Nielsen's Alertbox for 4 February 2008 repeats, with evidence and examples, previous claims about what sorts of problems trip users up on an unfamiliar web site.
"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."
Definitely the kind of thing to read if you want to critique an existing web site, or if you are involved in procuring a new one. Nielsen also provides insights into how users use search, which Nielsen characterises as "Google Gullibility". He concludes:
"When it comes to search, users face three problems:
- Inability to retarget queries to a different search strategy
- Inability to understand the search results and properly evaluate each destination site's likely usefulness
- Inability to sort through the search engine results page's polluted mass of poor results, whether from blogs or from heavily SEO-optimized sites that are insufficiently specific to really address the user's problem
Given these difficulties, many users are at the search engine's mercy and mainly click the top links — a behavior we might call Google Gullibility. Sadly, while these top links are often not what they really need, users don't know how to do better.
I use "Google" in labeling the behavior only because it's the search engine used by the vast majority of our test users. People using other search engines have the same problems. Still, it's vital to reestablish competition in the search engine field: it would be a tragedy for democracy to let 3 guys at one company determine what billions of people read, learn, and ultimately think."
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