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.
The 10 winners used a total of 49 different products for their intranets' technology platforms. Clearly, intranet technology continues to be an unsettled field. 
The consulting business has an old saying: "Fast, cheap, and good -- pick any two." The notion is that if you want something done quickly and inexpensively, it'll be of poor quality; if you want it quickly and done well, it'll be expensive, and so on. Although true in many areas, this maxim doesn't hold for one important aspect of usability: methodology. 
Does it matter that most films offer such an unrealistic depiction of usability? Mainly, no. A movie's purpose is entertainment, not task performance. So, go ahead and employ user interfaces and interaction techniques that are entertaining and would never work in the real world. 
In theory, there's no reason why you can't have many levels of progressive disclosure. Even though the secondary level is for experienced users, there are still limits to how complex it should be; some options might be so specialized or rare that you should relegate them to a tertiary level. In practice, designs that go beyond two disclosure levels typically have low usability because users often get lost when moving between the levels. 
The point is simply that users' basic expectations have settled and you should design accordingly, unless you have something that's substantially better. A small improvement won't work if it requires an unconventional interaction style. 
Apple's study focused at the wrong level of work. Pasting spreadsheet cells is not a user task, it's an operation at a low interaction level. More meaningful productivity has to be measured at a higher level, where users string together a sequence of operations to achieve their real-world goals. 
The first step to dealing with participation inequality is to recognize that it will always be with us. It's existed in every online community and multi-user service that has ever been studied. 
In this case, we discovered the IA problem through user testing that revealed a high frequency of navigation errors. If you know in advance that you have an IA problem and want to focus on it exclusively in your testing, you can conduct a card sorting study. For most projects, however, I prefer to keep an open mind and do standard user testing, which addresses all design aspects. In this case, for example, we found problems beyond the IA, including those with the site's writing, visual design, forms, error messages, and a service that was difficult to understand.
Ultimately, if you run your research as an entertainment franchise, you'll weaken your findings and compromise product improvement. All the usability problems you missed due to poor testing methodology will remain in the interface, and your executives will conclude that usability doesn't have as high an ROI as I’ve been promising them. 
Avoid "politically correct" terminology. When writing about accessibility, for example, talk about blind users or low-vision users, not visually challenged users. First, nobody searches for a made-up phrase like "visually challenged." Second, "blind" and "low-vision" are more precise: they refer to two separate groups of people. Each group uses different assistive technologies and has a different experience of your website. They therefore have distinct usability needs. 
What's the value of 58 pageviews? 
Apple and Microsoft have both published reports that attempt to quantify the productivity gains from bigger monitors. Sadly, the studies don't provide credible numbers because of various methodological weaknesses. My experience shows estimated productivity gains of 5-10% when users do knowledge work on a big monitor. This translates into about an 0.5-1% increase in overall productivity for a person who does screen-focused knowledge work 10% of the day. There's no doubt that big screens are worth the money. 
Mainly, though, the big patterns of Web use remain remarkably robust. This is explained by the same phenomenon that dictates the long-term durability of usability guidelines. In both cases, conclusions are independent of changes in technology or fashion. Rather, they are due to the fundamental nature of human behavior. 
Luckily, you don't have to measure usability to improve it. Usually, it's enough to test with a handful of users and revise the design in the direction indicated by a qualitative analysis of their behavior. When you see several people being stumped by the same design element, you don't really need to know how much the users are being delayed. If it's hurting users, change it or get rid of it. 
The average B2B user experience is not very supportive of customers. As a result, the websites fail to provide business value because they ultimately turn prospects away rather than turning them into leads. The only good news in this assessment is that most sites can dramatically enhance their business value by simply following a few more usability guidelines, and thereby offer a more customer-centered environment. It's time to upgrade B2B to the level of user experience that mainstream websites have long offered. 
As the table shows, the Web has the second-highest individual variability of the five computer-use types. 
Seen over the seven-year period from 1998 to 2005, usability salaries have been remarkably steady. If we disregard the bubble-induced bump, the long-term change is a trend toward slightly lower entry-level salaries. This difference is probably due to the fact that more and more universities are now pumping out graduates with some usability skills. Usability people are still difficult to recruit, but at least there are more of them around these days. 
In summary, it takes about twenty years to move from stage 2 (extremely immature usability) to stage 7 (very mature usability). Companies probably need another twenty years to reach the last stage.
It's fascinating to watch the slow-motion replay of users' eye movements as they read and scan across a page. Every page has reading issues beyond the dominant F pattern I'm discussing here. For example, users scan in a different, more directed way when they’re looking for prices or other numbers, and an interesting hot-potato behavior determines how users look at a list of search engine ads. We also have many findings on how people look at website images.
Showing sample prices is not just for B2B websites, though they tend to need it more because of the complexity of their products and services. Using sample prices also applies to some B2C sites. Consider, for example, a gardening service. While lot size and landscaping elements differ, the website could give service prices for a few typical lots so users could get an approximate idea of what they'd pay. 
Now, if only someone would make a Wiki solution with great usability that average people could use to author strongly interlinked hypertexts. That would be something worth almost any level of hype. The way to knock out Microsoft Office is not to reimplement its feature set from two versions ago in a different programming language. We don't need bad copies -- we need collaborative authoring of hyperspaces as opposed to linear documents. 
Content rules. It did ten years ago, and it does today. People don't use things they don't understand. Writing for the Web is still undervalued, and most sites spend too few resources refining the information they offer to users. 
Given that slow outliers account for 6% of Web usage, it's unacceptable to simply write them off. Although the data shows that most users will avoid bad luck in their next online task, you can't just say "better luck next time"; if you do, their next user experience will likely be on somebody else's website.