Jakob nielsen alert box stream

Who are you, and what do you do?

I am a usability specialist, which means that I run studies of how real people use computers and other technology in order to make the designs easier to use. I have a regular e-mail newsletter, Alertbox, published through my website, where I write about the highlights of this research. I also publish a series of research reports that presents the detailed findings together with usability guidelines for making websites better.

My company, Nielsen Norman Group also runs a regular series of usability conferences in the U.S., Europe, and Australia where we teach people how to do their own usability projects.

Because of all these varied activities, I travel a lot, and I write a lot, so that's what my computers mainly have to support. I also play some computer games, but that's one the side, except for the fact that new user interface ideas are sometimes to be found in games.

What hardware do you use?

Desktop:

• Alienware "

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  Top 10 Mistakes in Web Design

  Jakob Nielsen's Alertbox      

   

  Summary:
  The ten most egregious offenses against users. Web design disasters and HTML horrors are legion, though many usability atrocities are less common than they used to be.

  Since my first attempt in , inom have compiled many top lists of the biggest mistakes in Web design. See links to all these lists at the bottom of this article. This article presents the highlights: the very worst mistakes of Web design. (Updated )

  1. Bad Search

  Overly literal search engines reduce usability in that they're unable to handle typos, plurals, hyphens, and other variants of the query terms. Such search engines are particularly difficult for elderly users, but they hurt everybody.

  A related problem fryst vatten when search engines prioritize results purely on the basis of how many query terms they contain, rather than on each document's importance. Much better if your search engine calls out "best bets" at

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  Alertbox: 10 Years

  It seems like I wrote "Alertbox Five Years Retrospective" just yesterday, but another five years have passed. Since writing my first column in June , I've published columns comprising almost , words. That's a lot of writing and a lot of content to give away on the Internet. Has it been worth the effort?

  My most-read article, "Top Ten Mistakes of Web Design," has long passed two million readers. The average Alertbox gets , page views; the total number of page views for all columns is about 50 million. Even if I never wrote another article, the Alertbox would be a million-page-view project, because the next ten years will double the readership of the archived pages.

  Yes: it was worth it.

  When I conducted my first user tests of websites and intranets in , I was probably the only person in the world with this esoteric interest. Web people didn't care about usability, and usability people didn't care about the Web. After years of incessantly promoting user r

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