23 Musings

So says the usability guru Jakob Nielsen in his latest article.

He says that the returns from usability have lessened in recent times due to the fact that websites just aren't as bad as they used to be. Big pat on the back for all designers and developers out there but don't get complacent! Usability is hugely important and should never be underestimated, small tweaks to the user experience can often result in huge returns.

Another reason he gives for slowing ROI is that usability budgets have not grown in line with other budgets and that there still isn't enough importance placed on usability studies and testing.

Great post from Jakob Nielsen on the dangers of going web 2.0 crazy from a usability point of view!

Highly poingant as we're implementing a lot of AJAX at the moment. Overkill is deadly and could trash your conversion rate. Keep it minimal, useful, effective (AJAX is great for some things, pointless for others), simple, usable and give clear instructions where needed.

I agree with his pitch on user generated content as well. Pointless if your audience/customers aren't ready for it or if you have nothing interesting for them to talk about (that said, great in an emotive environment such as online travel if used wisely).

Really good insight as ever from usability expert Jakob Nielsen here. In this article he discusses whats known as banner blindness, the fact that users are often oblivious to the presence of banner adverts on the web. The study he's undertaken involved eyetracking and the results are pretty conclusive.

The findings show that designing banner ads which supposedly stand out as they are different colours and using borders is actually a false economy and you are better off integrating your advertising into a websites content. Users tend to avoid focusing on objects that look very different from the site design, often hardly glancing at them and rarely clicking. Google are an example of someone who's got this just right in their implementation of Adwords. As everyone knows, one of the main reasons Adwords works so well is that users rarely identify them as any different to a natural search result.

It's something I've always suspected as users always respond better to cohesive designs where all the elements of a website hang together and complement each other. We recently redesigned our homepage and one of the elements was a promo banner displaying a 'book online and save' message. In the new design this is just a textual message on the screen as opposed to a bordered banner, and traffic to that page has doubled since the design changed!