useit.com: Jakob Nielsen's Website

Permanent Content

Alertbox

Jakob's bi-weekly column on Web usability

DVD Menu Design: The Failures of Web Design Recreated Yet Again (December 9)
Designers of DVDs have failed to profit from the lessons of previous media: Computer software, Internet web pages, and even WAP phones. As a result, the DVD menu structure is getting more and more baroque, less and less usable, less pleasurable, less effective. It is time to take DVD design as seriously as we do web design. The field needs some discipline some attention to the User Experience, and some standardization of control and display formats.

10 Best Intranet Designs of 2001 (November 25)
Beyond Accessibility: Treating Users with Disabilities as People (November 11)
Poor Code Quality Contaminates Users' Conceptual Models (October 28)

All Alertbox columns from 1995 to 2001

Reports

Intranet Design Annual: 10 best intranets of 2001 New since Nov. 23
Beyond ALT text: designing for users with disabilities New since Oct. 25
PR sections of corporate sites - optimizing usability for journalists
E-Commerce usability (207 design guidelines)
User testing: 230 tips to improve

More reports and usability guidelines

Web Usability Books

Homepage Usability: 50 Websites Deconstructed

Designing Web Usability: The Practice of Simplicity

"the most important book on web publishing yet to appear" (SlashDot)

"should [...] be read by any executive with responsibility for managing online operations" (Business Week)

Products and Services

Nielsen Norman Group offers usability reviews, keynote speeches, workshops and seminars, usability testing (international and domestic)

Conference

User Experience 2001/2002 conference
> Sydney, Australia: mid-2002

About Jakob Nielsen

Biography and photos
Public appearances
Papers and essays by Jakob Nielsen

Jakob's Picks of Other Stuff

Recommended books about Web design and usability
Hotlist of recommended other sites

About This Site

Why this site has almost no graphics
Portal traffic referral statistics
Copyright and reprint rules

News

Macys.com has increased its conversion rate by 150% after a redesign that mainly focused on improving the usability of the site's search feature. The magnitude of the sales increase confirms the potential for improvement on current websites: most sites continue to lose most of their prospects because they are too difficult to use.

The fact that improved search accounted for most of the increase in sales does not surprise me. We know from our research last year that website users only succeed in half of their initial queries.

Macy's search improvements are partly due to a software solution called IntuiFind, which costs $250,000 and addresses the verbal disagreement phenomenon (the fact that many users will use different query terms than the vocabulary used by the webpage author). Smaller sites can get the same benefits from a manual analysis of their query logs and by following more of the 29 usability guidelines for search design: the average site only complies with a third of these guidelines, so it is no wonder that users have trouble searching on websites.

Archive of news items

Recent Interviews

FORTUNE: Thinkers: The Top Ten Minds in Small Business (Dec.)
Federal Computer Week: Dot-gov by design (Dec. 10)
USA Today: Dashing through the store is easy online (Dec. 5)
IT Director: Jakob Nielsen on usability and intranets (Dec. 3)
CIO Magazine: A discussion with Jakob Nielsen and Vincent Flanders (Dec. 1)
Revolution: Two cents' worth: Site usability must guide web designers (Nov. 21)
Computer Weekly: Cut intranet costs by factoring in usability (Nov. 15)
New Media Knowledge: Jakob Nielsen on Homepage Usability (Nov. 13)
The Age (Australia): Winnowing grain from the Internet chaff (Nov. 13)
Network of the World: Homepage usability (includes 3 minute video clip) (Nov. 9)
New Media Age: Independence is the killer app (Nov. 9)
The Independent (London): Microsoft deal fails to ensure public has choice (Nov. 8)
Darwin Magazine: What intranet metrics should companies pay attention to? (Nov. 1)
Washington Post: You'd Think They'd Learn: Bad Design Kills Web Sites (Oct. 25)
Federal Computer Week: Web usability obstacles abound (Oct. 22)
The Register: Jakob Nielsen on how Apple blew it, how Linux will blow it, and the Next Big Thing (Oct. 16)
WebReference: Jakob Nielsen and Marie Tahir on Homepage Usability (Oct. 11)
Internet Magazine: Web is 'evil, lazy and stupid' (Oct. 8)
The Guardian: Usability Guru (Aug. 16)
Credit Suisse Bulletin: The man with the mouse is king (July 31)
Internet Magazine: The future's bright! (What will the Internet be like in 20 years?) (July 1)
New York Times: Corporate Sites Seem to Skimp on the Facts

Full list of interviews

Mail: Dr. Jakob Nielsen, Nielsen Norman Group, 48921 Warm Springs Blvd., Fremont, CA 94539, USA
Contact: nielsen@nngroup.com; Luice Hwang, hwang@nngroup.com, tel. (408) 720-8808
PR agency: Darcy Provo, Antenna Group, darcy@antennagroup.com, tel. (415) 977-1920