Usability Snoozability

Jakob Nielsen applies usability to Kerry and Bush's campaign newsletters. Both fail. Pretty miserably.

Both fail equally and most miserably at "Differentiating newsletter from junk mail"--a 33% score. I'm not surprised. I subscribe to the newsletter from, er, one of these candidates (guess which one - hah!), and a) it comes too often, and b) [which is strongly related to a)] my eyes glaze over now every time I see it. Or most times anyway.

Of course, in typical Nielsen fashion, he ends his Alertbox, a newsletter I usually pay some attention to (but then it's my job), with a grandiose claim:

In 1996, I wrote a review for The New York Times on the campaign websites for Bill Clinton and Bob Dole. I concluded that the two sites scored about even in usability, and I provided several recommendations for improving each site. Two weeks after the article ran, Clinton's site had been updated to incorporate all of my recommendations. In contrast, Dole's site stayed the same throughout the campaign. We all know who won the 1996 election, so maybe this example will motivate the campaigns to pay closer attention to usability this time around.

That article on the Clinton/Dole sites is pretty interesting, too, and it links to both sites, only one of which is still up (Dole's). It looks so 1996.