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How is talking on a phone any more or less annoying than talking to a person sitting next to you?

See this.

"... more research is called for. But the problem seems to be that people pay more attention when they hear only half a conversation. It's apparently easier to tune out the continuous drone of a complete conversation, in which two people take turns speaking, than it is to ignore a person speaking and falling silent in turns."

How is talking on a phone any more or less annoying than talking to a person sitting next to you?

How is talking on a phone any more or less annoying than talking to a person sitting next to you?

Flash as a technology is fine. The only problem is that it breaks the hyperlinked web, which means that the more data is in flash, the more impossible it becomes to find it.

Fortunately, there is hardly any meaningful information Flash only, so for now it is not a problem.

If you don't believe me, go to Jakob Nielsen's site, and see for yourself.
useit.com

Bart

There was a recent AlertBox article in which Nielsen described the most hated forms of Web advertising and how much they hurt users and, in turn, the aggressive advertisers and the sites that use them. It's a small article and quite worth a read.

may i add this one :http://www.useit.com/alertbox/20041206.html

Design Element Users Answering "Very egatively" or "Negatively"
Pops-up in front of your window 95%
Loads slowly 94%
Tries to trick you into clicking on it 94%
Does not have a "Close" button 93%
Covers what you are trying to see 93%
Doesn't say what it is for 92%
Moves content around 92%
Occupies most of the page 90%


So if you use these kind of elements then people will dislike your ads.

Donald Norman's book The Design of Everyday Things

Jakob Nielsen's articles and newsletters on web design and usability testing:
Useit.com

Both are pretty good.

After skimming the article it seems like these are more like on demand content services rather than other "Internet TV" providers.

As for the brushed metal interface, that's just a theme, and themes do no good useability make. Check out Ask Tog or Jakob Nielsen for some work on what real useability means.

Hey--I'm a Unix geek, and I think that it's cool that Macs now have a Unix layer. I just think that it's sad that they've lost much of their original UI advantages.

It's Human-Computer Interaction (HCI). Every year there is a large ACM conference on this called CHI. There are also hundreds of HCI researchers all around the world at some of the top institutions working on problems like this.

Georgia Tech and Carnegie Mellon have two of the bigger masters programs available. Each program pumps out between one to two dozen people a year who should be well equipped to perform usability testing, among other things.

And you don't need a whole lab. You don't need to videotape often, and you don't need to buy some special software/hardware (you can, and they help, but you can get a lot of mileage from much less). Jakob Nielson and his cohort Don Norman have published a few good books that should be accessible to the uninitiated. Often times, some scribbles on paper are a better choice than prototyping the interface (scribbles usually give you higher levels of feedback, as opposed to "The font is ugly.").

There really are much better sources than articles like this one where people are just discovering HCI methods (not to rag on the article). Do a little google searching (you now have the right keywords: usability, hci), read some books (amazon is bound to have something up your alley), and maybe even ask some people in the field. There's a lot of really cheap, really quick things you can do to help yourself out (lookup Nielson's Discount usability, or you can hire an HCI person onto your team, we're very worth the cost).

BTW: There are many more excellent sources than Nielson, he's just the easiest to cite for applied HCI in a short period of time.

It's Human-Computer Interaction (HCI). Every year there is a large ACM conference on this called CHI. There are also hundreds of HCI researchers all around the world at some of the top institutions working on problems like this.

Georgia Tech and Carnegie Mellon have two of the bigger masters programs available. Each program pumps out between one to two dozen people a year who should be well equipped to perform usability testing, among other things.

And you don't need a whole lab. You don't need to videotape often, and you don't need to buy some special software/hardware (you can, and they help, but you can get a lot of mileage from much less). Jakob Nielson and his cohort Don Norman have published a few good books that should be accessible to the uninitiated. Often times, some scribbles on paper are a better choice than prototyping the interface (scribbles usually give you higher levels of feedback, as opposed to "The font is ugly.").

There really are much better sources than articles like this one where people are just discovering HCI methods (not to rag on the article). Do a little google searching (you now have the right keywords: usability, hci), read some books (amazon is bound to have something up your alley), and maybe even ask some people in the field. There's a lot of really cheap, really quick things you can do to help yourself out (lookup Nielson's Discount usability, or you can hire an HCI person onto your team, we're very worth the cost).

BTW: There are many more excellent sources than Nielson, he's just the easiest to cite for applied HCI in a short period of time.

It's Human-Computer Interaction (HCI). Every year there is a large ACM conference on this called CHI. There are also hundreds of HCI researchers all around the world at some of the top institutions working on problems like this.

Georgia Tech and Carnegie Mellon have two of the bigger masters programs available. Each program pumps out between one to two dozen people a year who should be well equipped to perform usability testing, among other things.

And you don't need a whole lab. You don't need to videotape often, and you don't need to buy some special software/hardware (you can, and they help, but you can get a lot of mileage from much less). Jakob Nielson and his cohort Don Norman have published a few good books that should be accessible to the uninitiated. Often times, some scribbles on paper are a better choice than prototyping the interface (scribbles usually give you higher levels of feedback, as opposed to "The font is ugly.").

There really are much better sources than articles like this one where people are just discovering HCI methods (not to rag on the article). Do a little google searching (you now have the right keywords: usability, hci), read some books (amazon is bound to have something up your alley), and maybe even ask some people in the field. There's a lot of really cheap, really quick things you can do to help yourself out (lookup Nielson's Discount usability, or you can hire an HCI person onto your team, we're very worth the cost).

BTW: There are many more excellent sources than Nielson, he's just the easiest to cite for applied HCI in a short period of time.

It wasn't that long ago, you know. Did parents never take a night off with a trusted babysitter at home? If you want to, you can call home yourself once or twice to check on things - just not in the middle of the movie!

People who *really* need to be contacted (doctors on call, for example) had pagers; and a blocking system based on a mini-cell station could be configured to allow such urgent calls/text messages through.

And you are quite wrong about the annoyance value of mobile phone conversations - a study has found them to be dramatically more annoying than face-to-face conversations, probably due to the one-way nature.

Heh. Whichever it turns out to be, the LoC, being yet another part of the federal government, will probably make it available for viewing/downloading as a single PDF file.

PDF sucks.

Too many websites have FAQs that list questions the company wished users would ask. No good. FAQs have a simplistic information design that does not scale well. They must be reserved for frequently asked questions, since that's the only thing that makes a FAQ a useful website feature. Infrequently asked questions undermine users' trust in the website and damage their understanding of its navigation.

That comment comes with an appropriate cartoon.

Too many websites have FAQs that list questions the company wished users would ask. No good. FAQs have a simplistic information design that does not scale well. They must be reserved for frequently asked questions, since that's the only thing that makes a FAQ a useful website feature. Infrequently asked questions undermine users' trust in the website and damage their understanding of its navigation.

That comment comes with an appropriate cartoon.

It's interesting that you mention this. Jakob Nielsen did a great study that showed that people don't need to talk any louder on their cell to be annoying - it's naturally annoying to you because you only hear one side of the conversation. Read about it here.

according to an affidavit filed in connection with one of the search warrants."

Just read this today... maybe that explains why I didn't see that (took two more tries after you pointed it out).

Thanks for pointing it out, makes me feel better.

1: Usability is a feature, and features can be usability.

If I'm blind then the previewing of sounds when I more the cursor over them is 100% usability.

If I can't be bothered to click on the files to play them then previewing of sounds is 100% usability.

If I've been out of the piss all night and can't manage to work XMMS then previewing sounds is 100% usability.

Anyhow, lets look at his 'perfect' web site......

I thought I'd take a better look at the "the king of usability"

Lets do a little search on his web site. (very important).

Search: things I should do
Categories: 7 categories
Found: 475 pages
Count: 126 pages contain all 4 search words

Cool 7 categories, can you tell me what they are so I don't have to scroll all the way through the page... cheers....

(they could be put in the empty space to the right)

The layout:

A list with 4 vertical headings, .
1: white space between headings and data is too large.
2: Headings are too technical for Joe user,Found and Count? what's going on there.

3: "Categories: 7 categories. " Yes, I know there categories, you don't have to tell me twice.

Categories: 7. Is better, and more grammatically correct.(not that my grammar is great, but then I'm not the king of usability).

4: Found + count, again. Just combine the two you fool.

5: why not just combine the whole lot

Label data

Searched for 'things I should do'.
475 pages were found across 7 categories.

Ok, enough of that, now look at the source.

No doc-type, well done the king.
Look at the body tag, those BGCOLOR, LINK, ALINK etc.. attributes should be in the CSS, Mr King.

Look a bit further down, FIXED WIDTH Mr King, Haven't you read bobby and 503 like any self respecting web guru.

Ok,no more, it's too fucking horrible for words.

I thought I'd take a better look at the "the king of usability"

Lets do a little search on his web site. (very important).

Search: things I should do
Categories: 7 categories
Found: 475 pages
Count: 126 pages contain all 4 search words

Cool 7 chategories, can you tell me what they are so I don't have to scrole all the way through the page... cheers....

(they could be put in the empty space to the right)

The layout:

A list with 4 vertical headings, .
1: white space between headings and data is too large.
2: Headings are too techincal for Joe user,Found and Count? what's going on there.

3: "Categories: 7 categories. " Yes, I know there categories, you don't have to tell me twice.

Categories: 7. Is better, and more gramaticly correct.(not that my gramma is greate, but then I'm not the king of usability).

4: Found + count, again. Just combine the two you fool.

5: why not just combine the whole lot

Label data

Searched for 'things I should do'.
475 pages were found accross 7 categories.

Ok, enough of that, now look at the source.

No doc-type, well done the king.
Look at the body tag, those BGCOLOR, LINK, ALINK etc.. attributes should be in the CSS, Mr King.

Look a bit further down, FIXED WIDTH Mr King, Haven't you read bobby and 503 like any self respecting web guru.

Ok,no more, it's too fucking horrible for words.

He's so predictable he's even got a drinking game I think that means he's got high levels of usability.

His web site?

well, just take a look. /. games section has a better choice of colours.

anyhow, enough of that.

This guy could do to take a look at OSS for a change and stop contradicting himself (familiarity is good, oh, but don't clone)....

kde look has got more usability hanging off of it than, well, Nielsen I suppose.

OSS Firefox has create standards support (not excellent though), which is really handy if you trying to design a web site for dis/abled people.

Maybe OpenOffice does have more features than Office, but can't you just turn them off, or ignore them. Maybe I can preview sounds in Konquror, but not in Explorer. Maybe were all pissed of with the likes of Microsoft and Nielsen trying to dumb the world down, to the point where people stop thinking all together.

Most kids are coming through school with a high level of computer literacy, I'm sure even the ones who aren't geeks can get to grips with a Mandrake install.

Jakob Nielsen, shut the fuck up and fix you web site, and try to practise what you preach, before telling other what to do.

I suggest Slashdot copy his website's color scheme for their next section.

However, according to Jakob Nielsen, deep linking is good linking.

If it's a pain in the ass for users to find what they want on the site, then people aren't going to want to use it. And if they prevent others from deep linking, they are only going to lose visitors that may well go beyond the deep-linked page, browsing the site if they find it interesting, while at the same time viewing ads.

The chances are that the people clicking through from the PocketPCTools weren't going to know about or have the inclination to go to eWeek in the first place. So in this case, they are getting visitors, a vast majority of which would not have visited eWeek without this link.

And if they wanted, they could probably redirect all deep link click-throughs to go to the eWeek main page if they felt particularly hostile (which it seems they do).

Here is a pdf (pretty dumb format) which has a few Google tricks for those who are not familiar with some of the extended functionality of the worlds most popular search engine.

Just to add a few Nielsen points into the mix:
(From a study of remote controls, this is some of the lessions for web designers he finds.)

* The simplest and most common operations are presented in myriad ways on different sites.
* Rather than comply with the standard way of doing things, there are always a few site designers who are compelled to invent deviant user interfaces, thus harming users and sacrificing business. Unfortunately, these sites also poison the well for everybody: non-standard designs reduce users' confidence in operating sites that do standardize their features.

Obviously, the Mac and Gnome people will see themselves as the standard, as will the windows/kde/other users.

There is a balance between two ideals here: Consistency and "raw usability", so to speak. The Apple ordering might be the best from the latter POV, while the kde way leads on the former, if we consider the number of users.

It seems what we need is a usability study looking at what effect the button orders have on users used to them, both to see if there's any measurable difference between users used to them [1], and to see if users used to they kde order actually earns anything on going to the gnome order (or the other way around, though that hasn't been argued).

[1] I suspect that the difference between two users using a button order they're used to is minimal.

Can you explain why the value attribute of LI and the target attribute of A were deprecated way back in HTML 4?

The "target" attribute was deprecated, because its use leads to bad design habits. The "target" attribute is used either in framesets or to open new windows. Both practices are indicators of bad design. See:

• About new windows see #2 in Top Ten New Mistakes of Web Design (1999)
• About frames see #1 in Top Ten Mistakes of Web Design (1996).

As you can see, this isn't a new problem.

Unfortunately I can't find were it says the "value" attribute of LI is deprecated.

Can you explain why the value attribute of LI and the target attribute of A were deprecated way back in HTML 4?

The "target" attribute was deprecated, because its use leads to bad design habits. The "target" attribute is used either in framesets or to open new windows. Both practices are indicators of bad design. See:

• About new windows see #2 in Top Ten New Mistakes of Web Design (1999)
• About frames see #1 in Top Ten Mistakes of Web Design (1996).

As you can see, this isn't a new problem.

Unfortunately I can't find were it says the "value" attribute of LI is deprecated.

Ideally, you'd need even more than 10 Gbps for the perfect user interface.

Wrong Nielsen. useit.com mentioned in the blurb is Jakob Nielsen.

From the article:

But If I want to learn how to write phrases understandable by users or what colors to use that still allow color-blind people to use my software or how to best name categories for efficient navigation, I can do nothing but listen to people's opinions in the matter. Where is the open source community's pool of facts and knowledge covering usability issues?

Bulls***.

There are numerous books and resources on usability. For example:

• About Face 2.0: The Essentials of Interaction Design
• User Interface Design for Programmers
• Boxes and Arrows
• useit.com

Let *them* draw the screens, then merely implement it.

You think developers know nothing about usability? That is nothing compared to users ignorance.

Your suggestion, while noble sounding, is a recipe for a design where every whim a user ever had is encoded as a button that does just that, nothing more, resulting in a Million Buttons design.

Users are moderately competent at designing an expert interface but utterly incompetent at designing a beginner interface. (So are most developers, so that's not a horribly user-hostile thing to say.) And note I mean moderately literally.

The problem is, first and foremost, that people need to understand what usability is. Here you are with a +5 comment on Slashdot and you seem to think its just a matter of drawing screens. You evidently have no clue. It goes way beyond that. It is a matter of making software easy to use.

What is Usability? "We Don't Need Usability, We Already Listen to Customer Feedback" (at the bottom).

Let *them* draw the screens, then merely implement it.

You think developers know nothing about usability? That is nothing compared to users ignorance.

Your suggestion, while noble sounding, is a recipe for a design where every whim a user ever had is encoded as a button that does just that, nothing more, resulting in a Million Buttons design.

Users are moderately competent at designing an expert interface but utterly incompetent at designing a beginner interface. (So are most developers, so that's not a horribly user-hostile thing to say.) And note I mean moderately literally.

The problem is, first and foremost, that people need to understand what usability is. Here you are with a +5 comment on Slashdot and you seem to think its just a matter of drawing screens. You evidently have no clue. It goes way beyond that. It is a matter of making software easy to use.

What is Usability? "We Don't Need Usability, We Already Listen to Customer Feedback" (at the bottom).

He's probably talking about Croquet which is a 3d collaborative environment developed on top of Squeak. Impressive stuff.

I don't know about this - 3D interfaces tend to fail becuase they don't make tasks any easier. You don't want to miss a web page or a file because another one is in front of it. And 3D navigation tends to be quite hard if you want to do it in an efficient manner - if you want to be able to zip halfway across the universe really quickly instead of walking there slowly using a game controller.

An old but good article on this can be found here. The points seem to be very relevent to what Croquet is doing.

Oh, I'm a software developer at this place so I'm pretty familiar with how difficult it is to get things right and usable in 3D.

The service and sales pitch are good, but I guarantee you're losing a lot of potential conversions.

Your site design looks like just walked out of 1997, as does your HTML (with the exception of the CSS code).

In order to make a conversion, you have to overcome a few important obstacles. One of them is trust. One of the most important trust factors on the web is a professional-looking design.

Design matters! Check out this before and after comparison. Which site would you be more likely to give your money to?

Improving your design would improve your conversion rate, and that could make a BIG DIFFERENCE to your bottom line. You'll get more sales in less time, improve your ROI for advertizing, build better good-will and brand-loyalty with your existing users, and get more inbound links, which will in turn bring in more potential customers faster.

Get your site a make-over.

This is what really annoys me about him. I'm a graphic and web designer. He doesn't consider it worthwhile to even address my field as something worth paying for, and basically celebrates the raw ugliness of his website.

That, and his endless collection of photos of himself.

I read his book "Designing Web Usability". While he has good points regarding the minimalist style of web design, I don't think minimalism is not applicable in today's web sites. Websites today need a certain degree of aesthetic appeal and good layout. With millions of web sites in the web, a web site designed for both aesthetic and usability is the key because it stands out from the crowd.

As a web site tends to be more simple and "usable", aesthetic appeal goes down. People remember to web sites which has the "cool" factor. For instance, while his website useit.com is accessible to all browsers, it is ugly. We can clearly see the trade-of between aesthetic and usability.

His minimalist approach does not apply to all kinds of web sites. Our company develops web sites and we have an actress client. Of course, she wants all her web sites with all the eye-candy. If we apply Nielsen's advocacy of minimalist design, I don't think she would buy the idea. If the client is developing a simple hobby site or portal, maybe we can apply minimalist approach.

Minimalist design does not apply to all kinds of web sites. It may have its uses but we live on the new of the internet: broadband, flash and fancy graphics. Minimalist design is more applicable in the early days of the web.

Talking of which: the print-friendly version of the original article is terrible. They've made it fixed width, but the fixed width they've chosen falls out of the size of the paper with my current browser settings. Site designers need to start using print-media CSS with max-width and some of the page-oriented properties to achieve their printer-friendly layout.

Something I'd wished for years ago was an override of specified table widths, something like "ignore table width attributes". Come to think of it, maybe an extension for Mozilla Firefox is feasible or already has it.

He'd agree with both of us - he sometimes refers to liquid layouts.

• glish
• Eric Meyer's CSS/edge
• Owen Brigg's Little Boxes
• Blue Robot's The Layout Reservoir
• CSS Zen Garden
• MezzoBlue

Never is a strong word... the biggest argument I have against this is that my eyes hate to read a line of text which spans across my monitor. This is just my preference, but I have a feeling many people share this pet peeve -- if I find a site which is too wide for my eyes, I have to resize my browser window, which is not something a user should have to do to view a site.

Most designs rely on fixed widths because the page can be controlled; otherwise the widths are unknown and all sorts of things start looking like crap -- images, for instance. Lets say you have a 400 pixel wide image, and your fluid page is *usually* big enough (on my monitor) so that whatever design element it sits in is large enough to contain it. Now let's say someone looks at it in 640x480 -- the image probably overflows the design.

When you just have text data, and it looks like crap (Nielsen's site being the prime example), then yes, fluid designs are preferable. But when you start trying to make a site look good, be more usable, be more accessible, and work well while providing useful content in a very eye-pleasing form, then you need some measure of control of the look, and fixed designs can provide some of that. Now of course there are fixed pages which are absoulutely horrible -- just like any design, using fixed width requires thought, and some designers don't have that capability, and I'm sorry if you come accross one; but fixed widths can be useful in making a web site look better, which in my opinion improves the user experience as much as any of Nielsen's tips.

I know I'll get modded to Hades for this, but I can't help but asking: Am I the only person who finds Mr. Nielson's site to be painful to use?

If *I* looked like that, I'm not sure I'd plaster my face all over the Internet!

If *I* looked like that, I'm not sure I'd plaster my face all over the Internet!

If *I* looked like that, I'm not sure I'd plaster my face all over the Internet!

His website, http://www.useit.com/, hasn't been redesigned and is still as useable and pretty as ever.

Additionally, it looks like the improvements will really make a usability difference in how we interact with the UI. Keeping notes on an application window, tilting the windows to keep most of the perceptual information (btw, using foreshortening to effectively compress windows is a great idea), making multiple desktops more perceptual, etc are all good ideas that will help people interact more intelligently with their programs.

Unfortunately, none of these good ideas justifies 3D. Consider this layered model of human-computer interaction. What do we change when moving from a 2D desktop environment to a 3D desktop environment? It's the lower layers: physical, alphabetic, lexical, syntax. The system gains new capabilities to arrange information on screen, and the users gain new operations to perform with their mice and keyboards. What does not change are the higher layers. A 3D desktop does not change the way we interact with the World Wide Web and its search engines, with our word processors and file systems, or with each other using e-mail and instant messaging. Even through a 3D looking glass, the Web is hypertext, and in your word processor you handle letters consisting of paragraphs and other elements. Your files are still organized in the same hierarchical model as before. Your buddy list does not change. (You will receive the same amount of spam and spim, too.) Nothing of importance does change.

The 3D desktop changes the way you interact with your operating system. Which is something the user shouldn't have to care about. Human-computer interaction is about interacting with your information to accomplish tasks, rather than interacting with systems to flip windows, and about making the system disappear so the user can focus on taks and information. 3D does not achieve this. It requires you to interact in more sophisticated ways with systems, and adds nothing to the way you interact with information or people.

The features you mention might be useful, but the are not really new, and don't require 3D. You can attach notes to documents or objects without 3D in quite a useful way; have a look at MS Word. There, notes are not simply attached to documents but to specific parts of a document, e.g. a heading or a paragraph, which is even more useful and usable than notes on the backside of a window.

Tabbed browsing has been invented quite a while ago. It does effectively compress windows, takes not much screen real estate, and provides for logical grouping of tabs within windows according to the user's needs. A key idea of tabbed browsing is to not simply make the representation of a window smaller, but also more abstract by stripping off everything except the title. 3D lacks such abstraction, trying to replace it with magic.

Multiple desktops work just fine the way they do in 2D. There we do need a map already to find out way around. Having some 3D thing and needing a map to find your way around is inlinkely to make interaction any easier.

3D desktops are misplaced innovation. They make basic interaction harder -- mind that mice and screens are 2D --, and they do not add anything to higher levels. Have a look at nooface.com for more examples of failing 3D interfaces.

Have you by chance tried the Harmony Remote? It's task based, so for example you click to watch a DVD and it executes all the remote commands for you. FWIW, Jakob Nielsen appears to like it

It's both. Jakob Nielsen would be rolling over in his grave if he were dead. This looks like a tool upper level managers would love and people who actually have to make sense of the information would love to hate. This product's commercial success is entirely based on the marketing and sales team's rolodex size and slickness factor.

I've long held a personal opinion that Jakob Nielsen is the real world equivalent of G.E.B. Kivistik. Finally, someone noted the emporer's lack of clothes, and did it with style and panache.

Compare Nielsen's page to a more effective design. Which one would you rather read? If it's the second, then why are you taking style advice from this man?

I've long held a personal opinion that Jakob Nielsen is the real world equivalent of G.E.B. Kivistik. Finally, someone noted the emporer's lack of clothes, and did it with style and panache.

Compare Nielsen's page to a more effective design. Which one would you rather read? If it's the second, then why are you taking style advice from this man?

His most famous prediction, that most website would be funded by Micropayments in 2000 hardly came true.