Compared with a similar 2001 study, a new study of journalists as they looked for information on corporate websites' PR areas showed significant usability improvements: a 5% higher success rate and 15% increased guidelines compliance.
Development projects should spend 10% of their budget on usability. Following a usability redesign, websites increase desired metrics by 135% on average; intranets improve slightly less.
To save costs, some companies are outsourcing Web projects to countries with cheap labor. Unfortunately, these countries lack strong usability traditions and their developers have limited access -- if any -- to good usability data from the target users.
About half of the users now access the Internet from more than one location. Despite the implications of this for service design, many systems assume that users remain bound to a single computer.
Usability is a well-paying profession these days: A usability specialist in California with five years' experience had an estimated cash compensation of $90,118 a year in 2001, not counting stock options or other benefits. This number is at the high end of our detailed survey, which analyzes salary data from 1,078 professionals who attended the User Experience World Tour from November 2000 to April 2001. The survey respondents represent a response rate of 40% of the 2,682 conference attendees. Because we surveyed people at a high-end professional conference, the data probably reflects the salaries of good user experience professionals.
Advertising-supported websites will soon be a thing of the past. As I predicted a year ago, sites began charging for services in 2001. Although most sites are still not handling payments right, two innovative European projects hold much hope for 2002.
Software bugs and system crashes result in huge productivity losses and undermine users' ability to form good models of how computers work. Website designers can help improve user confidence by prioritizing quality and robustness over features and the latest technology.
Web services will free individual site designers from having to program and design common features. This will decrease business costs, increase usability, and let designers focus on and improve features that are unique to each site.
A survey of 1,078 user experience professionals finds that usability specialists make more money than designers and writers in the same field. In all three areas, salaries are highest in the U.S., lower in Canada and Asia, and much lower in Europe and Australia.
Never listen to what people say in response to a survey: asking high-tech employees what will keep them in their jobs provides very different answers than the factors that actually drive retention.
Opponents of the usability movement claim that it focuses on stupid users and that most users can easily overcome complexity. In reality, even smart users prefer pursuing their own goals to navigating idiosyncratic designs. As Web use grows, the price of ignoring usability will only increase.
Offering free services on websites is not a sustainable business model, nor is advertising, which doesn't work on the Web. Most Internet companies are now pursuing an enterprise strategy to make money, but they'll soon begin turning to individual customers for revenue as well.
Microsoft's .NET strategy is a brilliant counter-move that reduces the Justice Department's proposed penalty to a victory in the previous war. Integrating the user experience at the network level opens the door to new and exciting services while diminishing the importance of traditional isolated websites.
Instead of rushing new websites to a premature launch that will scare away your best customers forever, it is better to run a few fast usability studies in the beginning of the project.
Instead of maximizing the profits from an individual visit it is better to encourage loyal users and establish non-monetary differentiation and frequent-user programs.
Instead of making users wander indefinitely and frustratingly around a site looking for something that's just not there, tell them if it lacks a frequently requested feature
Increased user impatience will make
new websites fail unless they are twice as usable as existing sites.
Revolutionary Internet services must explain why users should care
in no more than two lines.
4% of users upgraded to a new version each month in 1998. By 2008, upgrade speeds were only 2%/month. It takes 3 years for 3/4 of users to embrace a new version.
Unique visitors are a poor measure of user loyalty. Also, future users are late adopters and not likely to all patronize current popular sites. So beware of over-valuing Internet stock.
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.
