“Usage goes down as interaction costs increase. User motivation determines how fast demand drops, following an elasticity curve.” (Jakob Nielsen – Alertbox)

“I’m not down on every use of PDF files online. Campus maps, article reprints, and my aunt’s Christmas letters all work quite well as PDF files. What I want to challenge in this column is the use of PDF files for distributing user assistance online, in the form of large books.” (Mike Hughes – UXmatters)

“Agile methods aim to overcome usability barriers in traditional development, but pose new threats to user experience quality. By modifying Agile approaches, however, many companies have realized the benefits without the pain.” (Jakob Nielsen – Alertbox)

Welcome message by Bill Gates – “It’s about making our world work better. It’s about ‘Making Life Easy’ and user friendly. Technology today is too hard to use. A cell phone should be as easy to access as a doorknob. In order to humanize a world that uses technology as an infrastructure for education, healthcare, transportation, government, communication, entertainment, work and other areas, we must develop these technologies in a way that serves people first. World Usability Day was founded in 2005 as an initiative of the Usability Professionals’ Association to ensure that services and products important to human life are easier to access and simpler to use. Each year, on the second Thursday of November, over 225 events are organized in over 40 countries around the world to raise awareness for the general public, and train professionals in the tools and issues central to good usability research, development and practice.”

“Usability scores for 51 websites shows some correlation between navigation, content, and feature quality, but no connections to other usability areas.” (Jakob Nielsen – Alertbox)

“Automated email can improve customer service, strengthen relationships, and help websites bypass search engines. But most messages fared poorly in user testing and didn’t fulfill this potential.” (Jakob Nielsen – Alertbox)

Proceedings of the International Workshop – “The goal of this workshop is to bring together researchers and practitioners from the Human Computer Interaction and Software Engineering fields to determine the state-of-the-art in the interplay between usability evaluation and software development and to generate ideas for new and improved relations between these activities. The aim is to base the determination of the current state on empirical studies. Presentations of new ideas on how to improve the interplay between HCI & SE to the design of usable software systems should also be based on empirical studies.” (MAUSE COST Action 294)

“You can have a great plan for a User Experience Strategy, but you should really consider whether your company is able to execute that strategy. The same thing goes for product concepts, I believe. A groundbreaking, radical new product concept is inspiring, but if your company is currently not able to realize it and needs some time to live up to the strategy, by exposing your product concept to the public you have just told everyone in what direction you will be heading in the coming years.” (Jasper van Kuijk – uselog)

“We found a 9% improvement in the usability of About Us information on websites over the past 5 years. But companies and organizations still can’t explain what they do in one paragraph.” (Jacob Nielsen – Alertbox)

“Usability is an approved quality when designing interactive products. Another factor becomes more and more important: the hedonic quality, which includes the aesthetic of a product. The long-time experiences in user-friendly design convinced the initiators of Beauty matters that the combination of usability and aesthetics ensures the success of a product. Usability alone ist not enough. Most people associate the aesthetics of a product with its beauty. The beauty is also decisive whether a product represents a special value for us.” (Michael Burmester, Marc Hassenzahl and Franz Koller)

“It starts with any number of scenarios: Design and development have taken too long to produce a prototype, you need to release in three weeks, and you suspect there may be design flaws. You are trying to incorporate usability testing into an Agile development process. Or maybe you simply want to pare down your process to make it shorter and less expensive.” (Paul Nuschke – Boxes and Arrows)

“Finding addresses and location information on company websites has gotten dramatically easier, but users increasingly turn to search engines first for this task.” (Jakob Nielsen – Alertbox)

“A label for things that are convenient, practical, and functional.” (Lennart Grötzbach)

“Usability testing makes use of a lot of role-playing scenarios like this one, and many findings and design recommendations result from participants’ responses to these scenarios. But an over-reliance on role playing when testing a product and making design recommendations can have major downsides and risks (…)” (Isabelle Peyrichoux – UXmatters)

“New user testing of site maps shows that they are still useful as a secondary navigation aide, and that they’re much easier to use than they were during our research 7 years ago.” (Jakob Nielsen – Alertbox)

“Although I’ve been a Windows power user for years, the transition to Mac couldn’t have been easier and more pleasant. I don’t want to turn this article into some endless rambling about how great Mac is, but as the user of both systems I can speak from my own experience quite objectively. Let’s take a look at some of the spots where Apple really has done it better in terms of user interface and usability.” (Juul Coolen – Smashing Magazine)

“Started in 1998, the company is now 10 years old and has a long list of accomplishments. (…) Whatever the general outlook, I think the future is extremely bright for usability, for the simple reason that it works and has hugely profitable ROI for companies that embrace it.” (Jakob Nielsen – Alertbox)

“TiVo ran 12 user tests in 12 weeks while designing its new website. As TiVo’s experience shows, frequent and regular testing keeps the design usability focused.” (Jakob Nielsen – Alertbox)

“Different traffic sources imply different reasons for why visitors might immediately leave your site. Design to keep deep-link followers engaged through additional pageviews.” (Jakob Nielsen – Alertbox)

“The 1% of websites that don’t suck can be made even better by strengthening exceptional user performance, eliminating miscues, and targeting company-wide use and unmet needs.” (Jakob Nielsen – Alertbox)