user research

I chatted up a piece of new analysis from Nielsen around the office a good bit today.

In the analysis, David Martin, vice president of primary research for Nielsen Online, described an uphill battle that Twitter, the oh-so-buzzy status network, may face growing Internet market share while its user retention rates languish around 40 percent.

Troubling research findings reported by AFP: TV and video games increase teen depression risk.

Key points:

"Time spent engaging with electronic media may replace time that could be spent on social, athletic or intellectual activities that could guard against depression. ... Being exposed to media at night may also disrupt sleep important for emotional and cognitive development."

I'm not one of those people who believes today's young people have been dumbed down or made unproductive by media saturation, or spoiled by common access to privileges we considered unattainable in my middle-class, small-town childhood. Young people today are smarter and more worldly than we were.

Content site leaders pay more attention nowadays to measures of engagement beyond the venerable but flawed page view, per an overview from Jennifer Saba, writing for Editor & Publisher.

Be it time spent on site, page views per session, or frequency of visits per user, newspaper.com executives interviewed for the article want to grow 'em all.

Jakob Nielsen's latest Alertbox article, Web 2.0 Can Be Dangerous, reminds us that fancy trick plays in site development don't always bring the same great benefits as good old blocking and tackling.

Nielsen calls out Ajax, rich interfaces, mashups, so-called "user generated content" and online communities -- noting they can be valuable in proper context, but can also distract Web teams from more important user experience objectives. One example:

As I suddenly start receiving many invitations to connect on Yet Another Social Network -- in the most recent case, Plaxo Pulse -- I note the ever-astute Scott Karp contemplates the current crisis suffered by the darling of these nets, Facebook.

The new design of this Web site means a lot more than just a visual dust-off. Small Initiatives, the company, no longer represents just me, my blog and my occasional Internet design consulting.