Jakob Nielsen, Ph.D., is a retired principal and co-founder (with Dr. Donald A. Norman) of the Nielsen Norman Group. Jakob established the "discount usability engineering" movement for fast and cheap improvements of user interfaces and invented the heuristic evaluation method.
Newsletter usability has increased since our last study, but the competition for users' attention has also grown with the ever-increasing glut of information.
User testing shows that business-to-business websites have substantially lower usability than mainstream consumer sites. If they want to convert more prospects into leads, B2B sites should follow more guidelines and make it easier for prospects to research their offerings.
When doing website tasks, the slowest 25% of users take 2.4 times as long as the fastest 25% of users. This difference is much higher than for other types of computer use; only programming shows a greater disparity.
An organization that reaches the 'managed UX' stage still has far to go to reach UX nirvana. Attaining these higher maturity levels requires many years of effort.
As their UX approach matures, organizations typically progress through the same sequence of stages, from initial hostility to widespread reliance on user research.
B2B sites often have overly complex pricing structures or can't show prices at all. To help prospects with early research, list representative cases and their prices.
The fads and big deals that get the press coverage are not important for running a workhorse website. To serve your customers, it's far better to emphasize simplicity and quality than to chase buzzwords.
