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The Alertbox:
Current Issues in Web Usability

Current Column

• Intranet Usability: The Trillion-Dollar Question (November 11, 2002)

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Previous Columns

• Celebrating Holidays and Special Occasions on Websites (October 28, 2002)
• Making Flash Usable for Users With Disabilities (October 14, 2002)
• Email Newsletters Pick Up Where Websites Leave Off (September 30, 2002)
• Offshore Usability (September 16, 2002)
• 10 Best Intranets of 2002 (September 3, 2002)
• Let Users Control Font Size (August 19, 2002)
• Making the Physical Environment Interactive (August 5, 2002)
• Becoming a Usability Professional (July 22, 2002)
• User Empowerment and the Fun Factor (July 7, 2002)
• Improving Usability Guideline Compliance (June 24, 2002)
• Reduce Redundancy: Decrease Duplicated Design Decisions (June 9, 2002)
• Supporting Multiple-Location Users (May 26, 2002)
• Top Ten Guidelines for Homepage Usability (May 12, 2002)
• Usability for Senior Citizens (April 28, 2002)
• Kids' Corner: Website Usability for Children (April 14, 2002)
• Top Research Laboratories in Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) (March 31, 2002)
• Protecting the User's Mailbox (March 17, 2002)
• Deep Linking is Good Linking (March 3, 2002)
• Official Winter Olympics Site: Not Even Bronze (February 17, 2002)
• Avoiding Commodity Status (February 3, 2002)
• Field Studies Done Right: Fast and Observational (January 20, 2002)
• Site Map Usability (January 6, 2002)

• User Payments: Predictions for 2001 Revisited (December 23, 2001)
• DVD Menu Design: The Failures of Web Design Recreated Yet Again (December 9, 2001)
• 10 Best Intranet Designs of 2001 (November 25, 2001)
• Beyond Accessibility: Treating Users with Disabilities as People (November 11, 2001)
• Poor Code Quality Contaminates Users' Conceptual Models (October 28, 2001)
• The End of Homemade Websites (October 14, 2001)
• Deferred Hypertext: The Virtues of Delayed Gratification (September 30, 2001)
• Mobile Devices Will Soon Be Useful (September 16, 2001)
• Designing Web Ads Using Click-Through Data (September 2, 2001)
• Did Poor Usability Kill E-Commerce? (August 19, 2001)
• First Rule of Usability? Don't Listen to Users (August 5, 2001)
• Tagline Blues: What's the Site About? (July 22, 2001)
• Helping Users Find Physical Locations (July 8, 2001)
• Error Message Guidelines (June 24, 2001)
• Avoid PDF for On-Screen Reading (June 10, 2001)
• Salary Survey: User Experience Professionals Earn Good Money (May 27, 2001)
• Search: Visible and Simple (May 13, 2001)
• Japanese Products Map the Mobile Road Ahead (April 29, 2001)
• Collect, Compare, Choose: The 3Cs of Critical Web Use (April 15, 2001)
• Corporate Websites Get a 'D' in PR (April 1, 2001)
• Stationary Mobility (March 18, 2001)
• Retaining Key Staff: What High-Tech Employees Say versus What They Do (March 4, 2001)
• Success Rate: The Simplest Usability Metric (February 18, 2001)
• Are Users Stupid? (February 4, 2001)
• Usability Metrics (January 21, 2001)
• Mobile Phones: Europe's Next Minitel? (January 7, 2001)

• The Web in 2001: Paying Customers (December 24, 2000)
• WAP Field Study Findings (December 10, 2000)
• Security & Human Factors (November 26, 2000)
• Drop-Down Menus: Use Sparingly (November 12, 2000)
• Flash: 99% Bad (October 29, 2000)
• Request Marketing (October 15, 2000)
• Content Creation for Average People (October 1, 2000)
• New Devices Augur Decent Mobile User Experience (September 17, 2000)
• Regulatory usability (September 3, 2000)
• Mailing list usability (August 20, 2000)
• Why Doc Searls Doesn't Sell Any Books (August 6, 2000)
• End of Web design (July 23, 2000)
• WAP backlash (July 9, 2000)
• The Network is the User Experience: Microsoft's .NET announcement (June 25, 2000)
• Customers as designers (June 11, 2000)
• Alertbox Five years retrospective (May 28, 2000)
• Eyetracking Study of Web Readers (May 14, 2000)
• Finally progress in Internet client design (April 30, 2000)
• Reset and Cancel buttons (April 16, 2000)
• The mud-throwing theory of usability (April 2, 2000)
• Why you only need to test with 5 users (March 19, 2000)
• Profit maximization vs. user loyalty (March 5, 2000)
• Does the Internet make us lonely? (February 20, 2000)
• Novice vs. expert users (February 6, 2000)
• Saying No: How to handle missing features (January 23, 2000)
• Is navigation useful? (January 9, 2000)

• Predictions for the Web in 2000 (December 26, 1999)
• Voodoo usability (December 12, 1999)
• Usability as barrier to entry (November 28, 1999)
• When bad design becomes the standard (November 14, 1999)
• Graceful degradation of scalable Internet services (October 31, 1999)
• Prioritize: Good content bubbles to the top (October 17, 1999)
• Ten good deeds in web design (October 3, 1999)
• User-supportive Internet architecture (September 19, 1999)
• Reputation managers are finally happening (September 5, 1999)
• Do interface standards stifle design creativity? (August 22, 1999)
• Video and streaming media (August 8, 1999)
• Metcalfe's Law in reverse (July 25, 1999)
• Web research: Believe the data (includes sidebar on affiliates programs) (July 11, 1999)
• Content integration (June 27, 1999)
• Disabled accessibility: the pragmatic approach (June 13, 1999)
• The top ten new mistakes of web design (May 30, 1999)
• Who commits the "Top Ten Mistakes" in web design? (May 16, 1999)
• "Top Ten Mistakes" revisited three years later (May 2, 1999)
• Stuck with old browsers until 2003 (April 18, 1999)
• Intranet portals: the corporate information infrastructure (April 4, 1999)
• URL as UI (March 21, 1999)
• Trust or Bust: Communicating trustworthiness in web design (March 7, 1999)
• Details in study methodology can make results irrelevant (February 21, 1999)
• Why people shop on the Web (February 7, 1999)
• The difference between print design and Web design (January 24, 1999)
• Give me your billions: Internet stock valuation and future user characteristics (January 17, 1999)
• Collecting feedback from users of a Web archive (reader challenge) (January 10, 1999)

• Predictions for the Web in 1999 (December 27, 1998)
• Bill Gates' shopping list to build the Internet Desktop (December 13, 1998)
• The value of keeping pages alive forever (November 29, 1998)
• 2D is better than 3D (November 15, 1998)
• Why Yahoo is good (but may get worse) (November 1, 1998)
• Failure of corporate websites (October 18, 1998)
• Personalization is over-rated (October 4, 1998)
• Does Internet = Web? (September 20, 1998)
• Microcontent: writing headlines, page titles, and email subject lines (September 6, 1998)
• The end of legacy media (newspapers, magazines, books, TV networks) (August 23, 1998)
• The Web usage paradox: Why do people use something this bad? (August 9, 1998)
• Electronic books - a bad idea (July 26, 1998)
• Impact of data quality on the Web user experience (July 12, 1998)
• Should you outsource Web design? (June 28, 1998)
• Fighting linkrot (June 14, 1998)
• Micro-containers and new distribution networks are an example of strategic thinking and the coming Web patent bonanza (May 31, 1998)
• Using "greeked" layouts to test page templates (May 17, 1998)
• Cost of user testing a website (May 3, 1998)
• Global Web: Driving the international network economy (April 19, 1998)
• Nielsen's Law of Internet bandwidth: it grows by 50% per year (April 5, 1998)
• The increasing conservatism of Web users (March 22, 1998)
• Better than Reality: A fundamental Internet principle (March 8, 1998)
• Tracking the growth of a site (February 22, 1998)
• The Reputation Manager (February 8, 1998)
• The case for micro-payments (January 25, 1998)
• Using link titles to help users predict where they are going (January 11, 1998)
• Predictions for the Web in 1998 (January 1, 1998)

• Changes in Web usability since 1994 (December 1, 1997)
• Book review: Esther Dyson's Release 2.0 gives strategic vision for the network economy (November 15, 1997)
• The Tyranny of the Page: continued lack of decent navigation support in Version 4 browsers (November 1, 1997)
• Functionality applets vs. content applets: when to step outside the Web page (October 15, 1997)
• How people read on the Web (October 1, 1997)
• Difference between intranet and Internet design (September 15, 1997)
• Why advertising doesn't work on the Web (except for classified ads which are better online than in print) (September 1, 1997)
• Community is dead; long live mega-collaboration (August 15, 1997)
• Loyalty on the Web; how to use "frequent-browser points" (August 1, 1997)
• Search usability (July 15, 1997)
• Effective use of style sheets (July 1, 1997)
• Top ten mistakes of Web management (June 15, 1997)
• The fallacy of atypical examples like Yahoo, Wall St. Journal, Disney, and Amazon (June 1, 1997)
• The telephone is the best metaphor for the Web (May 15, 1997)
• The difference between Web design and GUI design (May 1, 1997)
• Do websites have increasing returns? (how important is it to be a big site?) (April 15, 1997)
• Tech support tales show that novice users have immense problems using the Internet (April 1, 1997)
• Be succinct: how to write for the Web (March 15, 1997)
• The need for download speed (March 1, 1997)
• TV vs. computers as Web media (February 15, 1997)
• WebTV usability review (February 1, 1997)
• Trends for the Web in 1997 (January 1997)

• Why frames suck most of the time (December 1996)
• Marginalia of Web design: page titles, colored text, and thumbnail images (November 1996)
• Web access for disabled users (October 1996)
• The rise of the sub-site (September 1996)
• International usability (August 1996)
• A review of Slate Magazine (July 1996; comments on their redesign added August 16, 1996)
• How to write inverted pyramids in cyberspace (June 1996)
• Top ten mistakes of Web design (May 1996)
• The Web backlash of 1996 (April 1996)
• The Internet Desktop (March 1996)
• In defense of paper (February 1996)
• Trends for website survival in 1996: Relationships on the Web (January 1996)

• Guidelines for multimedia on the Web (December 1995)
• How much bandwidth is enough? (November 1995)
• Who should you hire to design your website? (October 1995)
• Trying to kill a meme for the growth of the Web (September 1995)
• Directions for online publishing and the five generations of online services (August 1995)
• The future of Web browsers and their navigation support features (July 1995)
• Warning against pitfalls in Java and HotJava user interfaces (June 1995)

History of the Alertbox Column

• 1995: 50,000 page views on an annualized basis (actually 30,000 page views in a 7-month period)
• 1996: 189,000 page views
• 1997: 576,000 page views (all of Useit.com received 826,000 page views)
• 1998: 2.0 million page views (all of Useit.com received 3.0 Mpv)
• 1999: 3.1 million page views (all of Useit.com received 4.7 Mpv)
• 2000: 5.8 Mpv for Alertbox and 9.0 Mpv for Useit
• 2001: 6.1 Mpv for Alertbox and 10 Mpv for Useit

In addition to the traffic numbers listed here, the Alertbox received about 2.3 million page downloads from PointCast (mainly in 1998). I have not counted these pages as being traffic since I doubt that very many of the "pushed" pages were actually seen by users.