Current Issues in Web Usability

I love good, free stuff. Check out the bi-weekly column by Dr. Jakob Nielsen, principal, Nielsen Norman Group.

Their report Participation Inequality: Encouraging More Users to Contribute (Oct. 9)
highlights that in most online systems, 90% of users are lurkers who never contribute, 9% of users contribute a little, and 1% of users account for almost all the action.

They are a host of other useful reporst too. Read these first: Usability 101 and Top ten mistakes of Web design.

Here are links to the others.

• 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