Slashdot Mirror

StikyPad writes "Comcast is reportedly removing its oft-maligned 250GB data cap, but don't get too excited. In what appears to be an effort to capitalize on Nielsen's Law, the Internet's version of Moore's Law, Comcast is introducing tiered data pricing. The plan is to include 300GB with the existing price of service, and charge $10 for every 50GB over that limit. As with current policy, Xfinity On Demand traffic will not count against data usage, which Comcast asserts is because the traffic is internal, not from the larger Internet. There has, however, been no indication that the same exemption would apply to any other internal traffic. AT&T and Time Warner have tried unsuccessfully to implement tiered pricing in the past, meeting with strong push back from customers and lawmakers alike. With people now accustomed to, if not comfortable with, tiered data plans on their smartphones, will the public be more receptive to tiered pricing on their wired Internet connections as well, or will they once again balk at a perceived bilking?"

Hugh Pickens writes "PC World reports on a study showing that reading from a printed book — versus an e-book on any of the three tested devices, an iPad, Kindle 2, and PC — was a faster experience to a significant degree. Readers measured on the iPad reported reading speeds, on average, of 6.2 percent slower than their print-reading counterparts, while readers on the Kindle 2 clocked in at 10.7 percent slower. Jacob Nielsen had each participant read a short story by Ernest Hemingway. Each participant was timed, then quizzed to determine their comprehension and understanding of what they just read. Nielsen also surveyed users' satisfaction levels after operating each device (or page). For user satisfaction, the iPad, Kindle, and book all scored relatively equally at 5.8, 5.7, and 5.6 on a one-to-seven ranking scale (seven representing the best experience). The PC, however, did not fare so well, getting a usability score of 3.6."

Mark writes "Usability expert and columnist Jakob Nielsen wants to abolish password masking: 'Usability suffers when users type in passwords and the only feedback they get is a row of bullets. Typically, masking passwords doesn't even increase security, but it does cost you business due to login failures.' I've never been impressed by the argument that 'I can't think why we need this (standard) security measure, so let's drop it.' It usually indicates a lack of imagination of the speaker. But in this case, does usability outweigh security?"

theodp writes "The WSJ reports that the controversial practice of framing seems to be making a comeback on the Web. Big sites like Digg, Facebook, Ask.com and StumbleUpon have all begun framing links recently, joining the likes of Google, which employs the technique for Image Search. Long ago, Jakob Nielsen argued that 'frames break the fundamental user model of the web page,' but, today's practitioners contend, 'it's a feature, not a bug,' and say it provides publishers with massive distribution they wouldn't otherwise have."

athloi writes to tell us usability expert Jakob Nielsen is stressing the importance of well-thought-out articles as opposed to off-the-cuff blog postings. "Blog postings will always be commodity content: there's a limit to the value you can provide with a short comment on somebody else's comments. Such postings are good for generating controversy and short-term traffic, and they're definitely easy to write. But they don't build sustainable value. Think of how disappointing it feels when you're searching for something and get directed to short postings in the middle of a debate that occurred years before, and is thus irrelevant."

Ant writes "A UseIt.com article talks about user interfaces (UIs) in film that are more exciting than they are realistic, and heroes have far too easy a time using foreign systems. The way Hollywood depicts usability could fill many a blooper reel. Here are 10 of the most egregious mistakes made by moviemakers. From the article: '3. The 3D UI - In Minority Report, the characters operate a complex information space by gesturing wildly in the space in front of their screens. As Tog found when filming Starfire, it's very tiring to keep your arms in the air while using a computer. Gestures do have their place, but not as the primary user interface for office systems.'"

bigenchilada writes "Jakob Nielsen, former Sun Distinguished Engineer and now usability guru, proposes "that search engines are sucking out too much of the Web's value, acting as leeches on companies that create the very source materials the search engines index." He says that the value provided by search engines may be tilting too much in favor of the search engines. The web sites that create content are now simply fodder for the search engines' revenue stream."

Ohreally_factor writes "Web Usability Guru Jakob Nielson has recently written a piece for his Alertbox Blog that does not bode well for video bloggers: Static, talking heads are even more boring on the internet than they are on TV. Nielson backs up his ideas with data from a study done on eyetracking while watching web video. One of Nielson's caveats: 'keep distracting elements out of the frame of your shots. If there's a road sign in the video, for example, users will try to read it and will thus miss some of the main content.'"

Ohreally_factor writes "Web Usability Guru Jakob Nielson has recently written a piece for his Alertbox Blog that does not bode well for video bloggers: Static, talking heads are even more boring on the internet than they are on TV. Nielson backs up his ideas with data from a study done on eyetracking while watching web video. One of Nielson's caveats: 'keep distracting elements out of the frame of your shots. If there's a road sign in the video, for example, users will try to read it and will thus miss some of the main content.'"

Ant writes "Useit.com's Durability of Usability Guidelines article says about 90% of usability guidelines from 1986 are still valid. However, several guidelines are less important because they relate to design elements that are rarely used today... The 944 guidelines related to military command and control systems built in the 1970s and early 1980s; most used mainframe technology. You might think that these old findings would be completely irrelevant to today's user interface designers. If so, you'd be wrong."

Ant writes "Useit.com's Durability of Usability Guidelines article says about 90% of usability guidelines from 1986 are still valid. However, several guidelines are less important because they relate to design elements that are rarely used today... The 944 guidelines related to military command and control systems built in the 1970s and early 1980s; most used mainframe technology. You might think that these old findings would be completely irrelevant to today's user interface designers. If so, you'd be wrong."

Unqualified code-monkey Garote submits his annotated version of Neal Stephenson's In The Beginning Was The Command Line, updated to discuss UI design theory and fill in some of the gaps from the last five years. (And yes, he has been granted permission from Neal to do this.) There's plenty more to cover of course: Will the command-line last only as long as the keyboard? How will desktop search technology change our workflow? What about the 3D interface? Scroll to any random paragraph in the essay and you'll find something worth expounding on. What's ahead for the next five years?

TuringTest writes ""The user-centric UI webzine" UserInstinct has published a usability overview of the latest version of the GNOME desktop. While their conclusions and recommendations are not mind-blowing, it includes two interesting appendices with a survey of new users (and their reactions to the system) and a list of common tasks of modern computer users with a commentary on how Gnome performs in each one. Note that usually You Only Need to Test With 5 Users (this report tests 4), you need to test additional users when an interface has several highly distinct groups of users and thus the conclusions in this review should not be taken as definitive."

griffinn writes "Jakob Neilsen recently conducted a study comparing the perceived annoyance level of two commuters having a face-to-face conversation and one commuter talking on the mobile phone. Interestingly enough, subjects were also asked whether the ring tone is annoying, and people didn't find the ring to be particularly bad."

danila writes "In his latest column the king of usability discusses competitive testing of website usability. Among other things he suggests that "Some tasks might be much easier on your competitor's site, and those tasks would indicate areas where you can learn from the competition and improve your design." Overall, a very informative and insighful article, if not for a small paragraph in the end. "You can patent usability innovations to keep the competition from stealing them. Most Web projects are managed by marketing departments that have no experience with the patent system. Websites, however, are inventions and should be protected when you invest in developing something new." How can you learn from competition if every potential improvement is already patented?"

danila writes "In his latest column the king of usability discusses competitive testing of website usability. Among other things he suggests that "Some tasks might be much easier on your competitor's site, and those tasks would indicate areas where you can learn from the competition and improve your design." Overall, a very informative and insighful article, if not for a small paragraph in the end. "You can patent usability innovations to keep the competition from stealing them. Most Web projects are managed by marketing departments that have no experience with the patent system. Websites, however, are inventions and should be protected when you invest in developing something new." How can you learn from competition if every potential improvement is already patented?"

xtrucial writes "Jakob Nielsen of usability fame has a new article up about the perhaps-unexpected power of tiny websites: 'Considering that the Web as a whole will have about 4 trillion page views this year, the [low-traffic] sites might seem irrelevant with their pitiful millions of page views. But within their niche they dominate.'" (In particular, Nielsen is talking about weblogs.)

friedegg writes "Usability expert Jakob Nielsen's latest alertbox examines the future of text advertising on the web. Text based advertising has become increasingly popular recently partly because of Google's success with it. Nielsen notes that advertising works well on search engines because users visit them with the specific intent of going elsewhere. He also thinks it's only a matter of time before the novelty of text advertising wears off, and users develop "box blindness" in addition to their current "banner blindness." It isn't totally negative, though, as he thinks the low-end media format forces advertises to express a focused and succinct message that users may take more seriously."

KalvinB asks: "According to The Case for Micropayments, Nielson makes the case that subscriptions fence you in because you either pay nothing and get nothing or pay a large fee. I'm curious as to why a large fee is the only option. Perhaps in 1998 bandwidth was as expensive as gold but five years later I propose A Viable System for Micropayments and how to implement it. The cost can easily be calculated either arbitrarily or by determining the amount of bandwidth the average user uses per month or year. I'm curious as to how viable you think this system is and if you have any ideas for improvement. Mainly in calculating cost and accepting payments. I think the biggest obstacle to micropayments is a complete misunderstanding of the term 'micro.' In the article it's talking about paying several dollars per page at some sites. By my calculations that file better be 5GB or more. It's greed, I think more than anything, that's limiting it's acceptance. Sites don't want to charge a reasonable fee and people think their ISP bill is an all access pass to the Internet. The idea of actually paying for products they use and paying more than the product was produced for is suddenly lost when they go online."

yoey writes "Another famous Nielsen year-end wrapup: "Every year brings new mistakes. In 2002, several of the worst mistakes in Web design related to poor email integration. The number one mistake, however, was lack of pricing information, followed by overly literal search engines.""

Tom Davies asks: "Every GUI platform has a document which describes the conventions developers should use when building GUIs with that toolset. There are also lots of good resources for Web site usability (e.g. Jakob Nielsen's useit.com). But what about web -applications-? I am developing an intranet application which is aimed at people who use it every day, not those who stumble on a web site and need to be able to use it immediately. It can have a higher learning curve, but must deliver more 'client/server like' usability. Are there any sites/books which address how to make HTML GUIs for applications?"

aaronvegh writes "Slashdot readers have been griping a lot lately about the lack of an alternative to the desktop GUI. In his latest Alertbox column, Jakob Nielson (love him or hate him) is proposing that tactile, phsyical interfaces will be the next evolution in how we interact with machines. An interesting read, and a relief from the tired "the desktop GUI is dead, and we'll replace it with....uh....""

Grab a cuppa joe, or whatever you drink at this time of day, and read on for this edition of Slashback, with updates and additional information on the strange (but statistically iffy) dangers of microbiology, Google's contest winner, and Sony's Linux kit for the PS2.

Location, location, location. A lot of people were interested in the Google contest whose winner was announced last week; Dan Egnor creator of that entry, writes "FYI, I've released the code for the winning Google contest entry under the GPL."

You mean they weren't just saying Hi? Anonymous Goodfella writes: "In an update to the Dangers of Being a Microbiologist, the AP [news.com.au] is reporting an attack on a Tennessee state medical examiner who gave evidence to an inquiry into the death of infectious diseases researcher Don Wiley. Coroner O.C. Smith was left tied with barbed wire to an apparent explosive."

Jakob Nielsen says Flash No Longer Evil Allen Varney writes "Given that Flash MX now supports the back button, Unicode, and accessibility, and has introduced p$user interface components, usability guru Jakob Nielsen today updated his famous 'Flash: 99% Bad' rant from October 2000. (Scroll down to see the update, stirringly titled 'Flash Now Improved.') His Nielsen Norman Group has formed a strategic alliance with Macromedia to start educating one million Flash designers in the fundamentals of good design. You did know that Flash .SWF is now an open format, right?"

Step 47: remove blindfold, scream. For those anxiously awaiting (or judiciously pondering) the Linux upgrade kit for the PS2, some words to consider from reader silvaran, who writes: "I just received my Playstation 2 Linux kit in the mail. I was disappointed to find that none of the monitors (3) that I had function properly with it. So I took to following the instructions on a blind install. It's not the most elegant of solutions, but it works. You need a blank memory card to install, but everything else is included in the kit. I'm on my way to a full Linux installation, complete with 100mbit networking, 40-gig HD and a USB keyboard and mouse; also included are full documentation on taking advantage of the PS2 hardware under Linux."

That blind install looks not for the faint of heart -- still, it would be nice if every distro included a simple walk through like that for when a monitor just isn't handy :)

Reader microwerx adds some a few more words of advice and caution: "[T]he PS2 Linux Kit will not read CDRs, so you'll have to use the supplied 10/100 Ethernet Adapter to get stuff in and out of the machine. One very good thing about the PS2 Linux Kit was the documentation regarding the Emotion Engine chip, etc. There's at least 2000+ pages of information regarding how it all works in glorious PDF format. There is also a OpenGL-like library (ps2gl) that supports the hardware. I also understand that SDL also works. Another is the amount of equipment you receive. You get a USB mouse and keyboard, a 10/100MBPS Ethernet Adaptor, A VGA convertor, and a 40Gb Hard drive. And all of this stuff appears to have some future use (you may have to remove Linux to use them nonetheless). So, once again, unless you just want the novelty of having a PS2 Workstation, developing console games, or setting up a small home server, I don't believe that you'll gain too much additional functionality. An overall rating of 3 1/2 stars out of 5 is certainly in order (because after all, it is for game development)."

An Anonymous Coward writes: "Jakob Nielsen's latest Alertbox usability column details how kids use the web. Even if you don't design sites for kids, some of the results are very interesting. As you might expect, kids like sound and animation more than adults. They're also much more likely to click on ads ... but mostly because they don't realize that's what they are. And although there are some differences, the testing shows kids really aren't that different than adults, preferring consistent, simple and clear interaction. (And they hate slow load times, too!)"

An Anonymous Coward writes: "Jakob Nielsen's latest Alertbox usability column details how kids use the web. Even if you don't design sites for kids, some of the results are very interesting. As you might expect, kids like sound and animation more than adults. They're also much more likely to click on ads ... but mostly because they don't realize that's what they are. And although there are some differences, the testing shows kids really aren't that different than adults, preferring consistent, simple and clear interaction. (And they hate slow load times, too!)"

legLess writes: "Jakob Nielsen's latest Useit column lists his opinion of the best HCI research labs, from 'The Dawn of Time' (1945) 'til now. Xerox PARC made the list each decade, naturally. He says that future HCI research is in jeopardy, partly due to Universities backing away from 'real-world' research, and partly because 'HCI has rarely been the first priority of new research organizations, so by the time research managers recognize the need for it and build up a world-class HCI team, it's often too late.' Is he right about the best labs? Is he right about his other conclusions?"

legLess writes: "Jakob Nielsen's latest Useit column lists his opinion of the best HCI research labs, from 'The Dawn of Time' (1945) 'til now. Xerox PARC made the list each decade, naturally. He says that future HCI research is in jeopardy, partly due to Universities backing away from 'real-world' research, and partly because 'HCI has rarely been the first priority of new research organizations, so by the time research managers recognize the need for it and build up a world-class HCI team, it's often too late.' Is he right about the best labs? Is he right about his other conclusions?"

ObligatoryUserName asks: "Recently, a gaggle of Amazon Honor System, and PayPal logos (or cheeky text equivalents) have been proliferating on a number of great, beloved and/or famous/infamous web sites. While still other sites are turning to membership programs. The advertising model seems to have failed (or is in the process of failing) and according to yesterday's great interview, micropayments aren't going to work out either. So, I was wondering, how can we save these sites? Is the major cost bandwidth? (Sites with bandwidth sponsors seem, so far, less likely to ask for micropayments.) Is most of the money going to the salaries of content creators? If some non-profit organization or the government (as per PBS) were to pay for bandwidth for exceptional/popular sites, how much would it help?" It's a decent question, and one that I keep bringing up because a workable solution has yet to present itself. Before, the chorus was micropayments (as the minor chord chimes in with the yet-to-be-tested Street Performer's Protocol). With micropayments in doubt, what other routes can sites follow for the funding they need to exist?

We got a lot of (shall we say) slightly impertinent questions for Web Standards Project co-founder Jeffrey Zeldman, but that's okay. He reads Slashdot and knows the nature of the beast, and he's hard-core enough to give as good as he gets. So set your humor module to high, then sit back and enjoy Mr. Zeldman's (appropriately impertinent) answers to the 12 questions we forwarded to him.

1) Here's my question:
(Score:5, Insightful)
by FascDot Killed My Pr

If you're such a hotshot web designer, why have you committed one of the cardinal sins of web design: Putting an "entry page" that does nothing but suck bandwidth and make it difficult to "back" out of a site?

Jeffrey:

I'll answer this one piece by piece.

"If you're such a hotshot web designer."

Never claimed to be. Roblimo wrote that glowing description. It's not surprising that some of you, who have no idea what I do, were pissed off when those words of high praise took you to a very simple, low-bandwidth, personal site.

I wish Rob had said "Zeldman is a co-founder of The Web Standards Project" (WaSP), and had explained what the WaSP does, maybe even mentioning the role we played in getting Netscape to throw out its old rendering engine and begin building Mozilla around the standards-compliant Gecko core. I'm guessing people would have overlooked my supposed "design sins" or their distaste for the color orange on my personal site if they had a better idea about what I actually do.

For those who don't know, the WaSP organized a petition drive to persuade Netscape to throw out its old rendering engine and build its new browser around Gecko. Then-group-leader George Olsen of WaSP, along with ThunderLizard's Jim Heid, got 2,000 developers to sign the petition. Netscape is a company that listens - at least, for the last two years, it has been listening - and you all know the result: an upcoming browser that is designed to fully comply with HTML 4, CSS-1, the W3C DOM, XML, and EcmaScript.

No disrespect to Roblimo either. I dig the guy. And what he said is true in a sense. I *am* a web designer and writer, and a lot of the work I've done over the past five years *has* gotten imitated, for better or worse. For instance, oddly enough, the original Mozilla.org (http://www.mozilla.org) was copied from the simple HTML-and-CSS layout I did The Web Standards Project (http://www.webstandards.org/): from the technique, to the color palette, to the crude four-pixel black outlines around content areas. Don't bother checking; the new Mozilla layout has evolved away from that original look, though it still bears trace elements of the original design. A lot of you probably do remember the original Mozilla layout. I'm sure when Roblimo saw it, he realized it was copied from http://www.webstandards.org and I think that's the kind of thing he was referring to in his overly kind introduction to my work.

By the way, I wasn't upset by what Mozilla did; I was flattered by it. You may think it is ugly design, though I'm sure that none of you said so to Mozilla because you believe in the project. It's weird to me that the same people who dig Mozilla would be rude in their comments to someone who, at least in a small way, helped influence the direction of that browser, and who also influenced the initial DESIGN of that project, but whatever. I also talk with Microsoft, because the goal of WaSP is to get standards in *all* browsers, and the fact that I talk to engineers at that company may make me evil incarnate in your book. I can deal with that. If we get better browsers, I'll be satisfied.

I do get copied a lot and often those copies are better than the original. In that sense "VIEW SOURCE" functions like "OPEN SOURCE." ;) I am happy when someone takes an idea of mine and makes it better (and their own).

"why have you committed one of the cardinal sins of web design"

I've been designing websites for five years. I don't claim to be a genius and I'm far from the best designer on the planet, but your take on cardinal sins of a profession you do not participate in is about as meaningful as my comments on your programming decisions would be.

You are parroting Jakob Nielsen or some other expert whose work you've read. You haven't read my work on the same subject (no problem) and you don't know my work as a designer (no problem). Just as in programming, design is about decisions. A designer never sins. He/she makes informed decisions. If you get to know the work, you may understand why those decisions were made. If you never bother to engage with the work - if you merely believe that all design must conform with a small set of rules written by one or two people - you don't understand the nature of the thing you are criticizing. Especially if you spend all of five seconds looking at it, and then rush to be the first to post a rant. There are rules of grammar, too, and James Joyce threw them all out. True, I ain't him. But I am me. All designers make decisions, and if the entire web looked like http://www.useit.com I don't think that would be such a great thing. Anything that departs from the look of http://www.useit.com is violating at least a few of Jakob's "rules," and that's the nature of the beast.

"Putting [up] an 'entry page' that does nothing but suck bandwidth and make it difficult to "back" out of a site?"

The bandwidth sucked is exactly 4K. I think you can handle it.

The "entry page" is a temporary placeholder while I rethink the front end of my personal site. Notice the words "temporary," "placeholder," and "personal." The previous front page was navigational in nature, and it is archived at http://www.zeldman.com/mozillatest.html . The name refers to the fact that the page revealed a bug in recent builds of Mozilla. I have left it online so the Mozilla folks can use it to track down and fix that bug, which they are doing now.

Recently, I've been focused on WaSP and A List Apart (http://www.alistapart.com/), a web design magazine and mailing list I co-founded with Brian Platz. The content on my personal site (275+ pages) has not been my most recent focus, so I determined a while back that it was silly to stop the visitor with a primarily navigational page. I should explain that some people visit zeldman.com for entertainment like The Ad Graveyard; a completely different audience visits for web design info, such as the Ask Dr Web tutorial; and so on. To accommodate those very different visitors, I initially had a core page that was navigational. I didn't put real content on page one, because I was accommodating maybe six completely different audiences, and there was nothing in all that content that would appeal to ALL of them. On http://www.alistapart.com/ I start with content on page one, because the audience is more unified.

Even that old navigational page (http://www.zeldman.com/mozillatest.html), with all its rollovers etc., was very low-bandwidth. I recently got to look at it while stuck at an airport in Stockholm. The airport had five Windows boxes sharing one 56K modem. I looked at some of my favorite sites, and they were all crawling onto the screen. I was pleased that my own front page loaded instantly. I design for low bandwidth, which explains why my work rarely looks like that of "such a hot shit designer." Back to the point. I haven't yet figured out how to restructure the front end of my site, so I put up a 4K placeholder with a bone-simple rollover and a 6 second refresh to the single page at my site that I have been focusing on lately.

Now you know why I have a temporary entry page; now you know why it does "nothing" (it is temporary, and what it does is redirect you); and now you know that it does not suck bandwidth.

How it "makes it difficult to 'back' out of the site" is a mystery to me, so I can't comment on that clause in your question. Personally I find database driven pages much harder to navigate and back out of than 4K html pages. And with browsers that suck, frames-based pages can also be tough to navigate. My 4K page is frameless HTML.

2) I have a question:
(Score:4, Insightful)
by Skinka

What's with that small font www.zeldman.com, haven't you read any (web) usability guides?

Jeffrey:

Yes, I've read them, yes I've written on the subject, yes yes yes.

Along with another WaSP member, I helped influence Microsoft to make ALL web text resizable by the user in IE5/Mac for reasons of accessibility and usability, and we are hoping to get the same from Mozilla. (At the moment, this feature is only available in IE5/Mac. It should be in every browser. It's not in the Windows version of IE and it's obviously not in the current version of Navigator.)

Why small fonts? Personal design decision on a personal site. You can enlarge the type in some browsers, not all. That day is coming.

There are methods of CSS that allow you to resize type in *all* browsers.

Why do I often avoid those methods?

Because they are not supported in most "CSS-capable" browsers.

Absolute font-size keywords are broken in Navigator 4 (all platforms) and IE5/Windows.

Percentages and ems are broken in Netscape 4.

Points are meaningless on computer screens, and the reliance on points in Style Sheets is a widespread authoring error.

Until all browsers support standards, designers will be stuck using pixels or FONT SIZE tags. Or simply making no effort at all to control the appearance and size of type on the web page. If this bothers you, join The Web Standards Project.

(Warning: it is orange. If you "can't get past the color" then I guess you'll have to let big browser companies determine the fate of the web.)

Unless you design web sites every day, you have no idea of the compatibility nightmares involved. But in your own work, I'm sure you have plenty of examples of brain-dead decisions by others that force you to use hacks and workarounds. It's the same in web design.

At the moment, the main text at http://www.zeldman.com/coming.html (the one page in all my work that most Slashdotters seem to have looked at) is laid out with ems. This is wonderful, scalable technology. You can easily enlarge or reduce the type in just about any browser.

Except, of course, that it doesn't work at all in most versions of Navigator 4. If you're using Navigator - and you know you are - you will see large ugly type, not the type treatment I intended. Until we have standards, that's just the way it will be.

3) Not to flame, but...
(Score:5, Insightful)
by mr.nobody

I find it hard to ask HTML questions to someone who has committed the cardinal sin of taking away the status bar with JavaScript.

Jeffrey:

Another cardinal sin.

Hmm. Let's see.

The status bar *does* reveal the url of the page it links to - just like an untreated status bar would do. It also provides ADDITIONAL INFORMATION AND COMMENTARY. I guess that's a bad thing. I can't see why, but I guess I'll take your word for it. URL = good, URL + additional information = bad. Because you say so.

The title tag also provides additional information, but Question #12 told me that that was okay, even good. Whew! That's a relief.

4) where's the interview
(Score:4, Interesting)
by geekpress

Jeff, I programmed for a web design company in which design issues totally trumped more practical concerns like download time. (In one case, I was forced to create absurdly complex html tables just so that the designer could get his one-pixel rounded corners on his notecard design.) What do you see as the appropriate balance between aesthetics and practical usability?

P.S. That company is now out of business, thank goodness!

Jeffrey:

I almost always design for low bandwidth.

I was creative director at a web firm and had designed a layout with thin black borders (yes I do this same thing over and over again) for a database driven site that would be creating tables on the fly. The design effect would not render in Navigator, but the page still looked fine in Navigator, even without those little black outlines.

It was possible to FORCE Navigator to display the effect by surrounding every table with an additional, empty table. That is sometimes okay, obviously - I've been doing it since we could begin applying rudimentary styling to tables - but on a large page full of data, it would unnecessarily increase the bandwidth per page, force all browsers to burn cycles as they calculated the appearance of complex table-in-table displays, possibly cause display errors, and completely yoke the content to the presentation, making it that much harder to fix later, when we have better browsers.

So I told the company president it was a usability nightmare and a waste of resources and bandwidth and therefore not worth doing.

He told me to do it anyway.

So I quit my job and started my own company.

Rounded edges, high bandwidth, all that stuff can be fine in the right situations, as long as alternatives are provided and rules of accessibility are respected. Usually I persuade my clients to go in the low-bandwidth direction, and I almost always go low-bandwidth on the noncommercial sites I do (zeldman.com, http://www.webstandards.org/ and http://www.alistapart.com/ ).

But high bandwidth is fine for the right audience. Consider http://www.praystation.com, which is a brilliantly designed site by Joshua Davis. It's amazing work. The audience for that site is primarily Joshua's fellow designers, and most of them have T1 or DSL access. Since the site's goal is to push design as far as it can go on the web, and since the audience is known to have fast connections and a desire to see great design, there is absolutely nothing wrong (and lot right) with the higher-bandwidth road taken by this project.

5) Optimism?
(Score:5, Funny)
by Chalst

How hopeful are you that Microsoft can be coaxed into making IE standards compliant? What exactly do you think Microsoft's motive was in not supporting HTML 4.0 completely?

Jeffrey:

It varies by the hour. Sometimes I think they are going to do this and simply have not committed to it because they're not sure they can pull it off. Sometimes I suspect that as the current market leader (guys with the most users) they think they don't have to bother with this. ("Our way *is* the standard." That kind of thinking.) And sometimes I reckon that they're doing this to fuck up Mozilla. ("You're going to support standards? Well, we have more users. You lose.") I don't *know* what they're thinking, but I suspect that different people there are thinking combinations of all the above.

I do know there are engineers there who are committed to supporting standards. Not only because I've met some of them through my work with WaSP, but also because - in the case of IE5/Mac - they've actually pulled it off. Remember, Microsoft (along with Netscape, Sun, invited experts, etc.) helped come up with these standards in the first place. Why would you design blueprints and then not follow them when you build the house? The engineers who participate in the standards process are committed to complying with standards. Some people in management may not be. Or they may be delaying, for short-sighted competitive reasons, or from fear of committing until they are sure they can do it right.

HTML 4 - the LAST HTML - includes dozens of accessibility improvements, and it is insane for any company not to fully support that. Without full support for HTML 4, millions of web users get hurt. That's morally wrong, and it's also just plain bad for business. I think that in time, all browser companies, including Microsoft, will come to see that. I also think the W3C's recent hiring of a conformance manager (http://xmlhack.com/read.php?item=517) signals that the W3C will soon take a more active role in "helping" companies get with the program, support standards, and stop screwing up developers and web users in a game where everybody - including the browser companies - eventually loses.

6) Balancing Technologies
(Score:5, Insightful)
by Proteus

As you are no doubt aware, the technology that drives web site design is advancing rapidly. However, there are still a lot of users who run older browsers, or prefer to use text-only browsers such as Lynx.

Obviously, one wants to reach as large an audience as possible, but not "lag behind" too far. How do you go about balancing the use of newer technology on a site without alienating users of older software, disabled users, and text-only browsers?

Jeffrey:

Using HTML 4, ALT tags, and the TITLE tag goes a long way toward achieving this goal.

So does using CSS for type, instead of FONT FACE and FONT SIZE tags that yoke content to presentation.

I do both these things, and all the other little things you have to do, for instance with framesets. I think there may be some really old (1996) framesets at zeldman.com where I left out full content inside the noframes tags. I'm cleaning that up as quickly as I can. At ALA http://www.alistapart.com/), wherever I used framesets, I included the full text inside the noframes tags, and I also included TEXT versions of all articles.

The next stage is full separation of content from structure, and that means using HTML 4 and CSS (and eventually, replacing HTML 4 with XHTML; and eventually, migrating to XML).

We can't safely do that yet. Gecko is still in development, Netscape 4 has appalling "support" for CSS, IE5/Windows has better but far from complete support, and the only released browser that gets it right - IE5/Mac - has a 6% market share.

SOON. Not soon enough, but SOON, we will look back on this era of stupidity and laugh. Oh, how we will laugh. This is the TRON era and we are striving to reach the MATRIX era.

7) Reverse scenario question...
(Score:5, Interesting)
by Jonny Royale

Have you ever seen anything come from a browser publisher "extending" a standard (Microsoft, Netscape, other), and thought "Gee, I wish that was in the standard"? Examples?

Jeffrey:

Yes.

LOW SRC was a funky old tag from Netscape (dating back to Netscape 1.1) that allowed you to slip a low-bandwidth image into place, and then have it replaced by the more bandwidth-intensive image when the latter finished downloading. For people with very slow connections, it was a useful hack. It also enabled creative web designers to add a certain amount of "SFX magic" (cough) to even the most primitive pages, viewed by the oldest browsers, under the most adverse conditions. That's gone. Too bad. I miss it.

Because of browser offsets in all released versions of Navigator and most versions of Explorer, I wish the "four horsemen of non-validation" (leftmargin, topmargin marginwidth and marginheight) had made it into HTML 4.0 transitional. We won't need them eventually, but until the browsers are smarter, we still do need them. The W3C is always ahead of what the browsers can deliver, of course; but by discouraging these dumb proprietary tags, the W3C has put us in the position where PAGES THAT WILL NOT WORK without these tags will fail at http://validator.w3.org. That kind of failure discourages developers from building standards-compliant pages. It is a small thing, and it is transitional, but DURING THE TRANSITION, I would have liked to see those four stupid tags get approval with a benevolent sigh.

On the other hand, designers who know what they are doing may include these tags and ignore those validation errors, but don't tell the W3C I said so.

Given the brain-dead way Navigator 4 and IE4/5/Windows handled absolute font size keywords in CSS, I *sometimes* wish font size tags were not discouraged YET. I hate them and hardly ever use them, but (for instance) there's no way to get small type in Linux that is actually READABLE without relying on these dumb old non-standard tags. What I really wish in this case, of course, is that Netscape and Microsoft hadn't fucked up this simple CSS technology. So I take the FONT SIZE tags thing back. Uh, never mind. I just wish Netscape and Microsoft had gotten CSS right the first time.

8) Banners
(Score:5, Interesting)
by TheTomcat

This is only vaguely related to design, but directly related to the web, and functionality.

We all know that banners don't work anymore. The only way a business can profit from banners is to show thousands per day. Most users don't even SEE banners anymore. We avoid them the same way we dig in the couch for the remote when commercials interrupt The Simpsons.

Do you have any suggestions to make future, content-based sites profitable?

Jeffrey:

There are several issues here. One is, a lot of the best work is done as a labor of love, and always will be. Those who need a revenue model before they are willing to even think about working will lose one of the golden opportunities of the web, which is free expression and the building of communities, regardless of financial issues. For instance, Slashdot was born as a community and still is one. Eventually, Slashdot got into a position where it could make money, but Slashdot is true to itself and was not corrupted or changed by any commercial considerations. So it is possible to make a good thing and not blow it when the cash register starts jingling. But a lot of other sites and communities have turned to dreck when money was involved.

We all agree that banners suck - Roblimo even wrote an article for ALA on that subject, back when ALA was just getting launched. With a big enough readership, banners *can* be profitable, as they are at Slashdot. But I agree that most of us just hate 'em.

Sponsorships are another possible means of revenue. "This issue of Webmonkey brought to you by Hewlett-Packard." With an entertaining HP minisite available at the click of a link, for those who care. Kaliber 10000 (http://www.k10k.net) has gotten Apple sponsorship, and all that means is, there's a tiny Apple link in the top right hand corner of the front page. If you click it, you get a popup window with text on why the site's designers like their Macs, and links to some current movies in Apple Quicktime format.

The Cluetrain guys have spoken about this model of corporate sponsorship as well.

I think about it sometimes. For instance, http://www.alistapart.com/ could be "brought to you by" Macromedia or Adobe. But to tell the truth, I don't really pursue this idea because I'm not motivated by money when it comes to creating web content. I simply want to create or choose the right content, and totally control it, and I'm not sanguine that I could do that if I *had* corporate sponsorship. Thinking about it some more is on my to-do list, but it's about 500 layers down in the list. I make enough money designing websites that I don't worry about "revenue models" for my content sites. It is a real issue, though. Just one I haven't bothered with personally, yet.

9) Jeff, your CSS suck
(Score:4, Insightful)
by Nicolas MONNET

I quote from your website:

H1 {font: bold 24px verdana, helvetica, arial, sans-serif; margin-top: 0xp;}
H4 {font: 12px verdana, helvetica, sans-serif; margin-top: 0px; margin-bottom: 10px;}

So why, tell me, WHY did you use PIXELS (px) instead of POINTS (pt), thereby overriding my painfully crafted DPI settings, rendering your all page unviewable on my Linux machine?

Jeffrey:

Refer to the answer to Question 2. Also refer to this Word from the WaSP column:

http://www.webstandards.org/wfw/ieah.html

The best way to style text - and the way the W3C recommends - is to use relative sizes or absolute size keywords.

Both these methods are completely broken in Navigator 4. Totally frickin' useless. Don't shoot the messenger. Netscape agrees, and that's why they threw out their old rendering engine and started from scratch.

And absolute size keywords are stupidly mis-supported in IE4/5 for Windows, where "medium" means large, and "small" means medium.

Faced with this maddening stupidity on the part of browser makers, designers/developers have two choices:

Do not style text at all. Have a nice day.

*OR* rely on pixels, which work in all "CSS-capable" browsers.

I sadly choose the latter until the browsers fully comply with W3C standards.

As to POINTS versus pixels, points are absolutely meaningless on the web, and the fact that they are used by thousands of developers who should know better proves only how little CSS is understood by the development community.

Certain point sizes may work on your platform in your style sheet. That proves that certain point sizes work on your platform in your style sheet. Cross-platform it is not transportable, and points are print-based units of measurement that have no meaningful relationship to the wonderful world of monitor resolution.

For a good discussion of CSS problems, see Todd Fahrner's "Beyond the Font Size Tag: Practical HTML Text and Styling" at http://style.metrius.com/font_size /livetext.html (Unfortunately, even some of *THESE* techniques do not work in more recent versions of Navigator 4.)

In a few months, there will be exactly two browsers that get CSS-1 right: Mozilla/Nav 6 for all platforms, and IE5/Mac which we have now. Since neither has dominant marketshare, developers will still face huge obstacles when trying to do something as SIMPLE and BASIC as size text on the web. Many will stick with pixels, which are the only CSS technique that actually WORKS across browsers and platforms.

In addition to all these nightmarish problems with our browsers, there are special challenges with Linux, because unless Linux users install additional scalable fonts, you can follow all the rules for good CSS, and avoid "problem" font sizes, and still create pages that look jaggy or are unreadable on a lot of people's machines. I worry about this all the time, but I don't have a solution for it. I have actually gone back to using the stupid The way to advance the medium is to get absolute font size keywords and relative font sizes right in CSS, finish implementing HTML 4, and give us the W3C DOM, XML, and EcmaScript. (And then wait two years for users to upgrade.)

10) Pixel based alignment and HTML
(Score:4, Insightful)
by mcelrath

One of the most disturbing trends that I see in web design these days is the trend toward trying to control layout at the pixel level. As HTML (Hypertext Markup) was not intended to be a graphics language, what is your comment on this?

Jeffrey:

Separation of style and content is the way forward.

The problem is the browsers.

When I revised my "Ask Dr Web" tutorial at http://www.zeldman.com/askdrweb/, along with other pages at http://www.zeldman.com/, to use CSS layouts instead of tables, certain versions of Navigator 4 began crashing.

Actually crashing from basic CSS-1.

I wrote about this at A List Apart, ("The Day the Browser Died") and because of this, Netscape invested some time and resources to fixing some of these bugs in Navigator 4. It didn't catch them all, and it didn't catch them in Linux. These bugs will never be fully fixed in Navigator 4, because Netscape is wisely spending its energy to finish the Mozilla browser. Unfortunately, this means that Netscape users will continue to face serious usability hazards throughout the web until Netscape 6 is released ... *OR* it means that developers will continue to use TABLES for layouts for the next two years (as Jakob Nielsen has predicted).

If you look at these pages - http://www.zeldman.com/steal.html or http://www.zeldman.com/icon.html are other examples - you will see that we are talking about extremely BASIC layouts. An expert from the CSS pointers group actually volunteered hours of her time trying alternate combinations of the very basic CSS on those pages to see if she could find ways to stop Netscape from crashing. She could not; neither could I. Netscape did what it could for its 4.0 users, but it can't do anything more until the next generation is released.

On my personal site I made the tough decision to leave these pages as-is. I don't have time to recode them all using tables.

You can agree or disagree with that decision.

Linux folks can either use the Mozilla or Opera betas to navigate those pages in safety and comfort.

It's worth noting that W3C pages also crashed Netscape 4, for the same reason.

What happens when Netscape's browser is this badly damaged? I get hate mail from people who don't understand the issues involved. I also got a letter of thanks from Netscape's Eric Krock, because good companies WANT us to help them find bugs in their software.

As an example of this, many sites (including yours) use font size=1 to acheive a font that is fairly uniform in pixel size across browsers. Anyone with a high-resolution screen will tell you that this is highly annoying, since it results in an almost unreadable font.

See above for the explanation as to why developers are stuck using 1994 technology to support late-1990s browsers. The same questions, the same answers.

The good thing - the ONLY good thing - about the font size tag is that it is user-resizable. The rest of this has been answered above.

Forcing netscape to use a larger font size often destroys the layout of the page. What's worse, some pages use dynamic fonts and other features to force this on the user.

Right, although in some cases it is justified.

As another example, many pages use the table , and layer to specify the exact size in pixels of portions of the page, and then put a little notice at the bottom ("This site best viewed at 800x600") or some such.

Yes, that is usually a bad design decision. Whenever possible, I use what Glenn Davis (WaSP and Project Cool co-founder) calls "liquid" design ... design that reflows to exactly fit the visitor's monitor. That's almost always a better way to go. Examples of my liquid designs include http://www.alistapart.com/, http://www.the-adstore.com, and most of zeldman.com. If you dig long enough in zeldman.com, you'll come upon pages older than the NYC subways, that simply use BAD design ... though at the time, it wasn't all that bad.

Liquid design is not always appropriate but it is generally best.

What are standards groups doing to fix this?

Nothing. The W3C can't make better or more intelligent designers out of people, and neither can the WaSP, whose sole purpose is to agitate for W3C standards in browsers (and eventually in web authoring tools).

We can try to lead by example. http://www.webstandards.org/ is liquid (aside from the front page, which is "semi-liquid" owing to the large low-rez graphic) and it validates.

MEMBERS of standards groups can write articles on the subject and hope that people read them. Of course, if people "can't get past" a 4k splash page, they will not learn about my articles on the subject.

Will I be looking at pages designed for 800x600 (or worse, 640x480) with my 1920x1440 screen forever? Will persons with laptops at 640x480 be unable to read the web soon? Will standards bodies ever require percentage-of-screen width and height specifiers, or even better, implement table width=30ch to specify sizes in relation to the current font size?

Standards bodies can recommend certain authoring practices, and they can develop standards that make such practices possible, but they cannot enforce good authoring.

11) Evaluate Slashdot
(Score:5, Interesting)
by Pseudonymus Bosch

What would you change, what would you add, what would you remove in Slashdot?

Jeffrey:

It's a community and it works. It has achieved visibility, notoriety, and even commercial success without giving an inch. Pretty awesome achievement. What would I change?

Sometimes the longer threads take a long time to load, due to back-end technology, platform and server issues. The technology works better on Linux than it does on my platform of choice (Mac OS) but, hey, that's okay.

I know you want me to comment on the design. Design is subjective. Black backgrounds and teal are not my favorite color scheme (though I used black backgrounds at the 1995 Ad Graveyard (http://www.zeldman.com/ad.html) and the January 1997 Furbo Filters so who am I to talk? The main thing I was trying to do at Furbo was get CSS to work - and to let people know about Craig Hockenberry's and my Furbo Filters, which were the only Photoshop plugins at the time that dealt with the web-safe color palette - at least to our knowledge.)

I might change the color scheme and some other things if Rob Malda went on a crack run and asked me to redesign Slashdot, but that ain't likely to happen. And I think the design of Slashdot is just fine. It focuses you on the breaking stories, allows you to read more (or not), and provides access to almost everything else on the site via small navigation units. In terms of usability it is damn good, and it has plenty of attitude.

Of course, it commits the "cardinal sin" of teal, but I can get past that.

12) Do you agree with Nielsen?
(Score:4, Interesting)
by Pseudonymus Bosch

I have no idea about you and your views, but I have read lots of the Alertbox columns by Jakob Nielsen.

Do you agree with him? Do you disagree? What about?

Jeffrey:

I agree with his comments on oral sex and wearing white after Labor Day.

And I like that he can get $25,000 to talk for an hour. I'll do the same for half that amount.

I also agree with Jakob that most websites should be usable by as many people as possible.

What I have done about that is help found The Web Standards Project, so we can actually achieve that goal instead of using duct tape and lasagna to build sites that work for "most" people. And I try to make my pages accessible in spite of the limitations of current browsers and some of the cross-platform issues discussed above.

If you are interested in my views, you can read them at http://www.alistapart.com/, Adobe.com (here, http://www.adobe.com/we b/columns/zeldman/20000320/main.html, for instance), http://www.webstandards.org/ and of course at http://www.zeldman.com/. If you can get past the 4k splash page.

At least you share the use of TITLE attributes in hyperlinks (a good feature that Slashdot shouldn't chomp away).

Thanks! The reason Slashdot chomps title tags is probably because they are not supported in Netscape yet. They are an important usability feature, and in some browsers they also offer nifty low-grade special effects - along with the opportunity for contextual ampliciation or ironic commentary.

jeffrey

Can't act. Can't sing. Can dance a little.

http://www.zeldman.com
http://www.alistapart.com
http://www.happycog.com
http://www.webstandards.org

Jakob Nielsen is no Web-designer-come-lately. He's a respected, thoughful researcher and educator. When he speaks, (smart) people listen. The first review below is one of more than five hundred by reviewer Danny Yee. Likely to interest Slashdotters are reviews in the categories popular science, science fiction, and computing. Our second reviewer is Cliff Lampe, who brings his own expertise in human-computer relationships to the table. Readers may also want to read the Slashdot interview with Nielsen.

Designing Web Useability (The Practice Of Simplicity) author Jakob Nielsen pages 417 publisher New Riders 1999 rating 8/10 reviewer Danny Yee, Cliff Lampe ISBN ISBN 1-56205-810-X summary Down-to-earth, practical advice on making Web sites work at all levels.

Review One: Danny Yee

Designing Web Usability is the most important book on Web publishing yet to appear. While it contains little that is novel, at least to those who have read Nielsen's www.useit.com Web site and other such resources, the lessons it teaches have not reached widely enough: there are all too many Web sites that are a continual source of frustration and stress to users. (Nielsen begins by explaining why he chose to write a printed book on Web design: for comprehensive, sustained arguments online reading is not yet as effective as print. Another consideration is that, going by the utter un-usability of so many corporate Web sites, there must be many web site managers who don't actually use the Web: some of these might read a printed volume.)

At the core of Designing Web Usability, and two thirds of it by page-count, are chapters on page, content, and site design. The first covers cross-platform design, the importance of minimizing response times, how to use links effectively, and the advantages and disadvantages of style-sheets and frames. The second covers writing for the Web, micro-content (titles, headlines and so forth), and multimedia content (images, animation, audio, and video). The last covers navigation, home pages ("splash screens must die"), search support, and "URL design." Other chapters cover special usability issues with intranets, accessibility for users with disabilities, and internationalization and localization; in a final chapter Nielsen takes a stab at predicting the future of the Web.

Because Designing Web Usability addresses underlying ideas rather than specific technologies, it will date far less rapidly than most books on Web publishing. It doesn't contain as much as its 400 pages would suggest, since a lot of space is used for screen shots of example Web pages. (These are not, however, gratuitous, as is often the case with books on HTML.) Web publishing is very different from paper publishing, but Designing Web Usability is a high quality, usable book -- only a few minor things got past the proof-readers. Check Danny's Other 500 Reviews

Review Two: Cliff Lampe

The Scenario

In Designing Web Usability, Jakob Nielsen codifies his ideas and wisdom on user-centered design. This is the first book in a two-parter, to be followed by Ensuring Web Usability, which will be more analysis centered.When I first was reading through this book, the irony of reviewing a usability book for Slashdot absolutely thrilled me. A common complaint about Linux, whether deserved or not, is that it is completely unusable. Except for a few shots at both the Windows and Mac OS, Nielsen obviously stays away from this topic. On the other hand, his advice on Web design is well researched, sensible, and right on target. Since human/computer interaction is what may be referred to as my "bag," I found this book impressively concise and comprehensive.

For those who may have missed the usability boat, Nielsen advocates user-centered design. This is the radical idea that a computer is a tool for managing information, not an end in itself. As many of us know, this concept is remarkably easy to lose in the rush to make everything work in the first place. When it comes to usability, everyone has their ideas about what they like, and tend to include them in their own designs. The problem is, we creators of Web sites may be too far removed from our users by experience or some other perspective to be designing in their best interest.

Eminently practical, Nielsen gives step-by-step advice on how to design with your user in mind. His examples are backed by screenshot examples and extensive user studies. The first section deals with page-level design, with advice on colors, layout and use of special features. Further sections of the book deal with site and intranet design, usability issues surrounding various disabilities and the future of Web design. One especially welcome chapter deals with actual creation of content in a Web environment. Writing for the Web is vastly different from writing for other media, like newspapers or magazines, but this is rarely recognized.

Once Nielsen has dispensed with the advice that is applicable to the Web environment we all deal with today, he spends the last section discussing the future. As the author says, we tend to overestimate the short-term effects of technological change and underestimate the long term effects. Keeping this in mind, Nielsen makes some stabs at predictions of his own (like the gradual erosion of the Post Office) that seem accurate and eerie at the same time. He makes the good point that most of the user interfaces we deal with today are descendents of the 1984 Mac. That's like using your little aquarium net to snare salmon. With the eventual dissolution of Web browsers will come a need for user interfaces that more capably deal with a glut of information.

I have some advice for reading this book. Treat it like a computer manual, and don't necessarily read it from cover to cover. Read the section on content design for sure, but depending on your familiarity with human/computer interaction principles, you may want to poke around a little more. Fortunately, and in typical Nielsen fashion, the book is laid out perfectly to make this kind of browsing convenient. That being said, if you do read straight though it, you won't be disappointed.

What's Bad?

There are a couple of concerns I had with the book. One is that the layout is wacky, though I understand this is more the fault of the publisher than Nielsen. There is a straight narrative, like in any other manual, but it is broken frequently by screenshots and pull-out comments that attract attention away from the main narrative. The integration is good enough that you can pick up where you left off easily enough, but a tighter bundling of content with the visuals would have been welcome.

Secondly, the last chapter should have had some content stolen for the preface. Many of the limitations mentioned by Nielsen immediately beg the question of higher bandwidth on the horizon or more powerful computers. The book is so practical I almost found myself playing devil's advocate in response. At the same time, the advice is so well backed up by research, that to rail against it feels a little bit like yelling at your mom for telling you vegetables are good for you.

What's Good?

This book is so efficiently packed with tons of great advice that I read some sections again and again to make sure I didn't miss anything. Nielsen does not waste time over-elaborating his points, which is a welcome change from most books of this sort. The data from actual user studies are important to prove to a skeptical web developer that these considerations are real, and the actual examples of the Web pages and sites give incredible insight to the point being made. One of the pages captured even has a Jon Katz article on it.

So What's In It For Me?

If you are responsible for developing Web sites, or just a duffer who makes his greeting card collection available on the Web, read this book. The advice is sound, researched and proven over and over. If you are a usability engineer, this book may be on the general side for you, but otherwise it is the best introduction to these concepts assembled in one place that I have even seen.

As I was reading through this book, I kept thinking of various pages and sites that I had designed. What would be said if one of those pages had been captured and displayed? Would it be an example of what to do, or what only an idiot would do? These are good questions for any of us.

Purchase this book at ThinkGeek.

Jakob Nielsen is no Web-designer-come-lately. He's a respected, thoughful researcher and educator. When he speaks, (smart) people listen. The first review below is one of more than five hundred by reviewer Danny Yee. Likely to interest Slashdotters are reviews in the categories popular science, science fiction, and computing. Our second reviewer is Cliff Lampe, who brings his own expertise in human-computer relationships to the table. Readers may also want to read the Slashdot interview with Nielsen.

Designing Web Useability (The Practice Of Simplicity) author Jakob Nielsen pages 417 publisher New Riders 1999 rating 8/10 reviewer Danny Yee, Cliff Lampe ISBN ISBN 1-56205-810-X summary Down-to-earth, practical advice on making Web sites work at all levels.

Review One: Danny Yee

Designing Web Usability is the most important book on Web publishing yet to appear. While it contains little that is novel, at least to those who have read Nielsen's www.useit.com Web site and other such resources, the lessons it teaches have not reached widely enough: there are all too many Web sites that are a continual source of frustration and stress to users. (Nielsen begins by explaining why he chose to write a printed book on Web design: for comprehensive, sustained arguments online reading is not yet as effective as print. Another consideration is that, going by the utter un-usability of so many corporate Web sites, there must be many web site managers who don't actually use the Web: some of these might read a printed volume.)

At the core of Designing Web Usability, and two thirds of it by page-count, are chapters on page, content, and site design. The first covers cross-platform design, the importance of minimizing response times, how to use links effectively, and the advantages and disadvantages of style-sheets and frames. The second covers writing for the Web, micro-content (titles, headlines and so forth), and multimedia content (images, animation, audio, and video). The last covers navigation, home pages ("splash screens must die"), search support, and "URL design." Other chapters cover special usability issues with intranets, accessibility for users with disabilities, and internationalization and localization; in a final chapter Nielsen takes a stab at predicting the future of the Web.

Because Designing Web Usability addresses underlying ideas rather than specific technologies, it will date far less rapidly than most books on Web publishing. It doesn't contain as much as its 400 pages would suggest, since a lot of space is used for screen shots of example Web pages. (These are not, however, gratuitous, as is often the case with books on HTML.) Web publishing is very different from paper publishing, but Designing Web Usability is a high quality, usable book -- only a few minor things got past the proof-readers. Check Danny's Other 500 Reviews

Review Two: Cliff Lampe

The Scenario

In Designing Web Usability, Jakob Nielsen codifies his ideas and wisdom on user-centered design. This is the first book in a two-parter, to be followed by Ensuring Web Usability, which will be more analysis centered.When I first was reading through this book, the irony of reviewing a usability book for Slashdot absolutely thrilled me. A common complaint about Linux, whether deserved or not, is that it is completely unusable. Except for a few shots at both the Windows and Mac OS, Nielsen obviously stays away from this topic. On the other hand, his advice on Web design is well researched, sensible, and right on target. Since human/computer interaction is what may be referred to as my "bag," I found this book impressively concise and comprehensive.

For those who may have missed the usability boat, Nielsen advocates user-centered design. This is the radical idea that a computer is a tool for managing information, not an end in itself. As many of us know, this concept is remarkably easy to lose in the rush to make everything work in the first place. When it comes to usability, everyone has their ideas about what they like, and tend to include them in their own designs. The problem is, we creators of Web sites may be too far removed from our users by experience or some other perspective to be designing in their best interest.

Eminently practical, Nielsen gives step-by-step advice on how to design with your user in mind. His examples are backed by screenshot examples and extensive user studies. The first section deals with page-level design, with advice on colors, layout and use of special features. Further sections of the book deal with site and intranet design, usability issues surrounding various disabilities and the future of Web design. One especially welcome chapter deals with actual creation of content in a Web environment. Writing for the Web is vastly different from writing for other media, like newspapers or magazines, but this is rarely recognized.

Once Nielsen has dispensed with the advice that is applicable to the Web environment we all deal with today, he spends the last section discussing the future. As the author says, we tend to overestimate the short-term effects of technological change and underestimate the long term effects. Keeping this in mind, Nielsen makes some stabs at predictions of his own (like the gradual erosion of the Post Office) that seem accurate and eerie at the same time. He makes the good point that most of the user interfaces we deal with today are descendents of the 1984 Mac. That's like using your little aquarium net to snare salmon. With the eventual dissolution of Web browsers will come a need for user interfaces that more capably deal with a glut of information.

I have some advice for reading this book. Treat it like a computer manual, and don't necessarily read it from cover to cover. Read the section on content design for sure, but depending on your familiarity with human/computer interaction principles, you may want to poke around a little more. Fortunately, and in typical Nielsen fashion, the book is laid out perfectly to make this kind of browsing convenient. That being said, if you do read straight though it, you won't be disappointed.

What's Bad?

There are a couple of concerns I had with the book. One is that the layout is wacky, though I understand this is more the fault of the publisher than Nielsen. There is a straight narrative, like in any other manual, but it is broken frequently by screenshots and pull-out comments that attract attention away from the main narrative. The integration is good enough that you can pick up where you left off easily enough, but a tighter bundling of content with the visuals would have been welcome.

Secondly, the last chapter should have had some content stolen for the preface. Many of the limitations mentioned by Nielsen immediately beg the question of higher bandwidth on the horizon or more powerful computers. The book is so practical I almost found myself playing devil's advocate in response. At the same time, the advice is so well backed up by research, that to rail against it feels a little bit like yelling at your mom for telling you vegetables are good for you.

What's Good?

This book is so efficiently packed with tons of great advice that I read some sections again and again to make sure I didn't miss anything. Nielsen does not waste time over-elaborating his points, which is a welcome change from most books of this sort. The data from actual user studies are important to prove to a skeptical web developer that these considerations are real, and the actual examples of the Web pages and sites give incredible insight to the point being made. One of the pages captured even has a Jon Katz article on it.

So What's In It For Me?

If you are responsible for developing Web sites, or just a duffer who makes his greeting card collection available on the Web, read this book. The advice is sound, researched and proven over and over. If you are a usability engineer, this book may be on the general side for you, but otherwise it is the best introduction to these concepts assembled in one place that I have even seen.

As I was reading through this book, I kept thinking of various pages and sites that I had designed. What would be said if one of those pages had been captured and displayed? Would it be an example of what to do, or what only an idiot would do? These are good questions for any of us.

Purchase this book at ThinkGeek.

We gathered questions for Jakob Nielsen Monday; here are the answers. Interesting, possibly even essential reading for anyone involved in software or Web site design.

1) /. usability rating? (Score:5, Interesting)
by Col. Klink (retired) (wklink@yahoo.com)

Would you care to comment on the usability of Slashdot? Good? Bad? Ugly? Be sure to read the apache section before answering that last one.

Jakob:

Obviously, Slashdot has great usability for its targeted user base of nerds. The proof is in the pudding, in that they use it so much and keep coming back. There is nothing here but pure user interface: nothing you buy or get, so if people use it, it must be because it is good. This said, many elements of the interface would present too much complexity for more average users. For example, the many different ways of viewing and sorting threaded discussions is quite difficult to understand. How do you really know what you will see if you click on one of the links from the home page?

There are three elements of Slashdot that I particularly like:

• Simplicity in the layout itself: focus on content rather than flash.
• The liberal use of linking - in fact, the site lives off the ability to link to the rest of the Web. Too many other sites forget that hypertext is the foundation of the Web and provide nothing but a closed world.
• The reputation manager effect coming from the moderation system.

2) Short vs long pages (Score:5, Interesting)
by Anonymous Coward

In most of your writings and interviews, you seem to be recommending short pages as always better than long ones. Sometimes you qualify this as applying only to 'navigation pages'-- but you never define that term. Aren't there more complex rules about when it's okay to have a long page? Don't you yourself find it frustrating when you have to load multiple pages, when one longer page could easily have held all the info?

Jakob:

This very page itself is getting to be too long :-)

It depends on how you look at this page. If you think of it as a single interview, then it is best to preserve it as a single page since the users would just skim over those questions that don't interest them. If you think of it as a set of answers, it would be better to have a short summary of the entire collection and then have links to individual questions and answers. Unfortunately, the Web is currently too slow to support this type of hypertext (we need subsecond response times for true freedom of movement). It would be nice to have a more advanced model of Web hypertext that would support alternative views of both atomic information objects and composite information objects.

Talking about navigation pages, brevity does rule. Users need to be able to get an overview of their choices without having to scroll too much. Ideally without having to scroll at all. If you need to scroll while making the choice of where to go next, then you are forced to keep promising options in short-term memory after they scroll out of view. The Slashdot audience may not fully appreciate the problem of having to keep items in short-term memory since you only become a programmer if you are good at doing this. Most people are not. All users will furthermore suffer from the tendency to select among the visible choices: if something looks like a good answer and as the best answer, then users will often follow that link without scrolling down to see if there might be an even better link on the invisible part of the page.

3) Browsers compensating for bad sites (Score:5, Interesting)
by Ed Avis (epa98@doc.ic.ac.uk)

To what extent will people start using their browser's features to compensate for bad Web sites? For example, your browser might automatically convert frames to tables, or precis long chunks of text, or concatenate lots of bitty pages into one easily-readable page. Since there will always be badly designed sites out there, do you think this is a useful sticking-plaster?

Jakob:

Great idea. The Web has always been based on this notion to some extent. For example, the Back button in the browser (as opposed to relying completely on site-supported navigation) and the ability to make the font bigger or smaller (as opposed to hoping that every site gets it exactly right).

We may have temporarily abandoned some of the user control over the Web in the chase for better-looking pages, and one of the worst sins in using CSS is to specify text in an absolute font size that doesn't change if the user needs bigger or smaller text.

I am hoping that future generations of browsers will finally live up to their names and actually help users browse (or Navigate or Explore, as the case may be). If the big browser vendors won't do it, then that's a potential market for other browsers like Opera and iCab or for various types of browser add-on tools.

4) Patent culture vs Open Source culture (Score:5, Interesting)
by tbray

You are the holder (or co-holder) of quite a number of patents. Can Open Source software builders who construct, for example, something that "prints a hyperspacial document" or "updates visual bookmarks" expect to be hearing from your attorneys?

Jakob:

The literal answer is no, since "my" patents are actually not mine but owned by the company I worked for at the time. I cannot speak for the attorneys of Sun since I don't work there any more. But it is pretty standard for big computer companies to get as many patents as they can for basic reasons of self-defense: if somebody tries to come after you then you can fight back with your own patents. That usually does not mean that the company wants to go after smaller companies unless they attack first.

5) Revolutionary UNIX GUIs (Score:5, Insightful)
by Anonymous Coward

In a Wired article on Eazel posted to Slashdot the other day, you said:

"They need to rethink the entire approach... They're saying let's implement a Mac-like interface so that we can have a nicer Unix. That's a nice thing, I guess, but it's not really revolutionary."

Can you describe some specific ideas and UI elements you would consider if you were designing the "revolutionary" Linux GUI?

Jakob:

I know that Slashdot readers don't want to hear this, but the very first question is whether it is even possible to create a truly good user experience on top of Linux. Many other companies have tried to make Unix easy to use and many very talented designers have worked hard on these projects for several years without very good results.

The only data points we have say that it can't be done.

I tend to believe in an alternative interpretation of the data, which is that the various approaches to designing better Unix interfaces were doomed because they always kept reinventing the same thing again and again. They never did the two things that are necessary for great UI:

1. Don't just reimplement something that had a different design center (the Mac which was designed for a small black-and-white screen, 1MB RAM, and a puny 68000 processor)
2. Iterate. Your first design will be a flop (say, Xerox Star or Apple Lisa). You gotta keep improving rather than giving up as the Unix vendors have done.

There is already one type of revolutionary UI built on top of Linux: embedded systems in the form of information appliances. Linux inside. You can't tell from the outside, though. A typical information appliance may only have 2-3 commands in the form of simple buttons or knobs.

All respect for info appliances, but we also need a workstation-style interface that can help knowledge workers survive the information flood of modern society. And that's where I think we really need revolutionary designs that go beyond the Mac. For example, ways of managing tens of thousands of documents by a rich set of attributes and content-oriented navigation. Simply showing files as icons in folders doesn't cut it beyond a few hundred.

We also know from many studies that the average user is very bad at hierarchical filing and typically never moves a file once it gets to live in some directory. Even if the file would be better off elsewhere. This problem is magnified several hundred times when it comes to managing email. I am starting to think that the solution is to treat information objects as members of a soup and manage them by attributes rather than by hierarchy and name.

6) Standards Compliance (Score:5, Interesting)
by HerrNewton

What are your views on standards compliance for, baseline, HTML 4.01 and CSS-1? Are we fighting towards a goal which is universally unattainable (due to the embbeded nature of some browsers like WebTV and *cough* IE on Windows), or are we nearing a new age for web developers?

Jakob:

At least WebTV can update its browser when/if they decide to do so. And IE is also getting better, even if it doesn't do everything I would want. But we will soon see a new generation of hardwired browsers inside information appliances. Once a piece of consumer electronics ships, it usually doesn't get upgraded. Thus it will be really important to campaign for full standards compliance from such truly embedded browsers.

I am basically hopeful that we will see more respect for standards on the Web. The concept of proprietary extensions has lost and very few mainstream sites do anything any more that cannot be seen by the vast majority of users. This is one of the true benefits from the boom in e-commerce. No self-respecting salesperson wants to turn away paying customers at the door just because they don't have the latest beta-download of some browser.

7) Non-GUI apps and usability (Score:5, Interesting)
by washort (washort@samford.edu)

Much attention is given to usability in GUIs and Web sites, (such as in your column Novice vs. Expert Users) but what about textmode and primarily keyboard applications such as text editors? Personally, I believe that Emacs have the best user interface of any text editor I've ever used (vi's a close second, calm down people :), but it's geared towards experts. What do you see for the future with regard to synthesizing novice usability and expert usability? the "smart menus" as seen in MS Office 2000 seem to head in that direction, only showing basic options unless an expansion button is pressed at the bottom of the menu. The best touch is that it "remembers" what you last used from the full menu and puts it on the basic menu. How can we smooth the curve?

Jakob:

There was a good deal of research on the usability of textmode UI back in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Conference proceedings like CHI'83 (first large user interface conference) are filled with papers on issues like command abbreviations and best use of command keys. However, as we all know, interest changed to GUIs after the Mac came out in 1984.

We do need more attention to the productivity of expert users. All the same methods apply for how to study and measure interfaces, no matter what their interaction style, but I admit that there is not much work these days on keyboard interfaces.

The other part of the question is much harder to address. How to smooth the curve from novice to expert. Nobody has found the way yet. Cue cards, boot-up tips, and the little annoying paper clip are all attempts, but nothing works really well. Progressive disclosure is the best tool so far: show people the basics first, and once they understand that, allow them to get to the expert features. But don't show everything all at once or you will only confuse people and they will waste endless time messing with features that they don't need yet. Interestingly, research by Jack Carroll at IBM in the 1980s proved that a "training wheels" approach to computers makes people better at understanding the expert features once they get to them. The reason being that users learn the conceptual structure of the system better when they are presented with the smaller set of features first. Not seeing something during initial use of the system would result in better use of the hidden features later.

8) Education (Score:5, Interesting)
by Duke of URL (iridium@sporkandspam.mauimail.com)

What type of education did you (and others ) have to receive to become a useability expert? Basically what's the best route to get a career in human-computer factors?

Jakob:

The only real way to become a usability expert is to watch lots of users as they perform lots of different types of tasks with lots of different designs and interaction styles. If you have only seen people use a single type of user interface, then you don't have the breadth of understanding of user behavior. I find that I often draw what I learned from the studies we did with IBM mainframe interfaces back in the 1980s, even as I advise on the design of websites. One reason, of course, is that many Web interfaces are as primitive as the old 3270 designs. But another reason is that watching what people do under many different circumstances helps generate insight into what they will do under new circumstances.

There is no single answer in terms of degree. The best people in the field today have degrees in countless topics, including psychology, anthropology, computer science, mathematics, graphic design, and theater. None of these degrees is perfect for becoming a usability expert. The real way to learn usability is to do usability as much as possible.

9) What's Next? (Score:5, Interesting)
by moonboy (armstrong.spamalicious.99@yahoo.com)

What is the next "big thing" in interfaces?

Surely "windowing" can't be the end-all-be-all of interfaces. Is there some paradigm shift around the corner which we can't conceive of right now? Perhaps the same "leap" which occurred going from command line/text to windows.

Jakob:

There are two things I do not think are the next big thing: 3D and speech recognition. Speech suffers from the Star Trek fallacy: it's a great audience interface but not a good user interface in most situations.

I think there are two big paradigm shifts coming: Augmented reality and content-and time-based computing.

Augmented reality is the ability to project a user interface onto the physical world. For example, when repairing an airplane engine, a trainee mechanic can see an animated hand grab exactly in the right spot. And read-outs from various diagnostics will display in the context of the thing they are diagnosing rather than on a separate device. Lots of other ideas in this realm, including wearable computing, smart clothes, etc.

I also believe we need more information-rich interfaces as I was discussing above. I think the current Macintosh-style UI will be turned inside-out and we will start to manage information objects depending on a much larger set of attributes than simply their name and hierarchical placement. In particular, history and other time-based attributes will become more important. When did I last touch this object? What other things were I doing at the time?

Also, the computer will need to become a personal secretary and help the user manage his or her time. The opposite of push technology which was based on constant temptation to procrastinate. In the old days, an operating system was designed to optimize the utilization of the computer's resources. In the future, its main goal will be to optimize the user's time. For example, in terms of protecting you from too much e-mail.

10) Disturbing anecdotes (Score:5, Insightful)
by Anonymous Coward

Jakob,

Your work is chock full of terrifying statistics about what happens when we create slow, hard-to-navigate sites. When I (an information architect) try to convince my project teams to heed those statistics, though, nobody seems to listen. People continue to clamor for images, frames, JavaScript, etc.

If Ronald Reagan's speeches proved one thing to us, it's this: a well-chosen anecdote can drown out innumerable (and true) statistics. I was wondering whether you might have any good terrifying anecdotes that might scare people who are about to make an unusable Web site into doing the right thing.

Jakob:

Boo.com is one good anecdote. They wasted millions of dollars on fancy design which they had to retract shortly after the launch because nobody could use it. Even on a fashion site, people care more about the products than about the bleeding edge design.

Also, the Web itself is one big anecdote. What do all the big sites have in common? Minimalist design. I made a very simple analysis of the usability of the ten sites with the most traffic compared to the sites from the ten biggest companies (which would have had an inherent advantage if they had been more usable). The result was very clear: The ten biggest sites had much better usability scores than the sites built by huge corporations. For example, the download time for the home page was eight seconds for the big sites and 19 seconds for the big companies.

What happens is very simple: the good sites win. If the pages download fast, people return. If they can find the products, then they can buy the products. If people understand the site, they use it.

We gathered questions for Jakob Nielsen Monday; here are the answers. Interesting, possibly even essential reading for anyone involved in software or Web site design.

1) /. usability rating? (Score:5, Interesting)
by Col. Klink (retired) (wklink@yahoo.com)

Would you care to comment on the usability of Slashdot? Good? Bad? Ugly? Be sure to read the apache section before answering that last one.

Jakob:

Obviously, Slashdot has great usability for its targeted user base of nerds. The proof is in the pudding, in that they use it so much and keep coming back. There is nothing here but pure user interface: nothing you buy or get, so if people use it, it must be because it is good. This said, many elements of the interface would present too much complexity for more average users. For example, the many different ways of viewing and sorting threaded discussions is quite difficult to understand. How do you really know what you will see if you click on one of the links from the home page?

There are three elements of Slashdot that I particularly like:

• Simplicity in the layout itself: focus on content rather than flash.
• The liberal use of linking - in fact, the site lives off the ability to link to the rest of the Web. Too many other sites forget that hypertext is the foundation of the Web and provide nothing but a closed world.
• The reputation manager effect coming from the moderation system.

2) Short vs long pages (Score:5, Interesting)
by Anonymous Coward

In most of your writings and interviews, you seem to be recommending short pages as always better than long ones. Sometimes you qualify this as applying only to 'navigation pages'-- but you never define that term. Aren't there more complex rules about when it's okay to have a long page? Don't you yourself find it frustrating when you have to load multiple pages, when one longer page could easily have held all the info?

Jakob:

This very page itself is getting to be too long :-)

It depends on how you look at this page. If you think of it as a single interview, then it is best to preserve it as a single page since the users would just skim over those questions that don't interest them. If you think of it as a set of answers, it would be better to have a short summary of the entire collection and then have links to individual questions and answers. Unfortunately, the Web is currently too slow to support this type of hypertext (we need subsecond response times for true freedom of movement). It would be nice to have a more advanced model of Web hypertext that would support alternative views of both atomic information objects and composite information objects.

Talking about navigation pages, brevity does rule. Users need to be able to get an overview of their choices without having to scroll too much. Ideally without having to scroll at all. If you need to scroll while making the choice of where to go next, then you are forced to keep promising options in short-term memory after they scroll out of view. The Slashdot audience may not fully appreciate the problem of having to keep items in short-term memory since you only become a programmer if you are good at doing this. Most people are not. All users will furthermore suffer from the tendency to select among the visible choices: if something looks like a good answer and as the best answer, then users will often follow that link without scrolling down to see if there might be an even better link on the invisible part of the page.

3) Browsers compensating for bad sites (Score:5, Interesting)
by Ed Avis (epa98@doc.ic.ac.uk)

To what extent will people start using their browser's features to compensate for bad Web sites? For example, your browser might automatically convert frames to tables, or precis long chunks of text, or concatenate lots of bitty pages into one easily-readable page. Since there will always be badly designed sites out there, do you think this is a useful sticking-plaster?

Jakob:

Great idea. The Web has always been based on this notion to some extent. For example, the Back button in the browser (as opposed to relying completely on site-supported navigation) and the ability to make the font bigger or smaller (as opposed to hoping that every site gets it exactly right).

We may have temporarily abandoned some of the user control over the Web in the chase for better-looking pages, and one of the worst sins in using CSS is to specify text in an absolute font size that doesn't change if the user needs bigger or smaller text.

I am hoping that future generations of browsers will finally live up to their names and actually help users browse (or Navigate or Explore, as the case may be). If the big browser vendors won't do it, then that's a potential market for other browsers like Opera and iCab or for various types of browser add-on tools.

4) Patent culture vs Open Source culture (Score:5, Interesting)
by tbray

You are the holder (or co-holder) of quite a number of patents. Can Open Source software builders who construct, for example, something that "prints a hyperspacial document" or "updates visual bookmarks" expect to be hearing from your attorneys?

Jakob:

The literal answer is no, since "my" patents are actually not mine but owned by the company I worked for at the time. I cannot speak for the attorneys of Sun since I don't work there any more. But it is pretty standard for big computer companies to get as many patents as they can for basic reasons of self-defense: if somebody tries to come after you then you can fight back with your own patents. That usually does not mean that the company wants to go after smaller companies unless they attack first.

5) Revolutionary UNIX GUIs (Score:5, Insightful)
by Anonymous Coward

In a Wired article on Eazel posted to Slashdot the other day, you said:

"They need to rethink the entire approach... They're saying let's implement a Mac-like interface so that we can have a nicer Unix. That's a nice thing, I guess, but it's not really revolutionary."

Can you describe some specific ideas and UI elements you would consider if you were designing the "revolutionary" Linux GUI?

Jakob:

I know that Slashdot readers don't want to hear this, but the very first question is whether it is even possible to create a truly good user experience on top of Linux. Many other companies have tried to make Unix easy to use and many very talented designers have worked hard on these projects for several years without very good results.

The only data points we have say that it can't be done.

I tend to believe in an alternative interpretation of the data, which is that the various approaches to designing better Unix interfaces were doomed because they always kept reinventing the same thing again and again. They never did the two things that are necessary for great UI:

1. Don't just reimplement something that had a different design center (the Mac which was designed for a small black-and-white screen, 1MB RAM, and a puny 68000 processor)
2. Iterate. Your first design will be a flop (say, Xerox Star or Apple Lisa). You gotta keep improving rather than giving up as the Unix vendors have done.

There is already one type of revolutionary UI built on top of Linux: embedded systems in the form of information appliances. Linux inside. You can't tell from the outside, though. A typical information appliance may only have 2-3 commands in the form of simple buttons or knobs.

All respect for info appliances, but we also need a workstation-style interface that can help knowledge workers survive the information flood of modern society. And that's where I think we really need revolutionary designs that go beyond the Mac. For example, ways of managing tens of thousands of documents by a rich set of attributes and content-oriented navigation. Simply showing files as icons in folders doesn't cut it beyond a few hundred.

We also know from many studies that the average user is very bad at hierarchical filing and typically never moves a file once it gets to live in some directory. Even if the file would be better off elsewhere. This problem is magnified several hundred times when it comes to managing email. I am starting to think that the solution is to treat information objects as members of a soup and manage them by attributes rather than by hierarchy and name.

6) Standards Compliance (Score:5, Interesting)
by HerrNewton

What are your views on standards compliance for, baseline, HTML 4.01 and CSS-1? Are we fighting towards a goal which is universally unattainable (due to the embbeded nature of some browsers like WebTV and *cough* IE on Windows), or are we nearing a new age for web developers?

Jakob:

At least WebTV can update its browser when/if they decide to do so. And IE is also getting better, even if it doesn't do everything I would want. But we will soon see a new generation of hardwired browsers inside information appliances. Once a piece of consumer electronics ships, it usually doesn't get upgraded. Thus it will be really important to campaign for full standards compliance from such truly embedded browsers.

I am basically hopeful that we will see more respect for standards on the Web. The concept of proprietary extensions has lost and very few mainstream sites do anything any more that cannot be seen by the vast majority of users. This is one of the true benefits from the boom in e-commerce. No self-respecting salesperson wants to turn away paying customers at the door just because they don't have the latest beta-download of some browser.

7) Non-GUI apps and usability (Score:5, Interesting)
by washort (washort@samford.edu)

Much attention is given to usability in GUIs and Web sites, (such as in your column Novice vs. Expert Users) but what about textmode and primarily keyboard applications such as text editors? Personally, I believe that Emacs have the best user interface of any text editor I've ever used (vi's a close second, calm down people :), but it's geared towards experts. What do you see for the future with regard to synthesizing novice usability and expert usability? the "smart menus" as seen in MS Office 2000 seem to head in that direction, only showing basic options unless an expansion button is pressed at the bottom of the menu. The best touch is that it "remembers" what you last used from the full menu and puts it on the basic menu. How can we smooth the curve?

Jakob:

There was a good deal of research on the usability of textmode UI back in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Conference proceedings like CHI'83 (first large user interface conference) are filled with papers on issues like command abbreviations and best use of command keys. However, as we all know, interest changed to GUIs after the Mac came out in 1984.

We do need more attention to the productivity of expert users. All the same methods apply for how to study and measure interfaces, no matter what their interaction style, but I admit that there is not much work these days on keyboard interfaces.

The other part of the question is much harder to address. How to smooth the curve from novice to expert. Nobody has found the way yet. Cue cards, boot-up tips, and the little annoying paper clip are all attempts, but nothing works really well. Progressive disclosure is the best tool so far: show people the basics first, and once they understand that, allow them to get to the expert features. But don't show everything all at once or you will only confuse people and they will waste endless time messing with features that they don't need yet. Interestingly, research by Jack Carroll at IBM in the 1980s proved that a "training wheels" approach to computers makes people better at understanding the expert features once they get to them. The reason being that users learn the conceptual structure of the system better when they are presented with the smaller set of features first. Not seeing something during initial use of the system would result in better use of the hidden features later.

8) Education (Score:5, Interesting)
by Duke of URL (iridium@sporkandspam.mauimail.com)

What type of education did you (and others ) have to receive to become a useability expert? Basically what's the best route to get a career in human-computer factors?

Jakob:

The only real way to become a usability expert is to watch lots of users as they perform lots of different types of tasks with lots of different designs and interaction styles. If you have only seen people use a single type of user interface, then you don't have the breadth of understanding of user behavior. I find that I often draw what I learned from the studies we did with IBM mainframe interfaces back in the 1980s, even as I advise on the design of websites. One reason, of course, is that many Web interfaces are as primitive as the old 3270 designs. But another reason is that watching what people do under many different circumstances helps generate insight into what they will do under new circumstances.

There is no single answer in terms of degree. The best people in the field today have degrees in countless topics, including psychology, anthropology, computer science, mathematics, graphic design, and theater. None of these degrees is perfect for becoming a usability expert. The real way to learn usability is to do usability as much as possible.

9) What's Next? (Score:5, Interesting)
by moonboy (armstrong.spamalicious.99@yahoo.com)

What is the next "big thing" in interfaces?

Surely "windowing" can't be the end-all-be-all of interfaces. Is there some paradigm shift around the corner which we can't conceive of right now? Perhaps the same "leap" which occurred going from command line/text to windows.

Jakob:

There are two things I do not think are the next big thing: 3D and speech recognition. Speech suffers from the Star Trek fallacy: it's a great audience interface but not a good user interface in most situations.

I think there are two big paradigm shifts coming: Augmented reality and content-and time-based computing.

Augmented reality is the ability to project a user interface onto the physical world. For example, when repairing an airplane engine, a trainee mechanic can see an animated hand grab exactly in the right spot. And read-outs from various diagnostics will display in the context of the thing they are diagnosing rather than on a separate device. Lots of other ideas in this realm, including wearable computing, smart clothes, etc.

I also believe we need more information-rich interfaces as I was discussing above. I think the current Macintosh-style UI will be turned inside-out and we will start to manage information objects depending on a much larger set of attributes than simply their name and hierarchical placement. In particular, history and other time-based attributes will become more important. When did I last touch this object? What other things were I doing at the time?

Also, the computer will need to become a personal secretary and help the user manage his or her time. The opposite of push technology which was based on constant temptation to procrastinate. In the old days, an operating system was designed to optimize the utilization of the computer's resources. In the future, its main goal will be to optimize the user's time. For example, in terms of protecting you from too much e-mail.

10) Disturbing anecdotes (Score:5, Insightful)
by Anonymous Coward

Jakob,

Your work is chock full of terrifying statistics about what happens when we create slow, hard-to-navigate sites. When I (an information architect) try to convince my project teams to heed those statistics, though, nobody seems to listen. People continue to clamor for images, frames, JavaScript, etc.

If Ronald Reagan's speeches proved one thing to us, it's this: a well-chosen anecdote can drown out innumerable (and true) statistics. I was wondering whether you might have any good terrifying anecdotes that might scare people who are about to make an unusable Web site into doing the right thing.

Jakob:

Boo.com is one good anecdote. They wasted millions of dollars on fancy design which they had to retract shortly after the launch because nobody could use it. Even on a fashion site, people care more about the products than about the bleeding edge design.

Also, the Web itself is one big anecdote. What do all the big sites have in common? Minimalist design. I made a very simple analysis of the usability of the ten sites with the most traffic compared to the sites from the ten biggest companies (which would have had an inherent advantage if they had been more usable). The result was very clear: The ten biggest sites had much better usability scores than the sites built by huge corporations. For example, the download time for the home page was eight seconds for the big sites and 19 seconds for the big companies.

What happens is very simple: the good sites win. If the pages download fast, people return. If they can find the products, then they can buy the products. If people understand the site, they use it.

We gathered questions for Jakob Nielsen Monday; here are the answers. Interesting, possibly even essential reading for anyone involved in software or Web site design.

1) /. usability rating? (Score:5, Interesting)
by Col. Klink (retired) (wklink@yahoo.com)

Would you care to comment on the usability of Slashdot? Good? Bad? Ugly? Be sure to read the apache section before answering that last one.

Jakob:

Obviously, Slashdot has great usability for its targeted user base of nerds. The proof is in the pudding, in that they use it so much and keep coming back. There is nothing here but pure user interface: nothing you buy or get, so if people use it, it must be because it is good. This said, many elements of the interface would present too much complexity for more average users. For example, the many different ways of viewing and sorting threaded discussions is quite difficult to understand. How do you really know what you will see if you click on one of the links from the home page?

There are three elements of Slashdot that I particularly like:

• Simplicity in the layout itself: focus on content rather than flash.
• The liberal use of linking - in fact, the site lives off the ability to link to the rest of the Web. Too many other sites forget that hypertext is the foundation of the Web and provide nothing but a closed world.
• The reputation manager effect coming from the moderation system.

2) Short vs long pages (Score:5, Interesting)
by Anonymous Coward

In most of your writings and interviews, you seem to be recommending short pages as always better than long ones. Sometimes you qualify this as applying only to 'navigation pages'-- but you never define that term. Aren't there more complex rules about when it's okay to have a long page? Don't you yourself find it frustrating when you have to load multiple pages, when one longer page could easily have held all the info?

Jakob:

This very page itself is getting to be too long :-)

It depends on how you look at this page. If you think of it as a single interview, then it is best to preserve it as a single page since the users would just skim over those questions that don't interest them. If you think of it as a set of answers, it would be better to have a short summary of the entire collection and then have links to individual questions and answers. Unfortunately, the Web is currently too slow to support this type of hypertext (we need subsecond response times for true freedom of movement). It would be nice to have a more advanced model of Web hypertext that would support alternative views of both atomic information objects and composite information objects.

Talking about navigation pages, brevity does rule. Users need to be able to get an overview of their choices without having to scroll too much. Ideally without having to scroll at all. If you need to scroll while making the choice of where to go next, then you are forced to keep promising options in short-term memory after they scroll out of view. The Slashdot audience may not fully appreciate the problem of having to keep items in short-term memory since you only become a programmer if you are good at doing this. Most people are not. All users will furthermore suffer from the tendency to select among the visible choices: if something looks like a good answer and as the best answer, then users will often follow that link without scrolling down to see if there might be an even better link on the invisible part of the page.

3) Browsers compensating for bad sites (Score:5, Interesting)
by Ed Avis (epa98@doc.ic.ac.uk)

To what extent will people start using their browser's features to compensate for bad Web sites? For example, your browser might automatically convert frames to tables, or precis long chunks of text, or concatenate lots of bitty pages into one easily-readable page. Since there will always be badly designed sites out there, do you think this is a useful sticking-plaster?

Jakob:

Great idea. The Web has always been based on this notion to some extent. For example, the Back button in the browser (as opposed to relying completely on site-supported navigation) and the ability to make the font bigger or smaller (as opposed to hoping that every site gets it exactly right).

We may have temporarily abandoned some of the user control over the Web in the chase for better-looking pages, and one of the worst sins in using CSS is to specify text in an absolute font size that doesn't change if the user needs bigger or smaller text.

I am hoping that future generations of browsers will finally live up to their names and actually help users browse (or Navigate or Explore, as the case may be). If the big browser vendors won't do it, then that's a potential market for other browsers like Opera and iCab or for various types of browser add-on tools.

4) Patent culture vs Open Source culture (Score:5, Interesting)
by tbray

You are the holder (or co-holder) of quite a number of patents. Can Open Source software builders who construct, for example, something that "prints a hyperspacial document" or "updates visual bookmarks" expect to be hearing from your attorneys?

Jakob:

The literal answer is no, since "my" patents are actually not mine but owned by the company I worked for at the time. I cannot speak for the attorneys of Sun since I don't work there any more. But it is pretty standard for big computer companies to get as many patents as they can for basic reasons of self-defense: if somebody tries to come after you then you can fight back with your own patents. That usually does not mean that the company wants to go after smaller companies unless they attack first.

5) Revolutionary UNIX GUIs (Score:5, Insightful)
by Anonymous Coward

In a Wired article on Eazel posted to Slashdot the other day, you said:

"They need to rethink the entire approach... They're saying let's implement a Mac-like interface so that we can have a nicer Unix. That's a nice thing, I guess, but it's not really revolutionary."

Can you describe some specific ideas and UI elements you would consider if you were designing the "revolutionary" Linux GUI?

Jakob:

I know that Slashdot readers don't want to hear this, but the very first question is whether it is even possible to create a truly good user experience on top of Linux. Many other companies have tried to make Unix easy to use and many very talented designers have worked hard on these projects for several years without very good results.

The only data points we have say that it can't be done.

I tend to believe in an alternative interpretation of the data, which is that the various approaches to designing better Unix interfaces were doomed because they always kept reinventing the same thing again and again. They never did the two things that are necessary for great UI:

1. Don't just reimplement something that had a different design center (the Mac which was designed for a small black-and-white screen, 1MB RAM, and a puny 68000 processor)
2. Iterate. Your first design will be a flop (say, Xerox Star or Apple Lisa). You gotta keep improving rather than giving up as the Unix vendors have done.

There is already one type of revolutionary UI built on top of Linux: embedded systems in the form of information appliances. Linux inside. You can't tell from the outside, though. A typical information appliance may only have 2-3 commands in the form of simple buttons or knobs.

All respect for info appliances, but we also need a workstation-style interface that can help knowledge workers survive the information flood of modern society. And that's where I think we really need revolutionary designs that go beyond the Mac. For example, ways of managing tens of thousands of documents by a rich set of attributes and content-oriented navigation. Simply showing files as icons in folders doesn't cut it beyond a few hundred.

We also know from many studies that the average user is very bad at hierarchical filing and typically never moves a file once it gets to live in some directory. Even if the file would be better off elsewhere. This problem is magnified several hundred times when it comes to managing email. I am starting to think that the solution is to treat information objects as members of a soup and manage them by attributes rather than by hierarchy and name.

6) Standards Compliance (Score:5, Interesting)
by HerrNewton

What are your views on standards compliance for, baseline, HTML 4.01 and CSS-1? Are we fighting towards a goal which is universally unattainable (due to the embbeded nature of some browsers like WebTV and *cough* IE on Windows), or are we nearing a new age for web developers?

Jakob:

At least WebTV can update its browser when/if they decide to do so. And IE is also getting better, even if it doesn't do everything I would want. But we will soon see a new generation of hardwired browsers inside information appliances. Once a piece of consumer electronics ships, it usually doesn't get upgraded. Thus it will be really important to campaign for full standards compliance from such truly embedded browsers.

I am basically hopeful that we will see more respect for standards on the Web. The concept of proprietary extensions has lost and very few mainstream sites do anything any more that cannot be seen by the vast majority of users. This is one of the true benefits from the boom in e-commerce. No self-respecting salesperson wants to turn away paying customers at the door just because they don't have the latest beta-download of some browser.

7) Non-GUI apps and usability (Score:5, Interesting)
by washort (washort@samford.edu)

Much attention is given to usability in GUIs and Web sites, (such as in your column Novice vs. Expert Users) but what about textmode and primarily keyboard applications such as text editors? Personally, I believe that Emacs have the best user interface of any text editor I've ever used (vi's a close second, calm down people :), but it's geared towards experts. What do you see for the future with regard to synthesizing novice usability and expert usability? the "smart menus" as seen in MS Office 2000 seem to head in that direction, only showing basic options unless an expansion button is pressed at the bottom of the menu. The best touch is that it "remembers" what you last used from the full menu and puts it on the basic menu. How can we smooth the curve?

Jakob:

There was a good deal of research on the usability of textmode UI back in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Conference proceedings like CHI'83 (first large user interface conference) are filled with papers on issues like command abbreviations and best use of command keys. However, as we all know, interest changed to GUIs after the Mac came out in 1984.

We do need more attention to the productivity of expert users. All the same methods apply for how to study and measure interfaces, no matter what their interaction style, but I admit that there is not much work these days on keyboard interfaces.

The other part of the question is much harder to address. How to smooth the curve from novice to expert. Nobody has found the way yet. Cue cards, boot-up tips, and the little annoying paper clip are all attempts, but nothing works really well. Progressive disclosure is the best tool so far: show people the basics first, and once they understand that, allow them to get to the expert features. But don't show everything all at once or you will only confuse people and they will waste endless time messing with features that they don't need yet. Interestingly, research by Jack Carroll at IBM in the 1980s proved that a "training wheels" approach to computers makes people better at understanding the expert features once they get to them. The reason being that users learn the conceptual structure of the system better when they are presented with the smaller set of features first. Not seeing something during initial use of the system would result in better use of the hidden features later.

8) Education (Score:5, Interesting)
by Duke of URL (iridium@sporkandspam.mauimail.com)

What type of education did you (and others ) have to receive to become a useability expert? Basically what's the best route to get a career in human-computer factors?

Jakob:

The only real way to become a usability expert is to watch lots of users as they perform lots of different types of tasks with lots of different designs and interaction styles. If you have only seen people use a single type of user interface, then you don't have the breadth of understanding of user behavior. I find that I often draw what I learned from the studies we did with IBM mainframe interfaces back in the 1980s, even as I advise on the design of websites. One reason, of course, is that many Web interfaces are as primitive as the old 3270 designs. But another reason is that watching what people do under many different circumstances helps generate insight into what they will do under new circumstances.

There is no single answer in terms of degree. The best people in the field today have degrees in countless topics, including psychology, anthropology, computer science, mathematics, graphic design, and theater. None of these degrees is perfect for becoming a usability expert. The real way to learn usability is to do usability as much as possible.

9) What's Next? (Score:5, Interesting)
by moonboy (armstrong.spamalicious.99@yahoo.com)

What is the next "big thing" in interfaces?

Surely "windowing" can't be the end-all-be-all of interfaces. Is there some paradigm shift around the corner which we can't conceive of right now? Perhaps the same "leap" which occurred going from command line/text to windows.

Jakob:

There are two things I do not think are the next big thing: 3D and speech recognition. Speech suffers from the Star Trek fallacy: it's a great audience interface but not a good user interface in most situations.

I think there are two big paradigm shifts coming: Augmented reality and content-and time-based computing.

Augmented reality is the ability to project a user interface onto the physical world. For example, when repairing an airplane engine, a trainee mechanic can see an animated hand grab exactly in the right spot. And read-outs from various diagnostics will display in the context of the thing they are diagnosing rather than on a separate device. Lots of other ideas in this realm, including wearable computing, smart clothes, etc.

I also believe we need more information-rich interfaces as I was discussing above. I think the current Macintosh-style UI will be turned inside-out and we will start to manage information objects depending on a much larger set of attributes than simply their name and hierarchical placement. In particular, history and other time-based attributes will become more important. When did I last touch this object? What other things were I doing at the time?

Also, the computer will need to become a personal secretary and help the user manage his or her time. The opposite of push technology which was based on constant temptation to procrastinate. In the old days, an operating system was designed to optimize the utilization of the computer's resources. In the future, its main goal will be to optimize the user's time. For example, in terms of protecting you from too much e-mail.

10) Disturbing anecdotes (Score:5, Insightful)
by Anonymous Coward

Jakob,

Your work is chock full of terrifying statistics about what happens when we create slow, hard-to-navigate sites. When I (an information architect) try to convince my project teams to heed those statistics, though, nobody seems to listen. People continue to clamor for images, frames, JavaScript, etc.

If Ronald Reagan's speeches proved one thing to us, it's this: a well-chosen anecdote can drown out innumerable (and true) statistics. I was wondering whether you might have any good terrifying anecdotes that might scare people who are about to make an unusable Web site into doing the right thing.

Jakob:

Boo.com is one good anecdote. They wasted millions of dollars on fancy design which they had to retract shortly after the launch because nobody could use it. Even on a fashion site, people care more about the products than about the bleeding edge design.

Also, the Web itself is one big anecdote. What do all the big sites have in common? Minimalist design. I made a very simple analysis of the usability of the ten sites with the most traffic compared to the sites from the ten biggest companies (which would have had an inherent advantage if they had been more usable). The result was very clear: The ten biggest sites had much better usability scores than the sites built by huge corporations. For example, the download time for the home page was eight seconds for the big sites and 19 seconds for the big companies.

What happens is very simple: the good sites win. If the pages download fast, people return. If they can find the products, then they can buy the products. If people understand the site, they use it.

We gathered questions for Jakob Nielsen Monday; here are the answers. Interesting, possibly even essential reading for anyone involved in software or Web site design.

1) /. usability rating? (Score:5, Interesting)
by Col. Klink (retired) (wklink@yahoo.com)

Would you care to comment on the usability of Slashdot? Good? Bad? Ugly? Be sure to read the apache section before answering that last one.

Jakob:

Obviously, Slashdot has great usability for its targeted user base of nerds. The proof is in the pudding, in that they use it so much and keep coming back. There is nothing here but pure user interface: nothing you buy or get, so if people use it, it must be because it is good. This said, many elements of the interface would present too much complexity for more average users. For example, the many different ways of viewing and sorting threaded discussions is quite difficult to understand. How do you really know what you will see if you click on one of the links from the home page?

There are three elements of Slashdot that I particularly like:

• Simplicity in the layout itself: focus on content rather than flash.
• The liberal use of linking - in fact, the site lives off the ability to link to the rest of the Web. Too many other sites forget that hypertext is the foundation of the Web and provide nothing but a closed world.
• The reputation manager effect coming from the moderation system.

2) Short vs long pages (Score:5, Interesting)
by Anonymous Coward

In most of your writings and interviews, you seem to be recommending short pages as always better than long ones. Sometimes you qualify this as applying only to 'navigation pages'-- but you never define that term. Aren't there more complex rules about when it's okay to have a long page? Don't you yourself find it frustrating when you have to load multiple pages, when one longer page could easily have held all the info?

Jakob:

This very page itself is getting to be too long :-)

It depends on how you look at this page. If you think of it as a single interview, then it is best to preserve it as a single page since the users would just skim over those questions that don't interest them. If you think of it as a set of answers, it would be better to have a short summary of the entire collection and then have links to individual questions and answers. Unfortunately, the Web is currently too slow to support this type of hypertext (we need subsecond response times for true freedom of movement). It would be nice to have a more advanced model of Web hypertext that would support alternative views of both atomic information objects and composite information objects.

Talking about navigation pages, brevity does rule. Users need to be able to get an overview of their choices without having to scroll too much. Ideally without having to scroll at all. If you need to scroll while making the choice of where to go next, then you are forced to keep promising options in short-term memory after they scroll out of view. The Slashdot audience may not fully appreciate the problem of having to keep items in short-term memory since you only become a programmer if you are good at doing this. Most people are not. All users will furthermore suffer from the tendency to select among the visible choices: if something looks like a good answer and as the best answer, then users will often follow that link without scrolling down to see if there might be an even better link on the invisible part of the page.

3) Browsers compensating for bad sites (Score:5, Interesting)
by Ed Avis (epa98@doc.ic.ac.uk)

To what extent will people start using their browser's features to compensate for bad Web sites? For example, your browser might automatically convert frames to tables, or precis long chunks of text, or concatenate lots of bitty pages into one easily-readable page. Since there will always be badly designed sites out there, do you think this is a useful sticking-plaster?

Jakob:

Great idea. The Web has always been based on this notion to some extent. For example, the Back button in the browser (as opposed to relying completely on site-supported navigation) and the ability to make the font bigger or smaller (as opposed to hoping that every site gets it exactly right).

We may have temporarily abandoned some of the user control over the Web in the chase for better-looking pages, and one of the worst sins in using CSS is to specify text in an absolute font size that doesn't change if the user needs bigger or smaller text.

I am hoping that future generations of browsers will finally live up to their names and actually help users browse (or Navigate or Explore, as the case may be). If the big browser vendors won't do it, then that's a potential market for other browsers like Opera and iCab or for various types of browser add-on tools.

4) Patent culture vs Open Source culture (Score:5, Interesting)
by tbray

You are the holder (or co-holder) of quite a number of patents. Can Open Source software builders who construct, for example, something that "prints a hyperspacial document" or "updates visual bookmarks" expect to be hearing from your attorneys?

Jakob:

The literal answer is no, since "my" patents are actually not mine but owned by the company I worked for at the time. I cannot speak for the attorneys of Sun since I don't work there any more. But it is pretty standard for big computer companies to get as many patents as they can for basic reasons of self-defense: if somebody tries to come after you then you can fight back with your own patents. That usually does not mean that the company wants to go after smaller companies unless they attack first.

5) Revolutionary UNIX GUIs (Score:5, Insightful)
by Anonymous Coward

In a Wired article on Eazel posted to Slashdot the other day, you said:

"They need to rethink the entire approach... They're saying let's implement a Mac-like interface so that we can have a nicer Unix. That's a nice thing, I guess, but it's not really revolutionary."

Can you describe some specific ideas and UI elements you would consider if you were designing the "revolutionary" Linux GUI?

Jakob:

I know that Slashdot readers don't want to hear this, but the very first question is whether it is even possible to create a truly good user experience on top of Linux. Many other companies have tried to make Unix easy to use and many very talented designers have worked hard on these projects for several years without very good results.

The only data points we have say that it can't be done.

I tend to believe in an alternative interpretation of the data, which is that the various approaches to designing better Unix interfaces were doomed because they always kept reinventing the same thing again and again. They never did the two things that are necessary for great UI:

1. Don't just reimplement something that had a different design center (the Mac which was designed for a small black-and-white screen, 1MB RAM, and a puny 68000 processor)
2. Iterate. Your first design will be a flop (say, Xerox Star or Apple Lisa). You gotta keep improving rather than giving up as the Unix vendors have done.

There is already one type of revolutionary UI built on top of Linux: embedded systems in the form of information appliances. Linux inside. You can't tell from the outside, though. A typical information appliance may only have 2-3 commands in the form of simple buttons or knobs.

All respect for info appliances, but we also need a workstation-style interface that can help knowledge workers survive the information flood of modern society. And that's where I think we really need revolutionary designs that go beyond the Mac. For example, ways of managing tens of thousands of documents by a rich set of attributes and content-oriented navigation. Simply showing files as icons in folders doesn't cut it beyond a few hundred.

We also know from many studies that the average user is very bad at hierarchical filing and typically never moves a file once it gets to live in some directory. Even if the file would be better off elsewhere. This problem is magnified several hundred times when it comes to managing email. I am starting to think that the solution is to treat information objects as members of a soup and manage them by attributes rather than by hierarchy and name.

6) Standards Compliance (Score:5, Interesting)
by HerrNewton

What are your views on standards compliance for, baseline, HTML 4.01 and CSS-1? Are we fighting towards a goal which is universally unattainable (due to the embbeded nature of some browsers like WebTV and *cough* IE on Windows), or are we nearing a new age for web developers?

Jakob:

At least WebTV can update its browser when/if they decide to do so. And IE is also getting better, even if it doesn't do everything I would want. But we will soon see a new generation of hardwired browsers inside information appliances. Once a piece of consumer electronics ships, it usually doesn't get upgraded. Thus it will be really important to campaign for full standards compliance from such truly embedded browsers.

I am basically hopeful that we will see more respect for standards on the Web. The concept of proprietary extensions has lost and very few mainstream sites do anything any more that cannot be seen by the vast majority of users. This is one of the true benefits from the boom in e-commerce. No self-respecting salesperson wants to turn away paying customers at the door just because they don't have the latest beta-download of some browser.

7) Non-GUI apps and usability (Score:5, Interesting)
by washort (washort@samford.edu)

Much attention is given to usability in GUIs and Web sites, (such as in your column Novice vs. Expert Users) but what about textmode and primarily keyboard applications such as text editors? Personally, I believe that Emacs have the best user interface of any text editor I've ever used (vi's a close second, calm down people :), but it's geared towards experts. What do you see for the future with regard to synthesizing novice usability and expert usability? the "smart menus" as seen in MS Office 2000 seem to head in that direction, only showing basic options unless an expansion button is pressed at the bottom of the menu. The best touch is that it "remembers" what you last used from the full menu and puts it on the basic menu. How can we smooth the curve?

Jakob:

There was a good deal of research on the usability of textmode UI back in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Conference proceedings like CHI'83 (first large user interface conference) are filled with papers on issues like command abbreviations and best use of command keys. However, as we all know, interest changed to GUIs after the Mac came out in 1984.

We do need more attention to the productivity of expert users. All the same methods apply for how to study and measure interfaces, no matter what their interaction style, but I admit that there is not much work these days on keyboard interfaces.

The other part of the question is much harder to address. How to smooth the curve from novice to expert. Nobody has found the way yet. Cue cards, boot-up tips, and the little annoying paper clip are all attempts, but nothing works really well. Progressive disclosure is the best tool so far: show people the basics first, and once they understand that, allow them to get to the expert features. But don't show everything all at once or you will only confuse people and they will waste endless time messing with features that they don't need yet. Interestingly, research by Jack Carroll at IBM in the 1980s proved that a "training wheels" approach to computers makes people better at understanding the expert features once they get to them. The reason being that users learn the conceptual structure of the system better when they are presented with the smaller set of features first. Not seeing something during initial use of the system would result in better use of the hidden features later.

8) Education (Score:5, Interesting)
by Duke of URL (iridium@sporkandspam.mauimail.com)

What type of education did you (and others ) have to receive to become a useability expert? Basically what's the best route to get a career in human-computer factors?

Jakob:

The only real way to become a usability expert is to watch lots of users as they perform lots of different types of tasks with lots of different designs and interaction styles. If you have only seen people use a single type of user interface, then you don't have the breadth of understanding of user behavior. I find that I often draw what I learned from the studies we did with IBM mainframe interfaces back in the 1980s, even as I advise on the design of websites. One reason, of course, is that many Web interfaces are as primitive as the old 3270 designs. But another reason is that watching what people do under many different circumstances helps generate insight into what they will do under new circumstances.

There is no single answer in terms of degree. The best people in the field today have degrees in countless topics, including psychology, anthropology, computer science, mathematics, graphic design, and theater. None of these degrees is perfect for becoming a usability expert. The real way to learn usability is to do usability as much as possible.

9) What's Next? (Score:5, Interesting)
by moonboy (armstrong.spamalicious.99@yahoo.com)

What is the next "big thing" in interfaces?

Surely "windowing" can't be the end-all-be-all of interfaces. Is there some paradigm shift around the corner which we can't conceive of right now? Perhaps the same "leap" which occurred going from command line/text to windows.

Jakob:

There are two things I do not think are the next big thing: 3D and speech recognition. Speech suffers from the Star Trek fallacy: it's a great audience interface but not a good user interface in most situations.

I think there are two big paradigm shifts coming: Augmented reality and content-and time-based computing.

Augmented reality is the ability to project a user interface onto the physical world. For example, when repairing an airplane engine, a trainee mechanic can see an animated hand grab exactly in the right spot. And read-outs from various diagnostics will display in the context of the thing they are diagnosing rather than on a separate device. Lots of other ideas in this realm, including wearable computing, smart clothes, etc.

I also believe we need more information-rich interfaces as I was discussing above. I think the current Macintosh-style UI will be turned inside-out and we will start to manage information objects depending on a much larger set of attributes than simply their name and hierarchical placement. In particular, history and other time-based attributes will become more important. When did I last touch this object? What other things were I doing at the time?

Also, the computer will need to become a personal secretary and help the user manage his or her time. The opposite of push technology which was based on constant temptation to procrastinate. In the old days, an operating system was designed to optimize the utilization of the computer's resources. In the future, its main goal will be to optimize the user's time. For example, in terms of protecting you from too much e-mail.

10) Disturbing anecdotes (Score:5, Insightful)
by Anonymous Coward

Jakob,

Your work is chock full of terrifying statistics about what happens when we create slow, hard-to-navigate sites. When I (an information architect) try to convince my project teams to heed those statistics, though, nobody seems to listen. People continue to clamor for images, frames, JavaScript, etc.

If Ronald Reagan's speeches proved one thing to us, it's this: a well-chosen anecdote can drown out innumerable (and true) statistics. I was wondering whether you might have any good terrifying anecdotes that might scare people who are about to make an unusable Web site into doing the right thing.

Jakob:

Boo.com is one good anecdote. They wasted millions of dollars on fancy design which they had to retract shortly after the launch because nobody could use it. Even on a fashion site, people care more about the products than about the bleeding edge design.

Also, the Web itself is one big anecdote. What do all the big sites have in common? Minimalist design. I made a very simple analysis of the usability of the ten sites with the most traffic compared to the sites from the ten biggest companies (which would have had an inherent advantage if they had been more usable). The result was very clear: The ten biggest sites had much better usability scores than the sites built by huge corporations. For example, the download time for the home page was eight seconds for the big sites and 19 seconds for the big companies.

What happens is very simple: the good sites win. If the pages download fast, people return. If they can find the products, then they can buy the products. If people understand the site, they use it.

Let's put it this way: when it comes to software, hardware, and Web usability issues, Jakob Nielsen be da man! There's been lots of talk about Linux usability since before kernel 1.0, and there has been so much discussion about Web site usability vs. technological cuteness, not only here on Slashdot but everywhere such things are discussed, that heads spin every time the subject comes up. So let's bypass all the people who have usability opinions just because they have opinions, and go straight to The World's Leading Expert. Read his Web site first to keep from asking questions he's answered over and over, then start typing (or moderating). Answers are scheduled to appear Friday.