Alertbox

http://www.useit.com/alertbox/

Current Issue

April 16, 2007: Show Numbers as Numerals When Writing for Online Readers

Previous Columns

Read these first: Usability 101 and Top ten mistakes of Web design.

Breadcrumb Navigation Increasingly Useful (April 10, 2007)
Does User Annoyance Matter? (March 26, 2007)
10 High-Profit Redesign Priorities (March 12, 2007)
Life-Long Computer Skills (February 26, 2007)
Do Government Agencies and Non-Profits Get ROI From Usability? (February 12, 2007)
Wishlists, Gift Certificates, and Gift Giving in E-Commerce (January 29, 2007)
10 Best Intranets of 2007 (January 15, 2007)
Fast, Cheap, and Good Usability Methods: Yes, You Can Have It All (January 2, 2007)
Usability in the Movies -- Top 10 Bloopers (December 18, 2006)
Progressive Disclosure (December 4, 2006)
Digital Divide: The Three Stages (November 20, 2006)
100 Million Websites (November 6, 2006)
Productivity and Screen Size (October 23, 2006)
Participation Inequality: Encouraging More Users to Contribute (October 9, 2006)
6 Ways to Fix a Confused Information Architecture (September 25, 2006)
User Testing is Not Entertainment (September 11, 2006)
Use Old Words When Writing for Findability (August 28, 2006)
Data Visualization of Web Stats: Logarithmic Charts and the Drooping Tail (August 14, 2006)
Screen Resolution and Page Layout (July 31, 2006)
Traffic Log Patterns (July 10, 2006)
Quantitative Studies: How Many Users to Test? (June 26, 2006)
Email Newsletters: Surviving Inbox Congestion (June 12, 2006)
B2B Usability (June 1, 2006)
Variability in User Performance (May 15, 2006)
Salary Trends for Usability Professionals (May 8, 2006)
Corporate Usability Maturity: Stages 5-8 (May 1, 2006)
Corporate Usability Maturity: Stages 1-4 (April 24, 2006)
F-Shaped Pattern For Reading Web Content (April 17, 2006)
Show Prices for Common Scenarios (April 10, 2006)
Hyped Web Stories Are Irrelevant (April 3, 2006)
Growing a Business Website: Fix the Basics First (March 20, 2006)
Outliers and Luck in User Performance (March 6, 2006)
Avoid Within-Page Links (February 21, 2006)
Users Interleave Sites and Genres (February 6, 2006)
Ten Best Intranets of 2006 (January 23, 2006)
Search Engines as Leeches on the Web (January 9, 2006) - with sidebar on the cost of ownership of "free" software
One Billion Internet Users (December 19, 2005)
Talking-Head Video Is Boring Online (December 5, 2005)
Accessibility Is Not Enough (November 21, 2005)
Enterprise Usability (November 7, 2005)
Incompetent Email Marketing = Lost Future Opportunities (October 31, 2005)
Intranet Portals Get Streamlined (October 24, 2005)
Weblog Usability: The Top Ten Design Mistakes (October 17, 2005)
R.I.P. WYSIWYG (October 10, 2005)
Top Ten Web Design Mistakes of 2005 (October 3, 2005)
The Power of Default Values (September 26, 2005)
Forms vs. Applications (September 19, 2005)
Time Budgets for Usability Sessions (September 12, 2005)
The Slow Tail: Time Lag Between Visiting and Buying (September 6, 2005)
Open New Windows for PDF and other Non-Web Documents (August 29, 2005)
Putting A/B Testing in Its Place (August 15, 2005)
International Sites: Minimum Requirements (August 8, 2005)
Amazon: No Longer the Role Model for E-Commerce Design (July 25, 2005)
Scrolling and Scrollbars (July 11, 2005)
Usability: Empiricism or Ideology? (June 27, 2005)
Archiving Usability Reports (June 13, 2005)
Alertbox: Ten Years (June 1, 2005)
Canonical Intranet Homepage (May 23, 2005)
Mental Models For Search Are Getting Firmer (May 9, 2005)
Formal Usability Reports vs. Quick Findings (April 25, 2005)
Medical Usability: How to Kill Patients Through Bad Design (April 11, 2005)
Evangelizing Usability: Change Your Strategy at the Halfway Point (March 28, 2005)
Low-Literacy Users (March 14, 2005)
Best Intranets of 2005 (February 28, 2005)
Authentic Behavior in User Testing (February 14, 2005)
Teenagers on the Web (January 31, 2005)
Durability of Usability Guidelines (January 17, 2005)
Reviving Advanced Hypertext (January 3, 2005)
Situate Follow-Ups in Context (December 20, 2004)
Most Hated Advertising Techniques (December 6, 2004)
Undoing the Industrial Revolution (November 22, 2004)
Acting on User Research (November 8, 2004)
User Education Is Not the Answer to Security Problems (October 25, 2004)
Newsletter Usability: Can a Professional Publisher Do Better? (October 11, 2004)
Checkboxes vs. Radio Buttons (September 27, 2004)
Bush vs. Kerry: Email Newsletters Rated (September 20, 2004)
The Need for Web Design Standards (September 13, 2004)
Preparing for the Holiday Shopping Season (September 6, 2004)
Mastery, Mystery, and Misery: The Ideologies of Web Design (August 30, 2004)
Informational Articles Must Ask For the Order (August 23, 2004)
When Search Engines Become Answer Engines (August 16, 2004)
Deceivingly Strong Information Scent Costs Sales (August 2, 2004)
Card Sorting: How Many Users to Test (July 19, 2004)
Beyond the Buy Button in E-Commerce (July 6, 2004)
Ten Best Government Intranets (June 21, 2004)
Remote Control Anarchy (June 7, 2004)
Thirty Years With Computers (May 24, 2004)
Guidelines for Visualizing Links (May 10, 2004)
Change the Color of Visited Links (May 3, 2004)
B2B Advocacy Kits: Help Your Fans Convince Their Bosses (April 26, 2004)
Mobile Phones are Annoying (April 12, 2004)
Productivity in the Service Economy (March 29, 2004)
Why Consumer Products Have Inferior User Experience (March 15, 2004)
Risks of Quantitative Studies (March 1, 2004)
Targeted Email Newsletters Show Continued Strength (February 17, 2004)
Keep Online Surveys Short (February 2, 2004)
How Big is the Difference Between Websites? (January 19, 2004)
Cleaning Up Information Pollution (January 5, 2004)
Top Ten Web Design Mistakes of 2003 (December 22, 2003)
Automated Customer Service Email and Transactional Messages (December 8, 2003)
Two Sigma: Usability and Six Sigma Quality Assurance (November 24, 2003)
Ten Most Violated Homepage Design Guidelines (November 10, 2003)
"About Us" -- Presenting Information About an Organization on Its Website (October 27, 2003)
Ten Best Intranets of 2003 (October 13, 2003)
Alertbox #200 (September 29, 2003)
Time to Make Tech Work (September 15, 2003)
Misconceptions About Usability (September 8, 2003)
Usability 101: Introduction to Usability (August 25, 2003)
Mobile Devices: One Generation From Useful (August 18, 2003)
Information Pollution (August 11, 2003)
Gateway Pages Prevent PDF Shock (July 28, 2003)
PDF: Unfit for Human Consumption (July 14, 2003)
Information Foraging: Why Google Makes People Leave Your Site Faster (June 30, 2003)
Diversity is Power for Specialized Sites (June 16, 2003)
Usability for $200 (June 2, 2003)
Convincing Clients to Pay for Usability (May 19, 2003)
Making Web Advertisements Work (May 5, 2003)
Will Plain-Text Ads Continue to Rule? (April 28, 2003)
Low-End Media for User Empowerment (April 21, 2003)
Paper Prototyping: Getting User Data Before You Code (April 14, 2003)
Alternative Interfaces for Accessibility (April 7, 2003)
Intranet Portals: A Tool Metaphor for Corporate Information (March 31, 2003)
Do Productivity Increases Generate Economic Gains? (March 17, 2003)
PR on Websites: Increasing Usability (March 10, 2003)
Persuasive Design: New Captology Book (March 3, 2003)
Employee Directory Search: Resolving Conflicting Usability Guidelines (February 24, 2003)
Investor Relations Website Design (February 18, 2003)
Homepage Real Estate Allocation (February 10, 2003)
Voice Interfaces: Assessing the Potential (January 27, 2003)
Recruiting Test Participants for Usability Studies (January 20, 2003)
Return on Investment for Usability (January 7, 2003)
Top Ten Web-Design Mistakes of 2002 (December 23, 2002)
In the Future, We'll All Be Harry Potter (December 9, 2002)
Flash and Web-Based Applications (November 25, 2002)
Intranet Usability: The Trillion-Dollar Question (November 11, 2002)
Celebrating Holidays and Special Occasions on Websites (October 28, 2002)
Making Flash Usable for Users With Disabilities (October 14, 2002)
Email Newsletters Pick Up Where Websites Leave Off (September 30, 2002)
Offshore Usability (September 16, 2002)
10 Best Intranets of 2002 (September 3, 2002)
Let Users Control Font Size (August 19, 2002)
Making the Physical Environment Interactive (August 5, 2002)
Becoming a Usability Professional (July 22, 2002)
User Empowerment and the Fun Factor (July 7, 2002)
Improving Usability Guideline Compliance (June 24, 2002)
Reduce Redundancy: Decrease Duplicated Design Decisions (June 9, 2002)
Supporting Multiple-Location Users (May 26, 2002)
Top Ten Guidelines for Homepage Usability (May 12, 2002)
Usability for Senior Citizens (April 28, 2002)
Kids' Corner: Website Usability for Children (April 14, 2002)
Top Research Laboratories in Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) (March 31, 2002)
Protecting the User's Mailbox (March 17, 2002)
Deep Linking is Good Linking (March 3, 2002)
Official Winter Olympics Site: Not Even Bronze (February 17, 2002)
Avoiding Commodity Status (February 3, 2002)
Field Studies Done Right: Fast and Observational (January 20, 2002)
Site Map Usability (January 6, 2002)
User Payments: Predictions for 2001 Revisited (December 23, 2001)
DVD Menu Design: The Failures of Web Design Recreated Yet Again (December 9, 2001)
10 Best Intranet Designs of 2001 (November 25, 2001)
Beyond Accessibility: Treating Users with Disabilities as People (November 11, 2001)
Poor Code Quality Contaminates Users' Conceptual Models (October 28, 2001)
The End of Homemade Websites (October 14, 2001)
Deferred Hypertext: The Virtues of Delayed Gratification (September 30, 2001)
Mobile Devices Will Soon Be Useful (September 16, 2001)
Designing Web Ads Using Click-Through Data (September 2, 2001)
Did Poor Usability Kill E-Commerce? (August 19, 2001)
First Rule of Usability? Don't Listen to Users (August 5, 2001)
Tagline Blues: What's the Site About? (July 22, 2001)
Helping Users Find Physical Locations (July 8, 2001)
Error Message Guidelines (June 24, 2001)
Avoid PDF for On-Screen Reading (June 10, 2001)
Salary Survey: User Experience Professionals Earn Good Money (May 27, 2001)
Search: Visible and Simple (May 13, 2001)
Japanese Products Map the Mobile Road Ahead (April 29, 2001)
Collect, Compare, Choose: The 3Cs of Critical Web Use (April 15, 2001)
Corporate Websites Get a 'D' in PR (April 1, 2001)
Stationary Mobility (March 18, 2001)
Retaining Key Staff: What High-Tech Employees Say versus What They Do (March 4, 2001)
Success Rate: The Simplest Usability Metric (February 18, 2001)
Are Users Stupid? (February 4, 2001)
Usability Metrics (January 21, 2001)
Mobile Phones: Europe's Next Minitel? (January 7, 2001)
The Web in 2001: Paying Customers (December 24, 2000)
WAP Field Study Findings (December 10, 2000)
Security & Human Factors (November 26, 2000)
Drop-Down Menus: Use Sparingly (November 12, 2000)
Flash: 99% Bad (October 29, 2000)
Request Marketing (October 15, 2000)
Content Creation for Average People (October 1, 2000)
New Devices Augur Decent Mobile User Experience (September 17, 2000)
Regulatory usability (September 3, 2000)
Mailing list usability (August 20, 2000)
Why Doc Searls Doesn't Sell Any Books (August 6, 2000)
End of Web design (July 23, 2000)
WAP backlash (July 9, 2000)
The Network is the User Experience: Microsoft's .NET announcement (June 25, 2000)
Customers as designers (about configurators) (June 11, 2000)
Alertbox Five years retrospective (May 28, 2000)
Eyetracking Study of Web Readers (May 14, 2000)
Finally progress in Internet client design (April 30, 2000)
Reset and Cancel buttons (April 16, 2000)
The mud-throwing theory of usability (April 2, 2000)
Usability testing with 5 users is enough (March 19, 2000)
Profit maximization vs. user loyalty (March 5, 2000)
Does the Internet make us lonely? (February 20, 2000)
Novice vs. expert users (February 6, 2000)
Saying No: How to handle missing features (January 23, 2000)
Is navigation useful? (January 9, 2000)
Predictions for the Web in 2000 (December 26, 1999)
Voodoo usability (December 12, 1999)
Usability as barrier to entry (November 28, 1999)
When bad design becomes the standard (November 14, 1999)
Graceful degradation of scalable Internet services (October 31, 1999)
Prioritize: Good content bubbles to the top (October 17, 1999)
Ten good deeds in web design (October 3, 1999)
User-supportive Internet architecture (September 19, 1999)
Reputation managers are finally happening (September 5, 1999)
Do interface standards stifle design creativity? (August 22, 1999)
Video and streaming media (August 8, 1999)
Metcalfe's Law in reverse (July 25, 1999)
Web research: Believe the data (includes sidebar on affiliates programs) (July 11, 1999)
Content integration (June 27, 1999)
Disabled accessibility: the pragmatic approach (June 13, 1999)
The top ten new mistakes of web design (May 30, 1999)
Who commits the "Top Ten Mistakes" in web design? (May 16, 1999)
"Top Ten Mistakes" revisited three years later (May 2, 1999)
Stuck with old browsers until 2003 (April 18, 1999)
Intranet portals: the corporate information infrastructure (April 4, 1999)
URL as UI (March 21, 1999)
Trust or Bust: Communicating trustworthiness in web design (March 7, 1999)
Details in study methodology can make results irrelevant (February 21, 1999)
Why people shop on the Web (February 7, 1999)
The difference between print design and Web design (January 24, 1999)
Give me your billions: Internet stock valuation and future user characteristics (January 17, 1999)
Collecting feedback from users of a Web archive (reader challenge) (January 10, 1999)
Predictions for the Web in 1999 (December 27, 1998)
Bill Gates' shopping list to build the Internet Desktop (December 13, 1998)
The value of keeping pages alive forever (November 29, 1998)
2D is better than 3D (November 15, 1998)
Why Yahoo is good (but may get worse) (November 1, 1998)
Failure of corporate websites (October 18, 1998)
Personalization is over-rated (October 4, 1998)
Does Internet = Web? (September 20, 1998)
Microcontent: writing headlines, page titles, and email subject lines (September 6, 1998)
The end of legacy media (newspapers, magazines, books, TV networks) (August 23, 1998)
The Web usage paradox: Why do people use something this bad? (August 9, 1998)
Electronic books - a bad idea (July 26, 1998)
Impact of data quality on the Web user experience (July 12, 1998)
Should you outsource Web design? (June 28, 1998)
Fighting linkrot (June 14, 1998)
Micro-containers and new distribution networks are an example of strategic thinking and the coming Web patent bonanza (May 31, 1998)
Using "greeked" layouts to test page templates (May 17, 1998)
Cost of user testing a website (May 3, 1998)
Global Web: Driving the international network economy (April 19, 1998)
Nielsen's Law of Internet bandwidth: it grows by 50% per year (April 5, 1998)
The increasing conservatism of Web users (March 22, 1998)
Better than Reality: A fundamental Internet principle (March 8, 1998)
Tracking the growth of a site (February 22, 1998)
The Reputation Manager (February 8, 1998)
The case for micro-payments (January 25, 1998)
Using link titles to help users predict where they are going (January 11, 1998)
Predictions for the Web in 1998 (January 1, 1998)
Changes in Web usability since 1994 (December 1, 1997)
Book review: Esther Dyson's Release 2.0 gives strategic vision for the network economy (November 15, 1997)
The Tyranny of the Page: continued lack of decent navigation support in Version 4 browsers (November 1, 1997)
When to open Web-based applications in a new window: Functionality apps vs. content apps (October 15, 1997)
How people read on the Web (October 1, 1997)
Difference between intranet and Internet design (September 15, 1997)
Why advertising doesn't work on the Web (except for classified ads which are better online than in print) (September 1, 1997)
Community is dead; long live mega-collaboration (August 15, 1997)
Loyalty on the Web; how to use "frequent-browser points" (August 1, 1997)
Search usability (July 15, 1997)
Effective use of style sheets (July 1, 1997)
Top ten mistakes of Web management (June 15, 1997)
The fallacy of atypical examples like Yahoo, Wall St. Journal, Disney, and Amazon (June 1, 1997)
The telephone is the best metaphor for the Web (May 15, 1997)
The difference between Web design and GUI design (May 1, 1997)
Do websites have increasing returns? (how important is it to be a big site?) (April 15, 1997)
Tech support tales show that novice users have immense problems using the Internet (April 1, 1997)
Be succinct: how to write for the Web (March 15, 1997)
The need for download speed (March 1, 1997)
TV vs. computers as Web media (February 15, 1997)
WebTV usability review (February 1, 1997)
Trends for the Web in 1997 (January 1997)
Why frames suck most of the time (December 1996)
Marginalia of Web design: page titles, colored text, and thumbnail images (November 1996)
Web access for disabled users (October 1996)
The rise of the subsite (September 1996)
International usability (August 1996)
A review of Slate Magazine (July 1996; comments on their redesign added August 16, 1996)
How to write inverted pyramids in cyberspace (June 1996)
Top ten mistakes of Web design (May 1996)
The Web backlash of 1996 (April 1996)
The Internet Desktop (March 1996)
In defense of paper (February 1996)
Trends for website survival in 1996: Relationships on the Web (January 1996)
Guidelines for multimedia on the Web (December 1995)
How much bandwidth is enough? (November 1995)
Who should you hire to design your website? (October 1995)
Trying to kill a meme for the growth of the Web (September 1995)
Directions for online publishing and the five generations of online services (August 1995)
The future of Web browsers and their navigation support features (July 1995)
Warning against pitfalls in Java and HotJava user interfaces (June 1995)

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