# Prioritizing Web Usability, MobiPocket ## Metadata * Author: [Jakob Nielsen and Hoa Loranger](https://www.amazon.comundefined) * ASIN: B000SEGT1W * Reference: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B000SEGT1W * [Kindle link](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B000SEGT1W) ## Highlights These studies are available at www.nngroup.com/reports. If you are not working on the specific type of design project that was the focus of a particular study, the information in that report will most likely be irrelevant. — location: [464](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B000SEGT1W&location=464) ^ref-38273 --- Jakob and Marie Tahir happened to use bbc.co.uk in Homepage Usability: 50 Websites Deconstructed — location: [787](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B000SEGT1W&location=787) ^ref-48956 --- You have less than two minutes to communicate the first time a prospective customer visits your Web site. — location: [924](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B000SEGT1W&location=924) ^ref-45746 --- If your users can perform 70 percent of reasonable and representative tasks on your site, you have above-average usability. Conversely, if their success rate is 50 percent, you have abominable usability and you will need to improve by about a third to bring your usability rates up to the average of 66 percent. — location: [979](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B000SEGT1W&location=979) ^ref-22693 --- On average, our test users spent 1 minute and 49 seconds visiting a Web site before they decided to abandon it and move on. On the final site they visited while working on a task, they spent an average of 3 minutes and 49 — location: [1028](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B000SEGT1W&location=1028) ^ref-52367 --- Interior pages accounted for 60 percent of the initial page views. Recognize this and support it. — location: [1030](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B000SEGT1W&location=1030) ^ref-37797 --- Three Guidelines for Supporting Deep-Link Users 1. Tell users where they have arrived and how they can proceed to other parts of the site by including these three design elements on every page: Company name or logo in upper left corner Direct, one-click link to the homepage Search (preferably in the upper right — location: [1036](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B000SEGT1W&location=1036) ^ref-46513 --- 2. Orient the user to the rest of the site. If the site has hierarchical information architecture, the best way to do this is usually a "breadcrumb trail"—links that indicate the user's current location in the context of the site's hierarchy and allow users to backtrack or move up the hierarchy. Also include links to other resources that are directly relevant to the current location, but don't flood the user with links to all site areas or to unrelated pages. — location: [1042](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B000SEGT1W&location=1042) ^ref-46362 --- 3. Don't assume that users have followed a drill-down path to arrive at the current page. They may have taken a different path than what you intended and not have seen information that was contained on higher-level pages. — location: [1046](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B000SEGT1W&location=1046) ^ref-47741 --- Despite the importance of the homepage, however, interior pages accounted for 60 percent of the initial page views. — location: [1063](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B000SEGT1W&location=1063) ^ref-58920 --- A Web site is like a house with a thousand doors, and visitors can enter anywhere. — location: [1064](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B000SEGT1W&location=1064) ^ref-6340 --- News.com offers several follow-ups to users who might arrive at this page via a deep link—for example, from a blog posting about Super Bowl commercials. Below the story are three category links to lists of stories about similar topics. — location: [1070](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B000SEGT1W&location=1070) ^ref-56544 --- Four Goals in Thirty Seconds The four most important things a homepage must communicate to new readers in the half-minute they spend on the page: What site they have arrived at What benefits the organization offers them Something about the company and its latest products or new developments Their choices and how to get to the most relevant section for them — location: [1091](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B000SEGT1W&location=1091) ^ref-18059 --- Users will spend most of their 25 to 35 seconds figuring out where to go next, not reading word-for-word about what makes you special. — location: [1100](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B000SEGT1W&location=1100) ^ref-61035 --- In 93 percent of searches, the users in our study only visited the first SERP, which usually held ten search results plus a number of ads. In only seven percent of cases did users page on to a second SERP, and the number who visited three SERPs for a single query was too small to provide a firm estimate, — location: [1244](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B000SEGT1W&location=1244) ^ref-47277 --- Tip: Design for Short Scrolling Most users don't scroll, and when they do, they don't scroll very much. Our users who did scrolled through 1.3 screens worth of information on average—meaning that they saw a total of 2.3 screens, including the initial one above the fold. Any page longer than 2.3 screens risks being overlooked, even by those few users who care enough about the page to — location: [1360](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B000SEGT1W&location=1360) ^ref-17614 --- only 42% of users saw any information on the second screenful (the one immediately below the fold). Only 14 percent of users viewed beyond two screenfuls. — location: [1374](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B000SEGT1W&location=1374) ^ref-13248 --- low-experience users only scrolled 38 percent of long pages, whereas the high-experience users scrolled 46 percent of these pages. — location: [1379](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B000SEGT1W&location=1379) ^ref-25013 --- Peter Pirolli's Information Foraging: A Theory of Adaptive Interaction with Information (Oxford University Press, 2006). — location: [1465](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B000SEGT1W&location=1465) ^ref-5763 --- Homepage Usability: 50 Websites Deconstructed (New Riders Publishing, 2002), recommended showcasing sample content on the homepage (appear nutritious) and prominently display navigation and Search features (be an easy catch). — location: [1496](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B000SEGT1W&location=1496) ^ref-38549 --- Areas that still cause major problems include: Links that don't change color when visited Breaking the back button — location: [1662](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B000SEGT1W&location=1662) ^ref-8297 --- Design elements that look like advertisements Violating Web-wide conventions — location: [1667](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B000SEGT1W&location=1667) ^ref-34948 --- Vaporous content and empty hype Dense content and unscannable text — location: [1669](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B000SEGT1W&location=1669) ^ref-21079 --- Web text should be short, scannable, and approachable. Typically, you should write half as many words for the Web as you would for print. — location: [2049](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B000SEGT1W&location=2049) ^ref-28946 --- single, well-organized set of guidelines for its user interface designers called Guidelines for Designing User Interface Software, ESD-TR-86-278. Jakob Nielsen was one of several — location: [2104](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B000SEGT1W&location=2104) ^ref-29515 --- Don Norman's Three Levels of Emotional Design In his book Emotional Design: Why We Love (Or Hate) Everyday Things, our colleague Donald A. Norman describes three levels at which people relate to design: The visceral level is the most immediate and is dominated by appearance. Smooth or round objects have cuddly or pleasant connotations; sharp or pointed objects connote feelings of — location: [2124](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B000SEGT1W&location=2124) ^ref-17685 --- The behavioral level is based on use of the object. How does it feel to operate it? Is it annoying or pleasant to use? — location: [2130](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B000SEGT1W&location=2130) ^ref-32869 --- The reflective level is based on how we think about, or reflect on, an object. Does it have positive or prestigious connotations? Does it evoke a happy memory? Branding often works at the reflective level by making people think in advance that a certain product or vendor is — location: [2133](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B000SEGT1W&location=2133) ^ref-1721 --- Tip: The First Law of E-Commerce If the user can't find the product, the user can't buy the product. The ability to get around a Web site is extremely important for usability, but the key components of Search and findability account for more than one-third of users' difficulty doing so. — location: [2828](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B000SEGT1W&location=2828) ^ref-41341 --- Also, the user's query is repeated in the site's standard Search box in the upper-left corner, but on the SERP it's better to show the query in a wider Search box right on top of the results, so that the user will be more likely to spot it and use it to reformulate the queries. — location: [3139](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B000SEGT1W&location=3139) ^ref-59732 --- Tip: Help Bad Spellers Your SERP can provide a spelling check, typically in the form of a link asking, "Did you mean" with the proposed corrected spelling. This link is usually placed immediately above the list of Search hits to maximize the probability that users will see it when they start scanning the list. In our study, 7.5 percent of queries contained typos, so it's well worth helping users recover from these errors, which they may not even notice unless the site points out the correct or preferred spelling. — location: [3170](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B000SEGT1W&location=3170) ^ref-53553 --- Category names. The main page for that category should be the top hit. Make sure to consider names that are frequently used in your industry to refer to a category, including those used by competing companies. Often — location: [3198](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B000SEGT1W&location=3198) ^ref-62305 --- For some types of sites, however, it makes sense to make other sorting criteria available. For example, sorting by date instead of relevance is useful for people who want to monitor recent events or find out what has changed on a site. — location: [3224](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B000SEGT1W&location=3224) ^ref-9756 --- No Results Found When no results to a user's query are found, a special-case SERP is necessary. The first requirement for this page is that it clearly state that no results were found. Returning a blank page may make users sit and wait for the search to finish because there is no indication that it's already completed. Blank pages are also likely to make users think that something is broken. Second, a no-results SERP should help users modify their queries to get better results. As with all SERPs, it should repeat users' queries in a Search box so that they can edit their queries easily, but it should also provide explicit hints for how to correct typical search mistakes. If you have a spelling correction feature—as we recommend—it should display suggestions for revised spellings prominently. — location: [3249](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B000SEGT1W&location=3249) ^ref-13463 --- The placement of critical elements on the page can dictate whether people scroll or not. — location: [5408](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B000SEGT1W&location=5408) ^ref-18317 ---