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Jakob Neilsen on boo.com and /. in /.



http://slashdot.org/interviews/00/03/03/096223.shtml
Usability guru Jakob Neilsen (ten biggest mistakes etc) asnwers usability
questions in /. Finishing up with this one:

Q. If Ronald Reagan's speeches proved one thing to us, it's this: a
well-chosen anecdote can drown out innumerable (and true) statistics. I
was wondering whether you might have any good terrifying anecdotes that
might scare people who are about to make an unusable Web site into doing
the right thing.
             
Jakob:  Boo.com is one good anecdote. They wasted millions of dollars on
fancy design which they had to retract shortly after the launch because
nobody could use it. Even on a fashion site, people care more about the
products than about the bleeding edge design.

             Also, the Web itself is one big anecdote. What do all the big
sites have in common? Minimalist design. I made a very simple analysis of
the usability of the ten sites with the most traffic compared to the sites
from the ten biggest companies (which would have had an inherent advantage
if they had been more usable). The result was very clear: The ten biggest
sites had much better usability scores than the sites built by huge
corporations. For example, the download time for the home page was eight
seconds for the big sites and 19 seconds for the big companies.

             What happens is very simple: the good sites win. If the pages
download fast, people return. If they can find the products, then they can
buy the products. If people understand the site, they use it.

==========================================================================
                             Paul Jones
   "We must protect our precious bodily fluids!" General Jack D Ripper
http://MetaLab.unc.edu/pjones/ at the Site Formerly Known As SunSITE.unc.edu
  pjones@MetaLab.unc.edu   voice: (919) 962-7600     fax: (919) 962-8071 
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