go.

I just read an interview [cioinsight.com] from CIO Insight with usability virtuoso Jakob Nielsen. I’d recommend reading the whole thing, but I’ll list a few things that jumped out at me.

“Bad search continues to be a problem today… It’s usually not unified search—no one search can search everything.”

“The other problem about search is the content [is] typically poorly described in terms of things like the headline and the summaries… So if there was just one thing we could fix on the Web, and for intranets as well, I would say let’s fix search.”

I have not personally had much experience in this as a designer, but as a user I find myself typing “site: yaddayadda.net” into Google quite often. This is not an option that many users are aware of (or likely willing to use anyway).

On IA:

“…information is not structured in the way that people think of it.”

This is something I am trying to be very conscious of when designing new sites. I find that my clients are a tough sell on usability testing, so it is for now very informal and too much relies on my instincts.

In a sidebar entitled Pet Peeves

Neglect to use a liquid layout that lets users adjust the home page size.

I’m in the habit of building fixed-width home pages and liquid content pages. I have a hard time letting go of the appearance on that first impression page (assuming non-search-engine visitors, I guess). In defense of this practice, I should say that I rarely design for larger than 740px wide and, naturally, the unstyled version fits in anyting.

And something that would never have occured to me, but makes all sorts of sense (Three cheers for research):

Another thing that was quite striking was that several of these best intranets had reduction of e-mail as being one of their priorities in their project, finding ways of taking information away from e-mail and sticking it into a more kind of organized and searchable space on the intranet. It was probably because you can provide better features on the intranet than you can an e-mail reader, but it’s also partly because people are just getting so buried in their e-mail, we’ve got to take things out of e-mail if at all possible.