All About Content

What’s happening to the common denominator as the population of Internet users continues to mushroom? How will the trends affect your online business?

Jakob Nielsen — usability guru and publisher of the not-coincidentally- but-yet-unnecessarily ugliest professional website ever — writes about the fact that the number of Internet users in the world has surpassed 1 billion. Based on Morgan Stanley estimates, he reports: “It took 36 years for the Internet to get its first billion users. The second billion will probably be added by 2015; most of these new users will be in Asia.”

I believe the rest of the numbers are all lifted directly from the Morgan Stanley report, but the report itself is a 60-page PDF née PowerPoint presentation that takes ages to download. So I’m going to prove Nielsen’s point that users don’t bother to look at slow-loading pages by not downloading their presentation to check. So if you’re into fact-checking and that sort of thing, the presentation is available on the Morgan Stanley site under Technology Research.

Analysts are predicting e-commerce sales will at least double from their current level when more of the existing generation of users starts shopping online. Nielsen points out “Users are not like you, and the difference between elite and mainstream users is getting bigger every day…This means that for e-commerce to fulfill its potential to double, sites must be more systematic at following the e-commerce usability guidelines.” The emphasis is taken from the original, so I’ll add my own emphasis: Users Are Not Like You.

“You” in this case would be the type of people who run and design websites, who use the Internet to sell or advertise their own products and services, etc. As important as it has been, it’s going to be even more important moving forward that e-commerce website design focus first and foremost on the user experience. (”User” in this case being people not like you.)