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if you trust the relevance of his research its far, far cheaper to just purchase the report than hire someone to do the same research yourself. I'd suspect most
by curiousgeorge 18y ago
if you trust the relevance of his research its far, far cheaper to just purchase the report than hire someone to do the same research yourself. I'd suspect most developers with niche products have niche usability needs that make it lesson relevant. If you're building a giant web portal, it seems relatively inexpensive for access to decent comparative stats.
- mechanical_fish 18y agoits far, far cheaper to just purchase the report than hire someone to do the same research yourself Amen to that. You think $350 is expensive? That's like three hours of consultant time. For someone with Nielsen's resume, more like 1-2 hours. But, hey -- if you think it'll improve the situation, I might be willing to support your effort to give Nielsen a government grant that pays for his salary and his lab and lets him release all of his research for free.
- ojbyrne 18y agoAnd PCs used to cost $3000. Now they cost $500 (other than Macs). Operating systems used to require consultants and were priced for enterprises, until Windows came along and completely changed the market. There's lot of instances where a dramatic cut in price opened a new market for products, and it sure seems like this is the case here. I also find the whole "site licensing" of PDFs (which obviously means DRM) kind of obnoxious. Finally I find that the useit.com approach of putting up short parts of reports, followed by a link to the paid report, to be borderline sleazy. Perhaps I'm influenced by the "free" culture that is so pervasive these days.