What if Jakob Nielsen had a blog?

Usability ROI Declining, But Still Strong

The expected improvement from usability is smaller than it used to be for two reasons:

• We have now harvested most of the low-hanging fruit from the truly horrible websites that dominated the lost decade of Web usability (approximately 1993–2003). In those early years, Web design was abominable — think splash screens, search that didn't find anything, bloated graphics everywhere. The only good thing about these early designs was that they were so bad that it was easy for usability people to be heroes: even the smallest study would inevitably reveal several immense opportunities for improvement.
• Usability budgets have not increased substantially, even as the Web has gotten better. As the full report discusses in detail, during the last decade, the share of project resources allocated to usability has held steady at around 10% in those enlightened companies that include usability in their design lifecycle. Yes, many more companies do usability now than ever before. However, individual projects don't see much more funding, even though they're now challenged with identifying a higher level of design improvements.

http://www.useit.com/alertbox/roi.html

10 Best Intranets of 2008

The winners of the award for 10 best-designed intranets for 2008 are:

• Bank of America, US
• Bankinter S.A., Spain
• Barnes & Noble, US
• British Airways, UK
• Campbell Soup Company, US
• Coldwell Banker Real Estate Corporation, US
• IKEA North America Service, LLC, US
• Ministry of Transport, New Zealand
• New South Wales Department of Primary Industries, Australia
• SAP AG, Germany

Most of the winning designs are traditional, company-wide intranets, but IKEA won for its regional intranet covering North America. Also, Coldwell Banker's intranet works somewhat like an extranet: it connects 3,800 independently owned and operated residential and commercial real estate offices, while appearing to users as a local office intranet rather than a corporate intranet.

http://www.useit.com/alertbox/intranet_design.html

Free Report : 75 Best Practices for Design of Websites and Intranets, Based on Usability Studies with People Who Use Assistive Technology

The report is richly illustrated with 46 screenshots of designs that worked well or that caused difficulties for users with disabilities in the usability tests as well as 23 photos of assistive technology devices. The examples and guidelines are directly based on empirical observation of actual user behavior.

This report addresses the usability of websites and intranets. The report should be used together with the standards for technical accessibility of web pages. Obviously, technical accessibility is a pre-condition for usability: if users cannot get at the content of the web pages, they also cannot use the website. Technical accessibility is necessary, but not sufficient for usability of a design. Even if a site is theoretically accessible because it follows the technical accessibility standards to the letter, it can still be very hard to use for people with disabilities.

The fact that technical accessibility is insufficient to guarantee great usability, ease of learning, and high user performance should come as no surprise. After all, countless usability studies of websites and intranets have documented severe usability problems, low success rates, and sub-optimal user performance, even when testing users with no disabilities. Being able to see everything on a webpage certainly doesn't guarantee that you will know what to do on the page or the optimal way to perform your task. This observation holds equally true for users with disabilities: just because a site is technically accessible doesn't mean that it will be easy or fast to perform tasks on the site.

This report addresses the second level in improving the user experience of websites and intranets for people with disabilities. Yes, you must ensure technical accessibility but you should also ensure good usability, ease of use, and high productivity for employees and customers with disabilities.

http://www.nngroup.com/reports/accessibility/