When Things Go Well
The 1% of websites that don't suck can be made even better by strengthening exceptional user performance, eliminating miscues, and targeting company-wide use and unmet needs. But what if you've already run many rounds of qualitative user testing ... [... more]
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OK-Cancel or Cancel-OK?
Should the OK button come before or after the Cancel button? Following platform conventions is more important than suboptimizing an individual dialog box. We get countless questions about small details in UI design that Both are reasonable ... [... more]
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Site Map Usability, 1st study
See also the separate report on Intranet Information Architecture (IA) based on analysis of 56 companies' internal IA, including their intranet sitemaps. Full-day tutorial on navigation design at the User Experience 2008 conference in Chicago and ... [... more]
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Writing Style for Print vs. Web
Linear vs. non-linear. Author-driven vs. reader-driven. Storytelling vs. ruthless pursuit of actionable content. Anecdotal examples vs. comprehensive data. Sentences vs. fragments. I've spent many columns explicating the differences between the ... [... more]
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Intranet Portals Get Streamlined
An analysis of intranet portals found slimmer information architectures and a renewed emphasis on fresh content and useful applications. Past findings, including those on role-based personalization, were confirmed. It's been almost three years ... [... more]
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The History of Hypertext
This is chapter 3 from Jakob Nielsen's book Multimedia and Hypertext: The Internet and Beyond, Morgan Kaufmann Publishers, 1995. (For full literature references, please see the bibliography in the book.) Hypertext has a surprisingly rich history ... [... more]
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Two Research Studies
New user testing of site maps shows that they are still useful as a secondary navigation aide, and that they're much easier to use than they were during our research 7 years ago. One of the oldest hypertext usability principles is to offer a To ... [... more]
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Nielsen Norman Group: The First Decade
Started by Don Norman and Jakob Nielsen in 1998, the company is now 10 years old and has a long list of accomplishments and a much bigger team. Started in 1998, the company is now 10 years old and has a long list of accomplishments. Nielsen ... [... more]
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Intranet Portals: A Tool Metaphor for Corporate Information
My 343-page report on the usability of intranet portals with 210 screenshots, more case studies, and analysis is available for download. (Link points to the third edition, not the original report described in this article.) Internet portals are ... [... more]
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Weekly User Testing: TiVo Did It, You Can, Too
TiVo ran 12 user tests in 12 weeks while designing its new website. As TiVo's experience shows, frequent and regular testing keeps the design usability focused. I've always recommended fast and cheap user testing, with as many iterations as you ... [... more]
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Original Top Ten Mistakes in Web Design
This article has attracted a million page views since it was written in 1996, but most sites *still* commit these basic usability bloopers. Splitting a page into frames is very confusing for users since frames break the fundamental user model of ... [... more]
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Reduce Bounce Rates: Fight for the Second Click
Different traffic sources imply different reasons for why visitors might immediately leave your site. Design to keep deep-link followers engaged through additional pageviews. For many sites, the deep-dip increase has an unfortunate consequence: ... [... more]
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