Great Minds in Development: Designing your Applications for Usability - Jakob Nielsen

Thanks to James McDuffie for sending me this Jakob Nielsen talk (16 minutes) aimed at developers.

Designing your Applications for Usability - Jakob Nielsen
- why you programmers are not like users;
- use paper prototyping;
- do cheap low tech testing of the paper prototyping;
- ask users to 'think out loud';
- be conservative and not too whizz bang with new features;
- Jakob's nice sites: Yahoo - simplicity, easy to use; Amazon; Victorias Secret - glamour but has simple product page and add to cart;
- Jakob's bad sites - big companies and government; bigger the company the worse the websites;
- PDF bad for screen; dont want frozen fixed size fonts on screen; good for printing though; paging doesn't work; search is poor; not appropriate to online medium of browsing, etc.
- top thing that needs improvement is search. Search on websites is often terrible.

Other talks in the Great Minds series - notice Steve Krug has a talk on there too.