“After some questions about the most appropriate order for these buttons on a web application came up on a usability-related email distribution list, I decided to conduct an online survey of usability and user experience professionals to see what order they think is best.” (Tom Tullis – Measuring the User Experience) – Who’s right: Tom or Jakob?

“(…) when committing to customer-centered development (of a product, service, website, or whatever), it’s important to stay strategic, always try to improve the business, and listen to customers (as human beings, not as users of a tool).” (Mark Hurst – Good Experience)

“Should the OK button come before or after the Cancel button? Following platform conventions is more important than suboptimizing an individual dialog box.” (Jakob Nielsen – Alertbox)

“Lists of links are an intermediate case between content-embedded links and menu items. Showing listed links in blue or in the site’s main link color is the recommended design — and the one most intranets follow.” (Jakob Nielsen – Alertbox)

“On the average Web page, users have time to read at most 28% of the words during an average visit; 20% is more likely.” (Jakob Nielsen – Alertbox)

“Users scan lists by moving their eyes rapidly down the left edge. Menu items that are right-aligned make scanning more difficult.” (Jakob Nielsen – Alertbox)

“Since I started in 1983, the usability field has grown by 5,000%. It’s a wonderful job — and still a promising career choice for new people.” (Jakob Nielsen – Alertbox)

“Bad content, bad links, bad navigation, bad category pages… which is worst for business? In these examples, bad content takes the prize for costing the company the most money.” (Jakob Nielsen – Alertbox)

“Between the ages of 25 and 60, people’s ability to use websites declines by 0.8% per year — mostly because they spend more time per page, but also because of navigation difficulties.” (Jakob Nielsen – Alertbox)

“Depending on how representative designers are of the target audience, a project might need more or less user testing. Still, usability concerns never go away completely.” (Jakob Nielsen – Alertbox)

“Most usability tests culminate with a short questionnaire that asks the participant to rate, usually on a 5- or 7-point scale, various characteristics of the system. Experience shows that participants are reluctant to be critical of a system, no matter how difficult they found the tasks. This article describes a guided interview technique that overcomes this problem based on a word list of over 100 adjectives. We also include a spreadsheet to generate and randomise the word list.” (David Travis – Userfocus)

“Typically, you should deemphasize your company’s name in links, but a new guideline recommends frontloading the name for search engine links under certain conditions.” (Jakob Nielsen – Alertbox)

“Last fall at Adobe Max we talked with Adaptive Path’s Jesse James Garrett about how to build Rich Internet Applications utilizing technologies like AIR and Flex while simultaneously making them underestandable and coherent to end users. The issue isn’t just making them intuitive, but educating the public on what their purposes are, how they can be used, and, most importantly, what they can and cannot actually do.” (ScribeMedia.Org)

“Application usability is enhanced when users know how to operate the UI and it guides them through the workflow. Violating common guidelines prevents both.” (Jakob Nielsen – Alertbox)

“Users now do basic operations with confidence and perform with skill on sites they use often. But when users try new sites, well-known usability problems still cause failures.” (Jakob Nielsen – Alertbox)

“The average business metrics improvement after a usability redesign is now 83%. This is substantially less than 6 years ago, but ROI remains high because usability is still cheap relative to gains.” (Jakob Nielsen – Alertbox)

“Consistent design and integrated IA are becoming standard on good intranets. This year’s winners focused on productivity tools, employee self-service, access to knowledgeable people (as opposed to ‘knowledge management’), and better-presented company news.” (Jakob Nielsen – Alertbox)

“AJAX, rich Internet UIs, mashups, communities, and user-generated content often add more complexity than they’re worth. They also divert design resources and prove (once again) that what’s hyped is rarely what’s most profitable.” (Jakob Nielsen – Alertbox)

“(…) designing for web apps is different than just designing a web site. It lives in a browser, it has complicated activities and edge conditions, and little things can have big implications, especially when they go awry. You need to know different things when designing for web apps than when designing for any other type of interaction.” (Jared Spool – UIE)

“Information foraging shows how to calculate your content strategy’s costs and benefits. A mixed diet that combines brief overviews and comprehensive coverage is often best.” (Jakob Nielsen – Alertbox)