Treating the Web as a strategic industry driver will lead to a patent bonanza where companies sew up entire ways of doing business. Distribution networks are discussed as one example of such a change
Global use of websites leads to international usability problems and coping with the levels of Internet maturity in different countries; many of which are gaining rapidly
Loyal users who return to a site many times are more valuable than 'site tourists' who simply check out a few pages. Loyalty is built by fresh content, update notifications, and customization and other ways of rewarding repeat visits
Web project management impacts usability significantly. Mistakes include having site structure mirror your org chart, outsourcing to multiple agencies, generic links from offline collateral, and lack of strategic thinking.
Common conclusions about Yahoo, Wall St. Journal, Disney, The WELL, and Amazon.com are wrong: generalizing Web trends from popular examples featured in the press is dangerous; spectacular case studies are often outliers.
How much better is it to be a *big* website? Large sites can use their own hyperlinks to drive even more traffic, but small sites generate more value through focused content and microtransactions. (Updated 2005.)
You need to hire someone to design your Web site. What should you look for before signing on the dotted line? Let's look at a few different types of consultants.
Using Discount Usability Engineering to Penetrate the Intimidation Barrier,' paper by Jakob Nielsen on simpler and cheaper ways to a better UI;with examples of fast usability projects.
Roadmaps cover future work and vision, but this can be done at different scopes, from everything related to the product to only the UX activities and priorities, possibly narrowed to a sub-specialty of UX.
A roadmap documents upcoming and future priorities for your user experience. The process starts with gathering goals, proceeds through the creation and sharing of the UX roadmap, and never ends, since the last step is to update.
Research with people who are learning Design Thinking shows that they progress in a nonlinear manner through 4 phases of increasing competency and confidence. Understanding these phases helps both learners and educators/managers.
UX staff can be organized in two ways: centralized or decentralized (or a hybrid). The teams can also report into different parts of the bigger organization. There is currently no single best practice for these team-structure questions.
Do AI products have good user experience? Only partly, and to get better, we need to focus AI more on human needs than on what's technically possible. But AI can also help UX professionals do their job better, which will improve usability more widely.
Redesigning a user interface can be done in many smaller incremental releases, or as one big complete redo. Big change is risky, but necessary in 3 cases.
Create an aspirational view of the experience users will have with your product, service, or organization in the future. This isn't fluff, but will guide a unified design strategy. Here are 5 steps to creating a UX vision.
The total customer journey and user experience quality will benefit from considering market research and user research to be highly related, and to integrate the two, instead of keeping different kinds of research teams from collaborating.
At the Virtual UX Conference, Jakob Nielsen answered audience questions on how UX changes with the downturn in the world economy and what new industries will benefit from UX.
How has the field of user experience changed over the last 30 years, how will it continue to change, and what can we expect for the uptake of technology innovations?
Human-centered design has 4 principles: understand the problem, the people, and the system, and do iterative design. But what if you don't have time to do all 4 steps?
Is it possible to do all user-experience work 100% remotely? At the first Virtual UX Conference, Jakob Nielsen answered this question in an audience Q&A session.
If a website or company is big and famous, should you copy their design for your own site? Likely not, because good UX depends on context, and your situation could be quite different than a world-famous company's circumstances.
We asked a group of UX professionals what they think will happen to the field over the next 5 years. Will design get better? Worse? (Nobody thought this.) Or something completely new?
Any time you release a new user interface design, you'll get complaints. This doesn't mean that the new design is worse than the old design; it simply means that it's new, and users don't like to learn different ways of doing things. Tips for reducing change aversion (you can't avoid it completely).
Collaboratively create a UX roadmap in a workshop setting by guiding participants through activities that familiarize them with the project goals, context, and inputs and that identify key roadmap themes and priorities.
A survey of people in user experience and product management shows that these professionals disagree on who should be responsible for many key tasks, like doing discoveries and early design.
UX professionals often work hard to convince stakeholders to support UX research and design efforts. Recognizing who your key stakeholders are and how they impact your work is the first step to building fruitful stakeholder relationships.
A design system is a set of standards to manage design at scale by reducing redundancy while creating a shared language and visual consistency across pages and channels.
To create a roadmap, inputs are gathered and clustered into themes, then prioritized and visualized. This article covers 6 key steps to roadmapping that can be applied to any scope or industry.
Roadmaps that include UX work can have 3 scopes: product, field, and specialty. Understanding these and their benefits can focus your process, effort, and goals.
Benchmark your UX by first determining appropriate metrics and a study methodology. Then track these metrics across different releases of your product by running studies that follow the same established methodology.
Journey maps are useful for building common ground in an organization, but practitioners often have questions and misunderstandings about their scope and how to create them.
Focus on UX goals to drive analytics measurement plans, rather than tracking superficial metrics. Identify the core goal of a design to meaningfully measure it.
