Putting me in mind of Dustin Cur­tis’ mul­ti­vari­ate ‘split’ test­ing to increase click-through rates to his Twit­ter pro­file (pre­vi­ously), Jakob Nielsen dis­cusses his iter­a­tive design process for a Twit­ter mes­sage adver­tis­ing his lat­est usabil­ity conference.

The mes­sage went from,

Announc­ing LAS VEGAS and BERLIN as the venues for our biggest usabil­ity con­fer­ence of the year http://bit.ly/UsabilityWeek

to,

LAS VEGAS (Octo­ber) and BERLIN (Novem­ber): venues for our biggest usabil­ity con­fer­ence ever http://bit.ly/UsabilityWeek

I am by no means a high-output Twit­ter user and I dis­like ‘How to Twit­ter’ arti­cles with a pas­sion. Nielsen’s lat­est I quite like because he notes that, in the case of Twit­ter and other micro-blogging ser­vices, text is a form of UI in itself.

It’s a com­mon mis­take to think that only full-fledged graph­i­cal user inter­faces count as inter­ac­tion design and deserve usabil­ity atten­tion. As our ear­lier research has shown, URLs and email both con­tribute strongly to the Inter­net user expe­ri­ence and thus require close atten­tion to usabil­ity to enhance the prof­itabil­ity of a company’s Inter­net efforts.

The shorter it is, the more impor­tant it is to design text for usability.