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.
Rewriting pages from a popular website improved measured usability by 159%. Word count was cut to 54%; long pages were split into hypertext; Web writing guidelines were applied.
The Web will become more international (but will overseas sites or American sites benefit?), sites will outsource services, content will adapt to usage patterns in real time.
Most findings about Web usability from 1994 continue to hold. Scrolling pages and imagemaps are less of a problem; users now demand comprehensive sites.
Four years of progress in Web browsers have given us more fancy presentation but almost no improvements in helping users navigate the Web and getting the information they need.
Applets are divided into two categories: functionality applets that need to open in a new window and content applets that should stay on the browser page.
Users don't read Web pages, they scan. Highlighting and concise writing improved measured usability 47-58%. Marketese imposed a cognitive burden on users and was disliked.
Your intranet should have different visual style and navigational architecture from your website since users, tasks, and information all differ. Intranets should be managed diversity; neither totalitarian nor anarchies.
The Web is a cognitive medium; the user owns the navigation and won't wait for emotional brand messages. Product sites and classifieds have value, but most ads get puny click-through and few
customers.
