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I'd suggest reading Jakob Nielsen's Alertbox on web design, not only the current columns but past ones, too. Some columns like The Top Ten New Mistakes of Web Design are definitely worth reading. It's a couple years old, but people still make those same mistakes.

Besides not falling into the trap of flash without substance (pun intended; Flash is frequently useless for most web sites), keep in mind that people have come to expect certain things from how web pages work. It's nice to have an inovative design, but if it's so far outside the norm that no one can figure it out, people aren't going to use it.

For example, for web commerce, you may not like Amazon, but their site has become the standard for how people expect to shop on the web.

It really depends on who you're targeting, and on what your content is. A personal homepage with a bunch of family pictures is going to have different requirements than a site where you're trying to show off your Flash skills in hopes of landing a new job.

Jakob Nielsen's useit.com is a highly regarded source of information on what makes people's browsing experiences enjoyable and worthwhile. Generally speaking, Jakob advocates designing sites so as to make the user's experience as painless and "friction-free" as possible; some specific recommendations would be to try and design your site so that it doesn't require specific browsers, resolutions, or plug-ins to operate properly. If you want to keep people's interest, page loading times should be under 10 seconds, which places limits on how big your graphics will be and how many of them you'll have on a page (somebody has already mentioned remembering people on 33.6 dialup connections).

On the other hand, I've seen some amazing sites that were pure eye-candy. In that case, having a specific browser and/or plugin (usually some version of Flash) was an absolute prerequisite, and nobody minds because the animations on such sites push the envelope of what can be done with current technology, so it's understood that the "latest-and-greatest" stuff is required to view them. Few if any of them are practical; they're just fun, so it's OK to break the rules.

Good luck!

useit.com. It's a great resource for usability information, including a lot of stuff on web usability and design.

Check out Jakob Nielsen's Usability Website. Much of his current writing is on web design, but prior to that he spent alot of time researching application usability. Very insightful! Provides a consistent framework for approaching the usability problem.

How about a case study book? A series of case study books?

Loneliness and the Internet

Has some great information on the topic, plus links to some studies. Plus, by reading from a real source, Katz can't waste your time convincing you that he reads this stuff.

Most definately this is the worst thing I have come across in my "evangelising" for reliable operating systems. How many times do I have to tell people that crashing is abnormal?

Crashing is abnormal. If software crashes it is broken. Take it back for a refund.

Are they stupid or just masochists? Software crashes and they lose an hours worth of data. What do they do? Oh well, let's do that again. It also destroys people's faith in software. I'm a bit cautious about using Mozilla because once in the last week it disappeared - ZAP!

Refer: Poor Code Quality Contaminates Users' Conceptual Models (useit.com; October 28, 2001)

People aren't going to get saved if they don't see the need for it. Even if they can't see the need it doesn't mean the need disappears. You need stable software. (Hmm, close parallel to another sort of evangelism.)

Scripts and Windows
x Enable Javascript
x Open Windows by themselves
x Move or resize existing windows
x Make windows flip over or under other windows
x Change status bar text
x Change Images
x Create or change cookies
x Read cookies

Can you guess which one stops pop-ups?
Would a usability expert know what half these prefs mean?

Good job on the prefs, Moz-team, but please, hire Jakob Nielsen before 1.0 ships.

One alternative is Ken Perlin's QuikWriting, which has been discussed on slashdot and covered by Wired.

"Quikwriting is significantly faster and less stressful to use than Graffiti, and lets you write very quickly without ever picking your stylus up off the surface, although it has the disadvantage that you need to learn a special alphabet. For further info, you can preview a Technote in either PDF or PostScript, which was published at the ACM UIST'98 conference."

Another alternative that builds on Perlin's QuikWriting work, is Francois Guimbretiere's and Terry Winograd's FlowMenus, published at UIST'00.

"We present a new kind of marking menu that was developed for use with a pen device on display surfaces such as large, high resolution, wall-mounted displays. It integrates capabilities of previously separate mechanisms such as marking menus and Quikwriting, and facilitates the entry of multiple commands. While using this menu, the pen never has to leave the active surface so that consecutive menu selections, data entry (text and parameters) and direct manipulation tasks can be integrated fluidly."

I'm currently designing and programming a user interface on the Palm for a remote control application. So I've implemented "Finger Pies", which are simply pie menus that you can use with your finger!

To paraphrase Ben Shneiderman: Finger Pies work well for implementing direct manipulation user interfaces on handheld personal touch screen devices, in which the application provides meaningful, engaging, tightly coupled feedback on the screen, in response to your gesture. By integrating immediate gratification over time, the user enjoys the satisfaction of direct engagement in an immersive experience, and achieves the cognitive resonance of continuous gratification. [My apologies to Ben for the tongue in cheek impression.]

Finger Pies are not meant to replace character input systems like Graffiti, but they are extremely useful and reliable for many applications of handheld input devices, because they're easy enough to use with your finger instead of a pen.

Finger pies are good for reliably selecting between two, four or eight options at a time (which can be nested as pop up submenus), and they're much more robust and resistant to noise than gesture recognition.

One problem with gesture recognition in general, is that it doesn't allow for "reselection" or in-flight refinement and error correction. That is, once you've made a mistake in a gesture, there's no way to change or cancel it, so you will often get characters that you don't mean, and you have to stop what you're doing and erase the mistake.

Pie menus allow you to cancel or change the selection at any time before you commit to the selection, so you can easily browse the menus. So pie menus are most appropriate when there aren't too many items, the items don't change dynamically over time, and when you need to minimize the error rate and selection time.

Most gesture recognition systems are not "self revealing" like pie menus, which can pop up a "map" showing the directions. So pie menus are much easier to learn than gesture recognition, and more appropriate for novice users. Best of all, they naturally train users to "mouse ahead" and select without looking, so they have a smooth, gentle learning curve.

Another advantage of pie menus is that they're not patented or restricted, and there are several freely available open source implementations.

-Don

Penny Lane: "This song was written about the roundabout in liverpool where John and Paul grew up. Half of the song is fact, half is fiction, but most of it is nostalgia. John was starting to write about personal places, and Paul really took this one and ran. "I wrote that the barber had photographs of every head he'd had the pleasure of knowing. Actually, he just had photos of different hair styles. But all the people do stop and say hello." say Paul. Also, "finger pie" is actually an old obscenity in Liverpool. The girls would never thnk of saying the word. It was used in the song as a fun joke for the lads back home. Months after, waitresses in Liverpool had to put up with lads asking for "fish and finger pie." There is also a phallic reference to the "fireman who keeps his fire engine clean." Penny Lane has become a Beatles landmark, and like Blue Jay Way, has it's problems with stolen signs, which are now nicely bolted down. Penny Lane was recorded on December 29, 1966 and released as a single with Strawberry Fields.The song also has a promotional video." -http://members.aol.com/Sumacca/songs.html

First, my argument is not with your characterization of Linux vs Windows vs Mac. It is with the implication that user interface research has discovered anything interesting since the 60s. You didn't actually argue against that (usability testing doesn't count as an innovative discovery), so I can't argue back.

I disagree somewhat here. The basic ideas, used in released projects -- WIMP systems, command lines, whatever -- haven't changed much, sure. I also agree that the use of usability testing is not, in itself, an innovation in UI design. However, lots of little things have changed, often as a result of that usability testing, and some systems get them right while others don't.

Perhaps more telling is the fact that many innovations in "improved usability" have been put into commercial products, and even with massive marketing clout behind them, they've still turned out to be counterproductive and later removed. The smart guys do usability testing and avoid introducing complete disasters in the first place. The moderately intelligent guys at least know when to quit and take stuff out again.

As for major developments in the industry as a whole, check out the homepages for some of the big user interface labs run by the Microsofts and IBMs of the world. Most of the ideas they're playing with are years ahead of, and radically different from, what we're using now. They haven't filtered into the mainstream yet -- most people are too stuck on WIMP systems right now for anything so radical to sell well immediately, I expect -- but give them time. The research is there; it's the current applications that are lacking.

Here's a good analogy; interface design = psychology. Neither is actually a science. Neither admits measurable progress.

Ah, but that's just not true. You can measure a user interface's effectiveness in many objective ways. For examples, you might look at the way Jakob Nielsen looks at usability and the quantifiable measures he uses to justify his claims -- proportion of customers who end up buying a product they're looking for with different interfaces, how long it takes to complete certain tasks, and so on.

As long as there is a difference between "geek-friendly" and "user-friendly," interface design -- as an art or a science -- is lacking.

Perhaps I should clarify; by "user-friendly", I meant "typical-user-friendly". In that context, there is no problem with having one interface for typical users and one for "power user" geeks. The clever bit is how you present the two so that they can do the same things, but tailored to different audiences.

Oops! I've just deleted the Flash plug-in two days ago, both from my Netscape and IE, being annoyed to death by those obtrusive ads I couldn't freeze by the browser Stop button. I'm afraid, we are seeing the end of this technology. Once many users disable Flash to get rid of the ads, there will be no incentive for Web designers to use it legitimately. I cannot remember a single site using Flash that I actually cared about and that was useful to me. See also: Flash: 99% Bad - Alertbox article by Jakob Nielsen (October2000)

• The "Back" button does not work. If you navigate within a Flash object, the standard backtracking method takes you out of the multimedia object and not, as expected, to the previous state.
• Link colors don't work. Given this, you cannot easily see where you've been and which links you've yet to visit. This lack of orientation creates navigational confusion.
• The "Make text bigger/smaller" button does not work. Users are thus forced to read text in the designer-specified font size, which is almost always too small since designers tend to have excellent vision.
• Flash reduces accessibility for users with disabilities.
• The "Find in page" feature does not work. In general, Flash integrates poorly with search.
• Internationalization and localization is complicated. Local websites must enlist a Flash professional to translate content. Also, text that moves is harder to read for users who lack fluency in the language.

For that matter Nielsen's own site looks kind of like it was created by somebody who just set up their first MSN dialup account a few days ago... :)

(Freshmeat has had the same problem ever since it switched to its new software a few months back.)

http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/navigation/

This is also a great book on web usability and navigation. I actually like it a bit more than Nielsen's books because it's, well, written O'Reilly style. Very concise and concrete whereas Nielsen will break down into pretty abstract theoretical stuff and talk about his days at Sun. Nielsen is pretty good, but I end usually end up a little peeved at how much of a throwback the guy is at times.

http://www.useit.com/

Case and point. Sometimes he breaks his own rules on his own front page, so I take his word with a grain of salt. He also seems to abhor graphics. I wish I could find the article, but there was a time when he came out and said that you should never use graphics as navigational elements. Rather, you should use "native" widgets like form buttons if you wanted to make a graphical link. Come on! Talk about code bloat. It takes significantly more code to generate a simple form than it does to link from a graphic. Code bloat affects the user experience and therefore usability.

Personally, I think studying information design á la Edward Tufte is a better approach than studying Nielsen.

It may seem like common sense, but good page design is hard to implement. In our classes, we make sure that we always have representatives from at least two firms registered for any class. The students then do a usability analysis on pages that they did not create.

When the first student makes "dumb mistakes" on a page, the designer is sure that it's a fluke. When the third person makes the same "mistakes", it's funny to see the designer's jaw drop. Usability is not about being pretty, nor is it about what is expected.

Good usability incorporates page purpose, site purpose, and user expectations to make it easier to accomplish the purpose for the user. If I can't get to my desired item easily, return to it, and help other people find it, the site is not usable for me. End of story.

That thing about oil rigs and shadows in the water? It may seem trivial, but if a major purpose of the website is improved public relations with a potentially hostile audience, little things take on bigger meaning....

Flash: 99% Bad

most of the time people who determine what is and what is not good for web design dont have a clue, or are obsessed with old standards and old browsers. (ie you shouldnt use frames)

I don't think you've been paying attention . Frames have terrible usability. The article may be 5 years old, but most of the problems remain. This has nothing to do with old standards or old browsers, but fundamental problems with be behavior of frames. Bookmarks to framed pages don't work as users expect. Links from search engines into frames sites don't work as expected. Framed sites don't print as expected. Entering an URL from an email or newspaper article to a site using frames doesn't work as expected. When browsing web pages over limited browsers link handheld computers or cell phones, frames make the experience extremely painful.

That said, frames have their uses. Even Jakob admits as much. But too many people aren't considering the potential problems before using them.

Being both a designer and a programmer, I would like to point out that Quark is not that "easy" to use. It is a very complex and complicated program. As is illustrator, especially compared to the simple html found on easily usable sites such as useit.com

The major difficulty for a designer is selling the usable interface to the client. Most people would take one look at useit.com and would assume that a designer never came close to it. And they are probably correct. It is ugly. Usable, but ugly. People hire designers to make good looking sites. Some designers can do that in a very usable way, others can't. If usablity is your priority, you should not hire a designer, but a usablity specialist.

Of the homepages in our sample, 60% used the traditional standard for link colors: blue. This is a fairly small majority, but still large enough that we continue to recommend blue as the color for unvisited links. If links are blue, users know what to do. End of story.

Okay, maybe we need to sometimes be reminded about these, but I think that (and granted, I haven't read this yet so I can't be TOO judgemental) this book isn't for anyone other than relative web-design newbies.

I think that Nielsen would agree with you that he promotes design based on commonsense principles. The problem is that we obviously need to be reminded of them far more often than one would hope. The corporate sites that he analyzes in the book certainly weren't created by "relative web-design" newbies, and yet most of them ignore some (or all) of those commonsense principles.

It sometimes seems that web-design newbies actually do a better job of keeping to commonsense design: they don't have the skills to create complex Web pages, so their sites can end up being easy to understand and navigate just by default.

For that matterNielsen's own site looks kind of like it was created by somebody who just set up their first MSN dialup account a few days ago... :)

As for the author's credits, Nielsen is widely acknowledged to be a guru in the field. Check out his website, UseIt, for lots of more usability-related stuff.

How will this affect Usability aspects regarding page length? Jakob Neilsen has come up with some pretty good size, and page length guidelines. Essentially, there is a need to balance length with the annoyance of a page that is too short or too long.

...only a brilliant writer can keep users scrolling to the bitter end. The average site is cursed with extremely impatient users who want to get in and out and get answers or buy products fast. Paradoxically, the average site probably has below-average writing, since most commercial sites use repurposed print writing filled with "marketese" which backfires in terms of lowered trust and consumer skepticism.

Are these trends going to change? Will users beg for longer pages, whereas website authors might make more single-page clickthrough stories?

How will this affect Usability aspects regarding page length? Jakob Neilsen has come up with some pretty good size, and page length guidelines. Essentially, there is a need to balance length with the annoyance of a page that is too short or too long.

...only a brilliant writer can keep users scrolling to the bitter end. The average site is cursed with extremely impatient users who want to get in and out and get answers or buy products fast. Paradoxically, the average site probably has below-average writing, since most commercial sites use repurposed print writing filled with "marketese" which backfires in terms of lowered trust and consumer skepticism.

Are these trends going to change? Will users beg for longer pages, whereas website authors might make more single-page clickthrough stories?

Your friends are laughing at you because, although using the keyboard "feels" faster, nonetheless you are wrong.

I've read a number of summaries by members of the Nielsen Norman Group, and am a regular reader of Jakob Nielsen's Usable IT web site. They often turn up valid points, and results that people initially find counter-intuitive. On the other hand, you have to be careful with usability studies. As with everything else in the scientific method, the results are only valid within the context they were obtained. Extrapolation to other circumstances is not valid.

In this case, for example, the articles date from around ten years ago. At that point, applications didn't have the same consistency of default user interface that they have today, nor the ability to for users to customise keyboard shortcuts, menus, toolbars and so on that is routine on Windows, MacOS, and so forth today. There have also been some improvements in mouse usability, such as a "shadow cursor" in editors that shows where the insertion point would go if the mouse were clicked, and wheel mice. It is unreasonable to assume that the same conclusions would apply today as ten years ago.

Moreover, look at the example situation presented. In a real editor, if I want to replace all of the '|'s in a paragraph with 'e's, I don't do it one-by-one. I select the paragraph, choose the search-and-replace command, put in '|' and 'e' and tell it to go. For the record, to do it by keyboard, I did the following.

1. Ctrl-Up
2. Shift-Ctrl-Down (paragraph now selected)
3. Ctrl-H (replace)
4. Type '|'
5. Press Tab
6. Type 'e'
7. Alt-A (replace all)

1. Reach for mouse, position hand
2. Move to middle of paragraph and triple-click (selects paragraph)
3. Move to Edit menu and click
4. Move to Replace option and click
5. Move to input field and click
6. Type '|'
7. Move to output field and click
8. Type 'e'
9. Move to Replace All button and click

Note also that the above test used the most efficient interface for each case, as provided by default by my word processor without any UI customisation. In my experience, many rodent-loving users don't know about the triple-click to select a paragraph, though almost all keyboard-proficient users are aware of the Ctrl-H shortcut.

Now, I'm not arguing that the keyboard is always faster. For replacing one or two characters in a paragraph, I certainly do highlight with a mouse and overtype. For finding unfamiliar options on the menus or for scrolling text quickly, I use the mouse, too. But to claim that mousing is faster than keyboarding for general, everyday use is absurd, and contrived examples such as those presented don't strengthen the argument.

If you want more evidence, I suggest you go to Google and search for "mouse keyboard usability". Go past the articles on speech vs. mouse/keyboard interfaces and read the next twenty or so. The picture's pretty clear.

Lynx has had it almost forever. Mosaic had it. Even though I'd been using <link rel="author"> since I started making web pages, I first realized the possibilities when I saw it in iCab. There are a few others. Here are a few good articles about it.

• Jakob Nielsen's structural navigation article
• Sander's <link> page (Sander now works for Opera)
• Matthias' browser page

not sending admin commands to the list

As Jakob Nielsen says, "provide a special email address for each of the main commands: subscribe, unsubscribe, post discussion group message, etc. Keep the list short and there is a chance that users will understand it".

You should get better software if you can't get better users.

Jakob Nielsen went to DemoMobile and he says "Last year, most start-ups based their systems on WAP phones, but virtually all presenters now see WAP as a doomed technology. Think of the hundreds of millions of dollars that could have been saved last year if the VCs had bothered running a WAP usability study."

Jakob Nielsen has a collumn (actually, it was published in 98) on why 2D is better than 3D. He is a professional in usability - he is a good source for the answer to this question.

It's not just the web. Why do people still watch 2D movies and read 2D books? Why are so many top seller computer games 2D (SimCity, Civilization, Roller Coaster Tycoon)?

Your eyes view the world in 2D (plus depth), not full 3D. Monitors are 2D. Trying to stuff a 3D world through a 2D pipe means you lose data. For example, unless you're a hyperdimensional being, you can't see what's behind something without rearranging the data. It's "cool" but it's also a pain at times. If there's no good need/benefit for 3D, then using 3D is often worse than the 2D version. Most everything I do on the web doesn't benefit from 3D. I'd rather get the 2D version.

Read Jakob Nielsen for more thoughts on 3D vs. 2D.

- Amit

Yeah, just like the way all modern sites use the existing data (server logs, referrer info, yadda yadda) to improve the user experience.

The last thing these bozos (by which I mean every web designer except me!) need is more information to completely misinterpret. Sure, if people actually used the data sensibly it could be very helpful. What will actually happen instead is the marketing geniuses will generate a new set of first-level metrics and munge the sites to maximize that.

It will be just like current attempts to maximize the number of clicks on the "buy me" button. Only a very few will realize that maximum clickage does not translate to maximum long-term customer loyalty, sales, and those sorts of things that used to matter in the Old Economy.

Now if you'll excuse me I need a Jakob fix.

Maybe I'm missing the point when it comes to SOAP and all that -- but I've yet to see a really good description of why the hell I (as a web developer) should really care. It's not like I can't communicate over the net already. This makes the communication a bit more robust, perhaps... or maybe more easily integrated. But you can put a wrapper around all the various protocols you need and get the same thing. And you can do that now, with systems that are set up now, everywhere. That's why we use real programming languages and not XML.

The website also seems to imply that NetHesive will be closed source. In other words, I care as much about it as I do about web-enabled COBOL environments. If you can get people to use it and buy it, fine. But you aren't saving anyone. You won't be part of any revolution -- there are already more than enough niche commercial web products around. Hell, there's more than enough niche OSS web products around... but they usually whither and die more quickly, leaving the space more clean.

If there's a salvation for OSS, it's in the fact that people who actually get things done will still be doing things. Hell, if 44% of attempts to purchase online failed, I don't think web services are where attention needs to be focused. A good website/service is not a commodity yet, and most of the problems aren't things SOAP/.NET/NetHesive address.

...and that is, the old make things visible rule. Supposedly, if people have to remember a switch, it is less usable than an application that displays the switch.

Any other non-IE users experiencing problems with the rendering of this page? I'm using Mozilla. First, the menu bar is horizontal across the screen and streches way beyond my screen size (about +65%). Next, The first part of the article resides on the far right, which I have to scroll (majorly) to get to. Then, the remainer of the article resides to the far left, which I must scroll to after reading the first top of the article on the far right. This is very non-user-friendly, and I doubt Jakob Nielson would be happy with this article's usability and readability.

Is this an IE-preferred-only-please article? I'm interested in this subject, but really can't read much of it under these conditions. Perhaps this story is elsewhere?

"Customer registration forms are the bane of attracting new customers. It's like posting an armed guard at the door to a department store and only letting people in the store after they show two forms of ID and suffer nosy questions about their family tree. Web users often turn away rather than having to register. Quite simply, it's not worth peoples' time to answer all your questions... users will resent being asked to register. Every click is a burden for busy Web users, but more important, users don't like parting with their personal data before they have developed a sense of trust in the site... Qualitative studies have long shown that customer registration hurts usability and makes users turn away... Marie Tahir from Intuit... Too-early customer registration requirement posed a major problem in the earlier version of the site. After this finding, the site was redesigned to allow users to enter valuable areas of the site without having to register. Registration was postponed to a later stage where it was truly necessary to know the user's personal data in order to provide a mortgage. As a result, usage doubled." - Jakob Nielsen

If one wants flashy blinking stuff, it's much more effective to
watch MTV. Internet is for exchanging information, and most images do
not enhance that purpose. Is it easyer to find information in a
tabloid-style newspaper with everything on the page screaming for
attentention in all colors of the rainbow, or in a serious newspaper?
Then why does everybody want to have a webpage look like a tabloid?
Both designers and visitors, apparently.

Images don't scale nicely with screen size or default font size,
you can't do a text search in an image, they take lots of time to
download unless you are willing to pay USD 100 per month for a private
broadband connection. On Useit.com, you can find a large
archive of tested information on usability of web sites that support
these statements.

The only real purpose that most images on web pages serve, is to
obscure the structure of a website, such that visitors will spend more
time to find out what it's all about --- and see more ads.

Web sited that make their money through banner advertising have got to be unhappy about this development.

I'm sure they will be. Then again, since banner advertising doesn't work, it's not much of a loss...

Don't take my word about hazardous hotfixes. Do your own google search on "hotfix causes problems" and see for yourself. I imagine server admins who got burned by a recent broken hotfix, or at least read the June 8 CNET article about it, didn't want to be guinea pigs for MSFT's newest fixes.

It's splitting hairs to point out that this is an Index Server hole, not an IIS hole. Sure, and there was a mid-1990s hole that wasn't an Apache hole. It was a hole in a CGI script that happened to be part of the default Apache distribution. But let's not split hairs: it was effectively an Apache hole. This is effectively an IIS hole.

The difference is that the CGI script was just for debugging, whereas Index Server performs a very important web-site function that would be missed if turned off.

If you feel this is still an unfair comparison because Apache doesn't ship with a search engine, feel free to point out any remote exploits in SWISH or other popular free-software search engines. If you find any, be sure to say when they occurred. Good luck!

"PDF is great for distributing documents that need to be printed. But that is all it's good for. No matter how tempting it might be, you should never use PDF for content that you expect users to read online.

"Forcing users to browse PDF documents makes your website's usability about 300% worse relative to HTML pages."

http://www.useit.com/alertbox/20010204.html

Unless you've sat down and observed your interface getting tested with a usability professional or two who work with regular folks to see how the application works *in the real folks non-geek world* then you don't know what you're talking about.

Really, how can you argue with behavior-based experimental data that "this isn't how people behave"? Oh right - with unfounded 3l337 opinion.

Sure, there are other things we could do to better test usability - like have them spend a week or two with Gnome after this test, then test again to see how much they picked up.

but until you're doing testing with your own projects, until you appreciate that these are real people in the real world (that same world you think should use Linux as a desktop OS) then you're really missing the point.

cz

see www.usability.gov

IBM Ease of Use

The perennial Jakob Nielsen

Usability Professionals Association

Webword Usability Blog

• Low readability in monitors. This problem hasn't improved that much in thirty years or so, unfortunately. We make leaps and bounds in every other area of computer hardware but we still have monitors that reduce readability of text on screen by 25% (compared to the same text printed out). The eye doesn't like to read stuff that isn't very readable, eh?
• People are in a god damn hurry these days. This is a bad thing. Everyone all stressed out and whatnot.. People need to relax.
• Web content is formatted to be scannable, most of the time. The usability experts (Jakob Nielsen, Webword.com, etc.) always seem to think formatting things so that they are ultra-short and dumbed down to the point of insulting any reasonably educated (college degree) user's intelligence. But when everything is spoonfed and broken down into bulleted lists, I think we only contribute to this ultra-hurried way of browsing the web.

As this crowd well knows, any computer-related class worth taking is very expensive.

Classes are massively over-rated for most purposes, IMHO. However, funding for books, conferences or seminars on new technologies, etc. is usually money well spent.

I'm of the opinion that proper training pays for itself, but I'm also of the opinion that tech workers are some of the most disloyal employees on the planet.

There was an interesting survey recently looking into what employees say they want to keep them in a job, versus what they actually want. Among the more surprising results are that most people don't stay or quit based on salary alone, but that career advancement and getting to play with the new toys (or not) are a major factor.

So, the argument that people will take your training and then leave is clearly hogwash. If you train your people properly and treat them well, they won't want to leave. If you don't, and someone else does, they will leave anyway. Now, what does the smart manager do in this situation?

Reading the summary, and having a lot of respect for what the authors had to say on other topics convinced me it wasn't worth my while to bother with WAP.

The WAP Usability Report (available in PDF form for $26) reports on a study where 20 people were given WAP enabled phones for a week and asked to report back on their experiences. The study was done in London because of the advanced state of WAP services there. Read the summary here.

• 70% of users reported they would not use WAP within a year
• One user calculated it was cheaper to buy a newspaper and throw away everything but the TV listings rather than use WAP to check the BBC schedule

our basic conclusion is that WAP usability fails miserably; accomplishing even the simplest of tasks takes much too long to provide any user satisfaction. It simply should not take two minutes to find the current weather forecast or what will be showing on BBC1 at 8 p.m.

• Jakob Nielson
• Don Norman, author of The Design of Everyday Things, Things that Make Us Smart and The Invisible Computer
• Bruce "Tog" Tognazzini, one of the original designers of the Macintosh UI and author of Tog on Interface. Check out Tog's Software Design Bookstore to learn how to write software that doesn't suck. Read Top 10 Reasons the Apple Dock Sucks.

I link these and a couple other useful sites in my brief section on Some Web Application Design Basics in Use Validators and Load Generators to Test Your Web Applications:

I'm not talking about pretty rollover buttons here, folks.

You need to understand that many web sites are developed with investments totalling many millions of dollars, only to have the effect of driving away any user who might have the misfortune to stumble across them, with much resulting heartbreak and the loss of fortunes.

Reading the summary, and having a lot of respect for what the authors had to say on other topics convinced me it wasn't worth my while to bother with WAP.

The WAP Usability Report (available in PDF form for $26) reports on a study where 20 people were given WAP enabled phones for a week and asked to report back on their experiences. The study was done in London because of the advanced state of WAP services there. Read the summary here.

• 70% of users reported they would not use WAP within a year
• One user calculated it was cheaper to buy a newspaper and throw away everything but the TV listings rather than use WAP to check the BBC schedule

our basic conclusion is that WAP usability fails miserably; accomplishing even the simplest of tasks takes much too long to provide any user satisfaction. It simply should not take two minutes to find the current weather forecast or what will be showing on BBC1 at 8 p.m.

• Jakob Nielson
• Don Norman, author of The Design of Everyday Things, Things that Make Us Smart and The Invisible Computer
• Bruce "Tog" Tognazzini, one of the original designers of the Macintosh UI and author of Tog on Interface. Check out Tog's Software Design Bookstore to learn how to write software that doesn't suck. Read Top 10 Reasons the Apple Dock Sucks.

I link these and a couple other useful sites in my brief section on Some Web Application Design Basics in Use Validators and Load Generators to Test Your Web Applications:

I'm not talking about pretty rollover buttons here, folks.

You need to understand that many web sites are developed with investments totalling many millions of dollars, only to have the effect of driving away any user who might have the misfortune to stumble across them, with much resulting heartbreak and the loss of fortunes.

Reading the summary, and having a lot of respect for what the authors had to say on other topics convinced me it wasn't worth my while to bother with WAP.

The WAP Usability Report (available in PDF form for $26) reports on a study where 20 people were given WAP enabled phones for a week and asked to report back on their experiences. The study was done in London because of the advanced state of WAP services there. Read the summary here.

• 70% of users reported they would not use WAP within a year
• One user calculated it was cheaper to buy a newspaper and throw away everything but the TV listings rather than use WAP to check the BBC schedule

our basic conclusion is that WAP usability fails miserably; accomplishing even the simplest of tasks takes much too long to provide any user satisfaction. It simply should not take two minutes to find the current weather forecast or what will be showing on BBC1 at 8 p.m.

• Jakob Nielson
• Don Norman, author of The Design of Everyday Things, Things that Make Us Smart and The Invisible Computer
• Bruce "Tog" Tognazzini, one of the original designers of the Macintosh UI and author of Tog on Interface. Check out Tog's Software Design Bookstore to learn how to write software that doesn't suck. Read Top 10 Reasons the Apple Dock Sucks.

I link these and a couple other useful sites in my brief section on Some Web Application Design Basics in Use Validators and Load Generators to Test Your Web Applications:

I'm not talking about pretty rollover buttons here, folks.

You need to understand that many web sites are developed with investments totalling many millions of dollars, only to have the effect of driving away any user who might have the misfortune to stumble across them, with much resulting heartbreak and the loss of fortunes.

Reading the summary, and having a lot of respect for what the authors had to say on other topics convinced me it wasn't worth my while to bother with WAP.

The WAP Usability Report (available in PDF form for $26) reports on a study where 20 people were given WAP enabled phones for a week and asked to report back on their experiences. The study was done in London because of the advanced state of WAP services there. Read the summary here.

• 70% of users reported they would not use WAP within a year
• One user calculated it was cheaper to buy a newspaper and throw away everything but the TV listings rather than use WAP to check the BBC schedule

our basic conclusion is that WAP usability fails miserably; accomplishing even the simplest of tasks takes much too long to provide any user satisfaction. It simply should not take two minutes to find the current weather forecast or what will be showing on BBC1 at 8 p.m.

• Jakob Nielson
• Don Norman, author of The Design of Everyday Things, Things that Make Us Smart and The Invisible Computer
• Bruce "Tog" Tognazzini, one of the original designers of the Macintosh UI and author of Tog on Interface. Check out Tog's Software Design Bookstore to learn how to write software that doesn't suck. Read Top 10 Reasons the Apple Dock Sucks.

I link these and a couple other useful sites in my brief section on Some Web Application Design Basics in Use Validators and Load Generators to Test Your Web Applications:

I'm not talking about pretty rollover buttons here, folks.

You need to understand that many web sites are developed with investments totalling many millions of dollars, only to have the effect of driving away any user who might have the misfortune to stumble across them, with much resulting heartbreak and the loss of fortunes.

• Graceful Degradation of Scalable Internet Services, from October 1999, calls WAP the Wrong Approach to Portability and generally trashes the idea that cell phones as we know them will ever be productive 'net access devices.
• In WAP Backlash, from July 2000, he says "skip the current generation of WAP" and trashes it some more. Plus he says "I told you so" a couple times.
• WAP Field Study Findings, December 2000; good quote: "Considering that WAP users pay for airtime by the minute, one of our users calculated that it would have been cheaper for her to buy a newspaper and throw away everything but the TV listings than to look up that evening's BBC programs on her WAP phone." Trashes WAP some more, says "I told you so" a couple more times (God, he loves saying that ;).

• Graceful Degradation of Scalable Internet Services, from October 1999, calls WAP the Wrong Approach to Portability and generally trashes the idea that cell phones as we know them will ever be productive 'net access devices.
• In WAP Backlash, from July 2000, he says "skip the current generation of WAP" and trashes it some more. Plus he says "I told you so" a couple times.
• WAP Field Study Findings, December 2000; good quote: "Considering that WAP users pay for airtime by the minute, one of our users calculated that it would have been cheaper for her to buy a newspaper and throw away everything but the TV listings than to look up that evening's BBC programs on her WAP phone." Trashes WAP some more, says "I told you so" a couple more times (God, he loves saying that ;).

• Graceful Degradation of Scalable Internet Services, from October 1999, calls WAP the Wrong Approach to Portability and generally trashes the idea that cell phones as we know them will ever be productive 'net access devices.
• In WAP Backlash, from July 2000, he says "skip the current generation of WAP" and trashes it some more. Plus he says "I told you so" a couple times.
• WAP Field Study Findings, December 2000; good quote: "Considering that WAP users pay for airtime by the minute, one of our users calculated that it would have been cheaper for her to buy a newspaper and throw away everything but the TV listings than to look up that evening's BBC programs on her WAP phone." Trashes WAP some more, says "I told you so" a couple more times (God, he loves saying that ;).

• Graceful Degradation of Scalable Internet Services, from October 1999, calls WAP the Wrong Approach to Portability and generally trashes the idea that cell phones as we know them will ever be productive 'net access devices.
• In WAP Backlash, from July 2000, he says "skip the current generation of WAP" and trashes it some more. Plus he says "I told you so" a couple times.
• WAP Field Study Findings, December 2000; good quote: "Considering that WAP users pay for airtime by the minute, one of our users calculated that it would have been cheaper for her to buy a newspaper and throw away everything but the TV listings than to look up that evening's BBC programs on her WAP phone." Trashes WAP some more, says "I told you so" a couple more times (God, he loves saying that ;).