Strategy Articles & Videos

  • Retaining Key Staff: What High-Tech Employees Say versus What They Do

    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.

  • Are Users Stupid?

    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.

  • World Economic Forum Trip Report

    Jakob Nielsen's trip report for the 2001 World Economic Forum. World Economic Forum (Davos, Switzerland, 2001).

  • The Web in 2001: Paying Customers

    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.

  • The Network is the User Experience: Microsoft's .NET Announcement

    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.

  • The Mud-Throwing Theory of Usability

    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.

  • Profit Maximization vs. User Loyalty

    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.

  • Saying No: How to Handle Missing Features

    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

  • Usability as Barrier to Entry

    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.

  • Stuck With Old Browsers for at Least 3 Years

    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.

  • Give Me Your Billions: Internet Stock Valuation and Future User Characteristics

    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.

  • Personalization is Over-Rated

    Personalized Web interfaces are over-hyped: users don't want to be stereotyped and it is too much work for them to enter detailed preference settings.

  • Should You Outsource Web Design?

    Web design is a core competency for the network economy and should not be outsourced, even though certain specific components may be outsourced.

  • Micro-Containers: An Example of Strategic Web Thinking

    Treating the Web as a strategic industry driver will lead to a patent bonanza where companies sew up entire ways of doing business. Distribution networks are discussed as one example of such a change

  • Global Web: Driving the International Network Economy

    Global use of websites leads to international usability problems and coping with the levels of Internet maturity in different countries; many of which are gaining rapidly

  • Loyalty on the Web

    Loyal users who return to a site many times are more valuable than 'site tourists' who simply check out a few pages. Loyalty is built by fresh content, update notifications, and customization and other ways of rewarding repeat visits

  • Top 10 Mistakes of Web Management

    Web project management impacts usability significantly. Mistakes include having site structure mirror your org chart, outsourcing to multiple agencies, generic links from offline collateral, and lack of strategic thinking.

  • The Fallacy of Atypical Web Examples

    Common conclusions about Yahoo, Wall St. Journal, Disney, The WELL, and Amazon.com are wrong: generalizing Web trends from popular examples featured in the press is dangerous; spectacular case studies are often outliers.

  • Do Websites Have Increasing Returns?

    How much better is it to be a *big* website? Large sites can use their own hyperlinks to drive even more traffic, but small sites generate more value through focused content and microtransactions. (Updated 2005.)

  • Relationships on the Web

    Welcome to 1996. What will be the key to web-site survival this year? My bet is the establishment of relationships between the site and its users.