Jaokob Nielsen's most recent newsletter was about newsletter usability. His main findings are:

• The process of subscribing and unsubscribing is getting easier
• the average time spent “reading” a newsletter is 51 seconds
• the blah-blah text intro is skipped by more than two thirds of readers
• eye-tracking test show the most read parts are the first 2 words of each headline
• stored newsletters in inboxes become part of users' information spaces and thus will be found when they search their own environments

He also mentions RSS and suggest calling them “news feeds” as 82% have never heard of them. He concludes that feeds are a “cold medium”, and that they do not form the same relationships as newsletters. He also estimates newsletter subscribers generate 10 times as much revenue as feed subscribers.


newsletters: cut out the blah-blah text, no one reads it!

One last word about newlsetters not in Jakob's highly informative piece: “open rates” (the percentage of people who open the newsletter they receive in their inbox) are going down according to this ExactTarget study (registration required):
email open rates were 35.5% in 2005, down 16.5% from 2004.

The good news is that click-through rates (percenage of readers who click on a link in the newsletter) remained unchanged at around 6.6%. There's just fewer of them.

Still, Jakob maintains that newsletters are the “best way to maintain customer relationships” and as usual I tend to agree with him.

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I've always been reluctant to use Fly Out menus in the sites I've developed. As you can see from the image, these are navigation boxes which display more choices when you roll your mouse over the link.

The mouse is over the navigation link Leasing and displays further choices

Originally my hesitation was driven by the fact that keeping these submenus updated can be a maintenance nightmare for your friendly webmaster:
- they are often ignored by automatic link checkers
- they are written in JavaScript which makes them harder to “Find and Replace” using a code editor
- sometimes they do not work across browsers

I came across an article on the UIE site which for me puts the nail in the coffin for Fly Out menus:

users succeeded more often when they didn't encounter these design elements than when they did

The reason is that studies have shown that users decide where they will click before they move the mouse.

Unfortunately the information in fly outs, rollovers, or dropdowns can't help users decide where to click because the information isn't available to users when they are making their decision. It isn't until after they've decided where to click that they see what the element has to say.

When this happens, users often stop in their tracks, confused, to re-evaluate the information presented to them. And confusion is not a feeling you want to elicit in your users.

A few months ago I posted on the 3 fundamental skills of web writing. I re-read that post and realized it needed a real life example to truly be useful. So let's recap.

Writing for the web is different because people read differently on the web. In fact, they don't read but they scan, so everything you write needs to be scannable. These are the web writing guidelines:

- bolded, italicized and hyperlinked keywords
- lots of lists
- meaningful sub-headings (not “clever” ones)
- short paragraphs with one idea
- always start with the conclusion, giving readers what they are seeking upfront
- use lots of captioned photos, diagrams and graphics to illustrate your points
- make it less formal and more personalized

The following is a paragraph that appears on one of my clients' homepage:

At the Mind Wave Institute we use a unique and effective combination of Medical Hypnotherapy, Guided Imagery, Mindfulness Meditation and Life Style Coaching, to help you achieve optimal health and vitality using the natural healing power of your mind. Your mind has a powerful healing influence on your body, however most of us are not trained to access it. The mind body techniques taught at Mind Wave Institute allow you to access the full potential of your mind. Giving you the tools you need to create a life you love, free of pain and anxiety. Specialties include weight loss, pain management, anxieties, phobias, Irritable Bowel Syndrome, stress related medical issues and hypnosis for childbirth preparation - HypnoBirthing.

And here is (almost) the same content, but modified according to the web writing guidelines:

Are you suffering from:

• Being Overweight
• Smoking
• Teeth Grinding (Bruxism)
• Stress
• Anxieties and Phobias
• Irritable Bowel Syndrome (IBS)

At the Mind Wave Institute we use the proven techniques of Medical Hypnotherapy, Self Hypnosis Training, Guided Imagery, Mindfulness and Guided Meditation and Life Style Coaching to help you achieve optimal health and vitality.

These techniques tap into the usually unaccessible subconscious and allow you to use the natural healing power of your mind to its fullest potential.

Which one would you rather read?

Jakob Nielsen's on a roll. The usability Guru recently came out with the Top 10 web design mistakes (I wrote a post on the top 3), and now he's just published the top 10 weblog design mistakes. I thought it would be interesting to test this blog against his list. So no holds barred, here we go!

1. No Author Biographies
The main reason to have a biography is to build trust: check (my bio).

2. No Author Photo
They serve to personalize and connect: check (my photo).

3. Nondescript Posting Titles

Jakob says:

Users must be able to grasp the gist of an article by reading its headline. Avoid cute or humorous headlines that make no sense out of context.

I think looking at the list of recent entry titles in the right column we can check that.

4. Links Don't Say Where They Go
Avoid sentences like there's more here and here. This one is sometimes difficult to remember to do, but looking at the links in this article I'll generously give myself a check.

5. Classic Hits are Buried
This means linking to your most read pieces. Not many people read this blog (yet!) so I have not implemented a “most read posts” - but will do soon. Verdict for now: fail.

this post is about navel gazing, so this is a photo of the navel of the earth

6. The Calendar is the Only Navigation
There should be 10 to 20 categories as additional navigation: check.

7. Irregular Publishing Frequency
I've been trying to publish a post a week, but this area definitely needs improvement: C-.

Jakob adds:

you shouldn't post when you have nothing to say. Polluting cyberspace with excess information is a sin.

8. Mixing Topics
Try to stay focused on one (narrow) topic. I'll give myself a check on that one.

Another classic quote from JN:

The only people who read everything are those with too much time on their hands (a low-value demographic).

9. Forgetting That You Write for Your Future Boss
Hmm, maybe I should remove these compromising photos: B.

10. Having a Domain Name Owned by a Weblog Service
Jacob says that having a blog ending in blogspot.com or typepad.com will soon become the same as having a @aol.com email address: the mark of a beginner. Check on that one.

Verdict
7 or 8 out 10 - none too shabby.

The usability guru Jakob Nielsen comes out with a list of 10 web design mistakes every couple of years. Here's the top 3 for this year (2005):

1. Legibility Problems
Most complaints were about small font sizes or frozen font sizes (which you cannot alter using a browser's Text Size command). This one really surprised me, and it prompted me to start making websites with bigger fonts. With the baby boomers getting older, it's only going to get worse.

2. Non-Standard Links
This is broken down into 5 sections:
- Non-obviously clickable links (not underlined)
- No differentiation between visited and unvisited links
- No explanation of where the link leads to (a typical example is click here)
- JavaScript or other fancy techniques that break standard interaction techniques for dealing with links
- Opening pages in new windows (but Jakob says that's OK for PDF files and such)

3. Flash
Jakob says that

Most of the Flash that Web users encounter each day is bad Flash with no purpose beyond annoying people. The one bright point is that splash screens and Flash intros are almost extinct. They are so bad that even the most clueless Web designers won't recommend them, even though a few (even more clueless) clients continue to request them.

That fits in well with my philosophy and the reason I called my company no diamonds, meaning not flashy.

Jakob's homepage - an exercise in leanness weighing in at 15k with no images at all - too bad it still uses tables and is not XHTML valid

Gerry McGovern

Gerry McGovern is “widely regarded as the number one worldwide authority on managing web content as a business asset” and I've been reading his weekly newsletter New Thinking for a good 5 years now. In a recent issue he writes about the core skills in writing content for the web:

1. Writing using words for how people search

We need to use the words that [people] use, rather than the words that we might like to use.

I have found this to be ever more relevant in my work in improving sites' visibility on the Internet. Here's my tip: you can find out the words people search for by the free service Yahoo Search Marketing's Keyword Selector Tool. That way you get a pretty good idea of how many times a day a certain keyphrase is searched for.

2. Making your copy reader-friendly

People scan-read your webpages, and scan-reading is actually another type of search, where people are searching on the page for the words that they care about.

That means a lot of self-explanatory sub headings, italics, and bold text to facilitate scanning.

3. Writing quality links

Your links are signposts. Your readers are asking you directions and they are following your signposts.

In other words, using links to describe the destination such as “Testimonials of people who have used our product X” rather than just using “click here”.

If you are at all involved with web content creation, Gerry's newsletter is a must.