Although some graphic designers claim they hate UseIt, ordinary users tend to like it. We usually want sites to be usable, and we get frustrated when they're not, even if we don't really know what's wrong with them. Nielsen helps us to understand the problems, and that they're not necessarily our fault.

One of the most important things about improving is making it a way of life, so that it happens over and over. What's keeping you from using analytics to optimize your marketing?

What I want to develop is a web analytics maturity model encompassing the most important factors of success, basically, the Critical Success Factors of web analytics.

University of Minnesota Duluth: Information Technology Systems & Services - Usability Body of Knowledge

The next big thing doesn't have to be a new big thing. Neither Google nor Facebook were pioneers. Yet, Google searched better than the rest, and Facebook adopted a friends-only approach to profile viewing that helped the site grow more quickly than open-house competitors. Which is good news, because it means you don't have to invent the wheel to make it in the web-billionaire stakes, as long as you know how to overturn the established giants. Usability guru Jakob Nielsen, principal at Nielsen Norman Group, whose clients include Google and the BBC, is in no doubt regarding the secret. "The answer is easy - by being better," he told us. Of course, it's not that easy to be better than big companies that have clearly shown they resonate with customers. "There's always something that the market leaders do poorly, and with careful research, you can find the chink in their armour,"

Requiring prospects to register for content is a standard B2B lead gen practice. But what if your audience is rather old-school and not used to signing up for content online? Listen to a marketer who knew that promoting a new product to a traditional audience required a demo of its value and a voluntary registration form to avoid scaring away prospects. Almost one out of four (23%) demo viewers were converted into leads.

n this article, we contrast the "sales cycle" and related models with the "experience cycle" model. The sales cycle model is a traditional tool in business. The sales cycle frames the producer-customer relationship from the producer's point of view and aims to funnel potential customers to a transaction. The experience cycle is a new tool, synthesizing and giving form to a broader, more holistic approach being taken by growing numbers of designers, brand experts, and marketers. The experience cycle frames the producer-customer relationship from the customer's point of view and aims to move well beyond a single transaction to establish a relationship between producer and customer and foster an on-going conversation.

Even in a recession when budgets are tight, people are attracted to positive emotional experiences. They will scrimp on things of less emotional value to be able to splurge on experience that up lift their spirits. They get an emotional ROI and this is remembered.

The book never emerged from the bag. I was too busy with my internet-connected mobile phone: sending messages to friends; reading articles after clicking on links they'd sent; even looking at a couple of pages of a Sherlock Holmes story which I have stored in an application on the phone. Which brings us to the oft-asked question - is the internet killing the book?

When we developed our web usability benchmarking tool - a tool to measure web site usability and directly compare the usability of one web site with another - we knew that collecting the data was only half the battle. We knew that companies don't act on usability data unless senior management are swayed by the findings. So we set to work devising a way to present the data in a format to help them managers engage with the data.

The vast majority of iterations are never seen by anyone outside the team. So, it looks to the outside world that, when a great product comes out, that the team just sat down, thought it through, and built it, without any trial or errors. But nothing could be farther from the truth.

The woman was a "Jill," code name for a soccer-mom type who is the main shopper for the family but usually avoids electronics stores. She is well-educated and usually very confident, but she is intimidated by the products at Best Buy and the store clerks who spout words like gigabytes and megapixels.

Brad Anderson, chief executive officer of Best Buy Co., is embracing a heretical notion for a retailer. He wants to separate the "angels" among his 1.5 million daily customers from the "devils."

an internal training document that teaches Best Buy blue shirts how to stereotype customers. While Best Buy's use of personas has been known for several years, our exclusively obtained document contains several brand-new Best Buy personas, including "Maria Middle America" and "Empty Nesters" Helen and Charlie.

1. Build web products that meet audience needs\n2. The very best websites do one thing really, really well\n3. Do not attempt to do everything yourselves\n4. Fall forward, fast\n5. Treat the entire web as a creative canvas\n6. The web is a conversation\n7. Any website is only as good as its worst page\n8. Make sure all your content can be linked to, forever\n9. Remember your granny won't ever use "Second Life"\n10. Maximise routes to content\n11. Consistent design and navigation needn't mean one-size-fits-all\n12. Accessibility is not an optional extra\n13. Let people paste your content on the walls of their virtual homes\n14. Link to discussions on the web, don't host them\n15. Personalisation should be unobtrusive, elegant and transparent

Take a look at the tabs from the new Firefox 3 Beta. Not only are the tabs smaller in size than in previous versions (and thus creating a smaller target), they have foolishly added borders around them (which aren't clickable), making the targets smaller still and far more difficult to hit.

"[With eyetracking] we can see that a user may navigate the page of an interface that houses the info she wants," she said, "but if the text is poorly presented, or the navigation is cluttered, or there are too many superfluous images so she cannot easily find what she needs. This is a lost opportunity.

. Our User Experience Research team has found that people evaluate the search results page so quickly that they make most of their decisions unconsciously. To help us get some insight into this split-second decision-making process, we use eye-tracking equipment in our usability labs. This lets us see how our study participants scan the search results page, and is the next best thing to actually being able to read their minds.

For those that required attention to detail--such as proofreading a list of addresses--participants were slightly more accurate when the background was red, compared to blue or white. Blue, on the other hand, stimulated creativity.

combine this research with this research http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/01/090126112315.htm. Do rational people have more preference for color red and experiential for blue.

Since some people tend to think more rationally and others tend to think more intuitively, different people will have greater success and happiness with different activities. However, everyone is capable of thinking both ways, and sometimes just nudging yourself to think in a different direction can help you be more successful and feel more satisfied