Quoted: Summary:Users now do basic operations with confidence and perform with skill on sites they use often. But when users try new sites, well-known usability problems still cause failures.

Jakob Nielsen’s recently published web usage findings on browsing and search behaviors. The findings also reconfirm some of the existing usability guidelines (i.e. E-mail newsletters DO drive users back to the site, open new browser windows is confusing to users, non-standard ui elements are bad idea, ...etc.)

The test subjects to these findings were biased to “richer, intelligent” professionals. If these people are having trouble with understanding website ui, the rest of online users are likely to experience similar pain.

Getty has been steadily outsourcing its creative/produciton department from Seattle to overseas. Now, speculation that Getty Images is selling itself.

Quoted: Getty Images, the world's biggest supplier of pictures and video to media and advertising companies, has put itself on the auction block and could fetch more than $1.5 billion ...

OOh, yummy interaction design reference.

New Nintendo site looks a lot like apple.com

Quoted: Nintendo.com has relaunched, and a view source shows you that it now sports Dojo, Mootools, and much more script.

Quoted: The casual games industry, for better or worse, is beholden to game distribution websites known as portals (or ‘evil portals,’ depending on who you are). Each of the portals carries a large catalog of games that is fairly unique, but regardless of this fact, casual surveyors of the industry find the portals to be about as dissimilar as the games they carry -- which is to say, not very.

Gerry McGovern article on Customer Carewords

Quoted: The Long Neck is where the business case of your website lies. It is the small, crucial set of tasks that your customers really come to your website for.

Quoted: Friday, armed with GPS units and trowels, woven baskets and whistles, groups of organized treasure hunters will scour the earth within a 150-mile radius of Seattle

Showcase of 404 error page designs, part 1

Quoted: Every day you visit one of them. The pages, which don't exist any longer, have moved to a new server or never existed at all.

Yesss!

Quoted: Visual designers need to be involved early in the research process in order to define a sound, defensible visual strategy.

A great article and insight about how PMs, Engineering, Marketing and Design can work together to create products. Jonathan Korman of Cooper gives a good role definition and addresses hard questions about where progect management and interaction designers fit.

Quoted: People often ask how interaction designers should fit into their companies. If the company cannot take good advantage of it, the most brilliant interaction design ...