are dictated by cognitive limitations. Jakob Nielsen 2009-12-07T00:00:00+00:00 http://www.useit.com/alertbox/media-velocity.html The granularity of user decisions is much finer on the Web, which is dominated by the instant gratification of the user's needs in any given instant. Content must cater to this rapid pace. Jakob Nielsen 2009-11-24T00:00:00+00:00 http://www.useit.com/alertbox/agile-user-experience.html Agile projects aren't yet fully user-driven, but new research shows that developers are actually more bullish on key user experience issues than UX people themselves. Jakob Nielsen 2009-11-04T00:00:00+00:00 http://www.useit.com/alertbox/streams-feeds.html 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. Jakob Nielsen 2009-10-12T00:00:00+00:00 http://www.useit.com/alertbox/timeframes.html From 0.1 seconds to 10 years or more, user interface design has many different timeframes, and each has its own particular usability issues. Jakob Nielsen 2009-10-05T00:00:00+00:00 http://www.useit.com/alertbox/familiar-design.html Users hate change, so it's usually best to stay with a familiar design and evolve it gradually. In the long run, however, incrementalism eventually destroys cohesiveness, calling for a new UI architecture. Jakob Nielsen 2009-09-21T00:00:00+00:00 http://www.useit.com/alertbox/discount-usability.html Simple user testing with 5 participants, paper prototyping, and heuristic evaluation offer a cheap, fast, and early focus on usability, as well as many rounds of iterative design. Jakob Nielsen 2009-09-14T00:00:00+00:00