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So, instead of the Nielsen Norman Group, we should be listening to Business Week? Only one of the lists you linked to was about HCI research--an automatic indexer of published journal articles, many of which--even in the Interface Design subsection--are only loosely connected to research toward making more usable interfaces, which, yes, is what Nielsen (rightly) harps on.

NN/g may not be "avant garde," but they're taken seriously by businesses, which makes your counterpoint of Business Week's lists faintly ironic. You don't need to be an interface researcher to make observations about the state of applied usability research, you need to be someone who studies usability in applications for living.

Go to http://www.greenspun.com, http://photo.net, and http://www.arsdigita.com. Philip will teach you the way...

In case you don't wander across it, read Philip's book about web design.

Also, some other related reading would be Nielsen Norman Group, Nielson's own site www.useit.com, and their friend tog.

Make it work first, make it pretty last. User interface is key.

Two of the three guys you mentioned are partners with Nielsen. Go to Nielsen Norman Group to see more. They seem to believe that their ideas are compatible.

Reading the summary, and having a lot of respect for what the authors had to say on other topics convinced me it wasn't worth my while to bother with WAP.

The WAP Usability Report (available in PDF form for $26) reports on a study where 20 people were given WAP enabled phones for a week and asked to report back on their experiences. The study was done in London because of the advanced state of WAP services there. Read the summary here.

• 70% of users reported they would not use WAP within a year
• One user calculated it was cheaper to buy a newspaper and throw away everything but the TV listings rather than use WAP to check the BBC schedule

our basic conclusion is that WAP usability fails miserably; accomplishing even the simplest of tasks takes much too long to provide any user satisfaction. It simply should not take two minutes to find the current weather forecast or what will be showing on BBC1 at 8 p.m.

• Jakob Nielson
• Don Norman, author of The Design of Everyday Things, Things that Make Us Smart and The Invisible Computer
• Bruce "Tog" Tognazzini, one of the original designers of the Macintosh UI and author of Tog on Interface. Check out Tog's Software Design Bookstore to learn how to write software that doesn't suck. Read Top 10 Reasons the Apple Dock Sucks.

I link these and a couple other useful sites in my brief section on Some Web Application Design Basics in Use Validators and Load Generators to Test Your Web Applications:

I'm not talking about pretty rollover buttons here, folks.

You need to understand that many web sites are developed with investments totalling many millions of dollars, only to have the effect of driving away any user who might have the misfortune to stumble across them, with much resulting heartbreak and the loss of fortunes.

Reading the summary, and having a lot of respect for what the authors had to say on other topics convinced me it wasn't worth my while to bother with WAP.

The WAP Usability Report (available in PDF form for $26) reports on a study where 20 people were given WAP enabled phones for a week and asked to report back on their experiences. The study was done in London because of the advanced state of WAP services there. Read the summary here.

• 70% of users reported they would not use WAP within a year
• One user calculated it was cheaper to buy a newspaper and throw away everything but the TV listings rather than use WAP to check the BBC schedule

our basic conclusion is that WAP usability fails miserably; accomplishing even the simplest of tasks takes much too long to provide any user satisfaction. It simply should not take two minutes to find the current weather forecast or what will be showing on BBC1 at 8 p.m.

• Jakob Nielson
• Don Norman, author of The Design of Everyday Things, Things that Make Us Smart and The Invisible Computer
• Bruce "Tog" Tognazzini, one of the original designers of the Macintosh UI and author of Tog on Interface. Check out Tog's Software Design Bookstore to learn how to write software that doesn't suck. Read Top 10 Reasons the Apple Dock Sucks.

I link these and a couple other useful sites in my brief section on Some Web Application Design Basics in Use Validators and Load Generators to Test Your Web Applications:

I'm not talking about pretty rollover buttons here, folks.

You need to understand that many web sites are developed with investments totalling many millions of dollars, only to have the effect of driving away any user who might have the misfortune to stumble across them, with much resulting heartbreak and the loss of fortunes.

Your on the right track. This whole thread started reminding me of Brenda Laurel, creator of Purple Moon SW which sold out to Hasbro. When they went formed up they looked for a market that has some money waiting to be tapped. Of course, what they found is the teen female demographic. They don't buy any games, so let's give them a game they want to buy. Takling to their audience so they cnn design a game proved very interesting. The game is about volleyball. Girls like VBall, fine. But, they found girls really did enjoy equivalent sports game aimed at men. An example, "What's most important about playing volleyball?" Responses: Playing on the team together and really dogging the other team; Pasta parties; it's okay to have a fight with your friend before or after the game, but not during!

So, that get's us that what teen boys and teen girls are looking for two drastically different things for gaming entertainment. Brenda's team found that while the game (playing volleyball) was important and had to be fun, the whole picture of the game had to be fun too (talking with other girls, yelling at the other team, the day of the game, after the game at school, etc). By the way, you can get more information about Brenda's current work at NNGroup and if you shell out 800, you can hear tell this story too.

So this is why you see games like the Sims taking off across many demographics. There is stuff in there that caters to quite a bunch of people, without offending too many. I also think that Q3 has the potential to appeal to teen girls. There is a huge social aspect and team spirit to it. Now, i am sure most teen girls would prefer to have different methods of achieving their fun than "fraggin." But mod developers can step in now. Paintball CTF, i think, is heading in the right direction. And, just think guys, Q3 you can play with a girl!

COMMENTARY
Nielsen on Usability: The Seven Sins of Copy Protection Tools

By Jakob Nielsen and Susan Farrell

Copy protection always fails, sometimes even before a product is released, but it keeps coming back in new forms. From lost passwords to broken dongles, the user always feels the pain.

The latest scheme, Content Protection for Recordable Media (CPRM), puts ID numbers on disks and drives. IBM is working to make sure CPRM will be part of every new hard disk by next summer. The 4C Entity owns CPRM, the same group that brought us CSS2, a DVD audio protection scheme that was immediately cracked and has since been withdrawn.

After the first wave of protest, hardware manufacturers agreed to let users turn off hard drive protection. But the average user can't install software using written instructions, so opting out might not be realistic for most people. Anything that makes computers harder to use should be rejected on the drawing board, because if it ever goes to market, it will be rejected by the users, who already have more complexity than they can deal with on their desktops now.

Here's what is wrong with copy protection:

1) It creates more incompatibilities. It creates problems between compliant and noncomplaint media and drives. On the user side, products that worked before will stop working, and new purchases might never work.

2) Data will be lost. Copyright protection interferes with backup and restore operations, for example when a hard drive fails and a new disk must use backed-up data. Backup, a critical task that is difficult for most users, will become even more onerous, and thus less frequently done.

3) It costs more. Any business with more than a few machines tends to install the same software on multiple computers, to save time and effort. Unique installations for each machine cause delay and extra work. Businesses will have to pay for new hardware, more system administration time, and more user support.

4) It stifles innovation that consumers want. It threatens some of the newest and most popular business models such as those used by TiVo and ReplayTV (which save TV content for later play) and Napster-like peer-to-peer networks.

5) It threatens fair use and the ability to quote material within the limits that are well permitted by law.

6) It doesn't work. Every popular copy-protected program ever released has been cracked, so it will penalize home users and businesses for no good reason. Treating users as if they were data pirates just makes them mad. Real data pirates get excited about new copy-protection schemes, because they present a new challenge.

7) It could slow down the Net. Internet improvements often involve more caching, proxies, and content negotiation for multiple devices -- in other words: copying. Even if only trusted systems are used, those systems would be under tight control, the opposite of the kind of open Internet we know today.

Copy protection makes things harder to use, and people hate it. Early phonograph records had printed licenses that forbade their resale. People believe, no matter what the fine print says, that if they buy a thing, it's theirs. Books can be given away after use. Software can be used on both desktop and laptop. A CD can be taped and played in the car. A magazine can be read for free in the library. People need to share data among the many devices they own. Any content payment scheme that doesn't allow for the time-honored ways people actually use information is doomed and should be rejected.

(Dr. Jakob Nielsen is principal of Nielsen Norman Group ( http://www.nngroup.com/ ) and author of "Designing Web Usability: The Practice of Simplicity." E-mail: jakob@useit.com. Susan Farrell is a user experience specialist at Nielsen Norman Group. Nielsen on Usability appears in this newsletter every Monday.)

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However, the WAP Usability Report which you can purchase for download from useit.com (which is an excellent site for learning how to write good websites) says that people just don't like WAP.

From the report summary:

When users were asked whether they were likely to use a WAP phone within one year, a resounding 70% answered no. WAP is not ready for prime time yet, nor do users expect it to be usable any time soon. Remember, this finding comes after respondents had used WAP services for a week, so their conclusions are significantly more valid than answers from focus group participants who are simply asked to speculate about whether they would like WAP. We surveyed people who had suffered through the painful experience of using WAP, and they definitely didn't like it.

Michael D. Crawford
GoingWare Inc