Partitioning the Web into N unlinked or otherwise isolated parts will reduce its overall value by a
factor of N. A proprietary AOL instant messaging system will be worth only 4% of the full potential, and 1/3 will be completely lost.
Major websites violate on average 16% of the top ten mistakes in Web design; huge corporate sites have many more design mistakes than the most popular sites.
9 of 10 mistakes in Web design identified in May 1996 continued to cause severe usability problems years later and should be avoided in modern websites.
Users continue to type and guess URLs and domain names, so Web usability can be improved by better URLs. In the long term this machine-level addressing scheme must be hidden.
A survey of 1,780 people who have bought
something on the Web found that convenience and ease of use are the
main reasons to shop on the Web. Non-buying visits (product research) are important to shoppers.
Mobile access becomes 3rd Killer App for the Internet, Web standards rebound, customer service is automated, e-commerce patents are issued, and the Web has its own Y2K problems
Yahoo has great usability and huge traffic because it embraces the characteristics of the Internet medium:
minimalist design and many structured links. But Yahoo may not scale to keep up with the growth of the net.
Most corporate sites are so bad that Web usability problems cost a large company millions of dollars per year. On average, users fail when they try to accomplish tasks on the Web.
Most findings about Web usability from 1994 continue to hold. Scrolling pages and imagemaps are less of a problem; users now demand comprehensive sites.
CSS promotes site consistency and improved usability if linked (not embedded), centrally designed (not by page authors), and actively evangelized with example-rich style manuals. Respect user preferences.
The telephone is a better metaphor than television for thinking about the Web and its potential: the Web is a 1-to-1, narrowcast, low bandwidth medium that is user-driven and where everybody can publish content.
Comparing the nature of the Web as a medium when accessed through television sets and when accessed through computers, concluding that the level of user engagement is a main differentiator
Users' reactions to early design ideas for the Sun Microsystems' 1997 Web site demonstrate that users are becoming more web sophisticated, and prefer straightfoward access to content.