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This year I decided it was about time I attended Usability Week, a week of presentations from the Nielsen Norman Group focusing on website design and usability. A whole week would have certainly been overkill for me so I picked the most relevant day (today) – ‘Fundamental Guidelines for Web Usability’. I’ve read one of Jakob Nielsen’s books before and receive his regular usability email alerts so I knew what to expect. By lunchtime I realised that the day could just have easily been entitled ‘People are more fundamentally stupid than you could possibly imagine’. Definitely the best day I’ve spent out of the office in quite a few years gaining new knowledge and insight.

The sessions were especially enhanced by the use of short video clips from real usability studies to support the slides presented by Jakob Nielsen and Kara Pernice. The screenshot / webcam overlays showing what people do in real-time as they browse the web, what they say, their body language and eye tracking demos were most enlightening. There was also much amusement and shared frustration in a room filled with 200+ web design savvy people as we watched users demonstrate how they really do not always see what is there right before their eyes.

Jakob Nielsen’s concluding session touched on some of my own thoughts which I presented at a conference of the ALPSP last week (Content Marketing in a Digital Marketplace) – largely that loyalty is shifting to the search engines as the originating source to locate data, regardless of however many niche sources we might otherwise know about. A website has to have something of value that users want if it is to build loyalty because content is still king. Aggregation, it seems, is the name of the game, combined with easily accessible websites, intuitive navigation and adverts that don’t look like advertising at all. Quote of the day from Jakob “The Web is a selfish medium – where people are in control and don’t want to be told what to do”.

On a final note it’s worth saying that I still think many decent search engine optimisation techniques are at direct conflict with some of the usability recommendations, especially those which relate to keeping content short and grammar simple. I did raise this point during one of Jakob’s presentations “Is is better to get 100 visitors into a well optimised but harder to read page, or 10 visitors to a poorly optimised but easy to read page?” I asked. Jakob’s answer was that there’s a balance between SEO and usability and that the volume of poor experiences might convert as well in volume as the good but low volume experiences. I’m still reminded of the fact that you can go too far with usability as per this article I wrote in December 06 - Web Accessibility Problems Don’t Affect 99% of the Population.

Technorati Tags: jakob nielsen, nielsen norman, kara pernice, web usability, eyetracking

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