Usability in the Wild

For this exercise, let’s take a real live example of a website, and see how “usable” it is.

Go the the US Census Bureau website, http://www.census.gov/ and find out the population of the United States. Where did you find it? How long did it take?

For an analysis of this website, visit Jakob Nielsen’s website (www.useit.com/) , and see how most people responded to this site, and how they did with that same question. Click here for “fancy formatting”.

Interesting. It seems as if our best instincts may not be the right answer.

What did Jakob Nielsen say the website should do? Do you agree?