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"Science fiction authors do a better job than I do of speculating on future advances and the implications for human existence. However, one thing is certain: The transition from punched tape to the Web and megapixel displays is merely the first and smallest part of the evolution of user interfaces."

They probably won't be "computers" at all. They'll simply be smart everything and the idea of a computer probably won't exist. There will be pervasive computing everywhere though. And as for Nielsen, you should read up on some of his earlier predictions and see just how credible he is (do a find on predictions): http://www.useit.com/alertbox/

Especially as one side of a conversation is a lot harder to ignore than both

(Link goes to an Alertbox column, not the study itself)

Especially as one side of a conversation is a lot harder to ignore than both

(Link goes to an Alertbox column, not the study itself)

because all the PHBs are folks that don't know what their product actually _is_ or how _real_ people would use it and they need someone to slap them a bit so they can see the problems. If a lot of tech companies actually spent any time _using_, testing, and refining a product before releasing it, things could be a lot better.

I came across it on stumbleupon a few weeks ago.

For some reason, people find cell phone conversations more annoying than a face to face conversation. It's not clear why.

• Why Mobile Phones are Annoying

Nielsen told us that we only need to test with 5 users performing representative tasks and for the most part I believe him. Convincing the open source program authors to make the necessary changes (as observed by the testers) is always the hard part. But then, documenting the findings of usability studies of any scale and constructing an authoritative document will be useful
_____________
my weblog

I've got 26 things open right now and between a multi-tabbed browser, taskbars over two monitors and a sidebar I don't have any problem getting to what I want. The Alt-Tab Replacement helps too.

Part of the problem with 3D GUIs is that monitors are 2D devices, not 3D. Give me a workable 3D display device and manipulation tools (hint: I'm thinking of 'give me the real world' here) with my 3D GUI and you might have something. Even in the 'real world' however, 2D is often a most useful abstraction. Jakob Nielsen has an interesting column (with rebuttals) on the problems of 3D interfaces.

The best opt-in I've ever seen is an RSS feed.

• If you put it in your aggregator, you want it.
• If you remove it from your aggregator, you don't want it.

Mass-mailers/mail-mergers/automated-mailers (including my-cowardly-self) can deal with the fact that people are simply friggin' overwhelmed with inbox influx. I'm not an AOL user, but I've dealt with lousy unsubscribe procedures by crying "spam" to CloudMark etc... Go cry to mommy that they accidentally marked your carefully crafted newsletter as spam. Get over it.

Spread the word, RSS doesn't suck. Overload of inbox crap, opted-in or not, in the inbox does suck.

Thank you MS for making Outlook 2003 not download e-mail images by default! Thank you SpamCop and SpamHaus! Thank you Netscape engineers and Dave Winer for RSS!

While I'm on a roll. What the F is up with the national do-not-call list? Shouldn't it be a national call-me-i'm-an-idiot list instead?

And who would want to read an eBook, anyway? Printing the damn thing would take waaay too much paper, and we all know that .pdf files suck for everything except printing.

Who would pay for a markedly poor reading experience?

Maybe someone could come up with better usability design for the car interfaces as well, instead of those multiple-menu screens built by Germans (no offense to KDE and SuSE guys, but Germans, while touting reliability, do build awful interfaces in their cars).

I just got this column from Jacob Nielsen in my mailbox complaining about this exact issue.

There's an interesting article on ZDNet from November that takes as its angle that Yahoo deliberately set out to emulate Google's interface. The thing is, a lot of Google's design innovations (differentiating of text ads into coloured boxes, etc.) have now become web standards, and it pays (for users) that these are consistent across the web. Thanks to Google's innovation, I can recognise a coloured box as an ad, whether it's on Google or Yahoo. I just hope that they have sense, unlike Amazon, to not go around sueing everyone who does something similar.

Yes, true, but the bottom line is not really interesting unless you're a shareholder in one of those companies. As a viewer, I don't see a difference between crap media that makes money and crap media that doesn't; it just sucks. Except that I will have to put up with the crap that makes money for longer, since it will be more successful; so really it's worse :)

And also, aren't they two very different kinds of Philistine really? Nielson thinks anything apart from information in its barest form is a waste of 'screen real estate'. Look at his website. It's so bare and ugly that I stand to stay on the page long enough to read any of it. The marketing Philistines are a different animal; they don't care about information in the slightest. The only thing that matters to them in the money.

Bash away. His site is simply awful. It is the ugliest site I have ever seen that says "web design" in the title. If "usable" means it has to be that drab, then no thanks.

A better definition from Nielson:
"Excessive word count and worthless details are making it harder for people to extract useful information. The more you say, the more people tune out your message."

"...a good windows programmer will create an object (COM/C# Class) and then write a GUI that will call this object."

Regardless of what you think of Jakob Nielson (http://www.useit.com) and other usability gurus, writing the GUI as an afterthought is not good Windows programming.

Running usability tests (e.g., paper prototypes) early on in your development cycle can give you valuable insight into how your users expect to accomplish their tasks. You owe it to yourself to try it out.

No matter the relative market shares of the two platforms, Mac + Windows > Windows Only.

See also Metcalfe's Law in other contexts.

what they do is put together the hardware, software, and support in a convenient package for the end-user. As for the morons, well, they pay the bills.

Amen to that. I'm so tired of elitist geeks, especially ones who make unusable garbage and then blame the user for not getting it. Really smart geeks recognize that if they make stuff that only a geek can use, that's about 1% of the population. If they want broad adoption of something, then they have to make it so that people in the 20th percentile can use it, too.

What really gets me is that some of the people who are the worst offenders in this don't seem to realize that they are acting just like the people they love to hate. Those snobby, ignorant jocks and cheerleaders? They're also in the top 1% in a small slice of the world, and they measure everybody else in terms of their particular talents. Annoying and shallow, isn't it?

It would please me greatly if the users-are-all-idiots crowd would use some of their immense brainpower to discover that there are more aspects to people and the broader world than can be measured by IQ tests.

Usability testing isn't about recording what customers want, it's about recording what they do. They are two very different things!

See Jakob Nielsen's First Rule of Usability.

It's interesting to read this thread. Cliff says in his editorial:

It sounds good, but reality has a tendency of getting in the way of good ethics.

Almost all of the readers' comments, however, boil down to one or more of the following.

• A well-treated employee is a productive employee.
• It's hard to beat an honest man.
• Honour among thieves. ;-)

I've gotten to where I automatically reject as dishonest EVERY ad I see on TV or read anywhere.

You're not the only one. In fact, some research strongly suggests that users discount any text on a web page that comes across as marketese, even if it's not explicitly in an ad.

I don't always agree with Jakob "butt ugly, but look how useful" Nielsen, but on direct linking to PDFs the man's got a point. What's next? an article about the flexibility of various body holes, linked to the site which ruined the whole .cx TLD? (this is not flamebait, nor trolling.. Maybe off-topic..)

I don't always agree with Jakob "butt ugly, but look how useful" Nielsen, but on direct linking to PDFs the man's got a point. What's next? an article about the flexibility of various body holes, linked to the site which ruined the whole .cx TLD? (this is not flamebait, nor trolling.. Maybe off-topic..)

A little research report: PDF: Unfit for Human Consumption .

Usability expert Jakob Nielsen addressed the issue of linkrot in a column already in 1998: Fighting Linkrot.

Just to make a simple but reasonblly respectable* site would need two years of university education if you never done it before.

Poppycock.

When desktop publishing was new, everyone rushed to make the most complicated newsletters possible. Soon it seemed like you needed years of experience to generate a simple newsletter.

But it was all a farce. If you looked at the professional work, it had never gotten gaudy. Well, okay, some did, but the old respectable sources kept with the simple and elegant. That simple elegance has proven timeless.

The same goes for web sites. If you just use some bare bones formatting you'll end up with simple elegance. By way of example, check out a random article from useit.com. It looks good to me. 99% basic HTML. In fact the simplicity reinforces the seriousness of the page.

Jakob Nielsen wrote a nice article about why advertising doesn't work on the web in September of 1997. It's still true. The web isn't TV. People aren't passively watching the screen. They are actively reading and searching for information (or amusement). Anything that slows that process down will be at least ignored, if not actively blocked. As evidence, take a look at long term ad banner click through rates. They fall by a factor of 2 about every 18 months.

I personally use the Adblock plug-in for Mozilla and Mozilla Firebird. Before Adblock I used to leave Flash uninstalled so I wouldn't be distracted by blinking flashing ads. Now I just don't see them, and in fact, don't even download them.

James

Good presentation of information IS being pragmatic. Too often people substitute the word "pragmatic" for the word "lazy".

Speaking of the PowerPoint generation, as a software developer who actually tries to study information presentation from the likes of Edward Tufte, Jakob Nielsen, and so forth I still get real frustrated when the PHB's dictate requirements with no insight at all. Often times colors choices are made just by picking the prettiest color amongst the 32-color palette available in the MS Word toolbar or something silly like that. I find that in the real world it's not that Tufte is not very pragmatic, its just that the people making the decisions have not even heard of Tufte.

Hmm, that sounds suspicously like

1) Author makes content
2) Author makes content on crappy old 486 because they're essentially free now
3) Artists offers content for syndication
4) Lots of web sites buy author's syndicated content
5) Author gets popular, driving more traffic to sites that bought his/her content, so he can raise his syndication prices
6) Sites buying his content make money from ad banners
7) Profit!!

And we all know how well that worked out.

This L-shaped Lotka curve bears a suspicious resemblance to the Zipf distribution, which describes the popularity or prominence of objects in a wide range of fields. It is better displayed on a logarithmic scale, where the L shaped curve becomes a straight line. It would be interesting to see if Murray's data also showed that effect.

[adobe acrobat 6.0]
*slow load time
*poor searching capability
-CTRL-F
-enter value to search
-press *search*
-get results
-to find again press *new search*
-last search results disappear??
*very slow scrolling
-1 page per screen
-up/down scrolling is painful
-forcing you to use bookmarks which are not fine grained enough.
*poor use of screen real estate
-sidebar
-statusbar
-searchbar
-but difficult to turn off
*overwhelming options
-View has 16 sub options for instance
*pdf metaphor broken
-PDF: Unfit for Human Consumption
"... Users get lost inside PDF files, which are typically big, linear text blobs that are optimized for print and unpleasant to read ...J.Neilsen"

[adobe acrobat 6.0]
*slow load time
*poor searching capability
-CTRL-F
-enter value to search
-press *search*
-get results
-to find again press *new search*
-last search results disappear??
*very slow scrolling
-1 page per screen
-up/down scrolling is painful
-forcing you to use bookmarks which are not fine grained enough.
*poor use of screen real estate
-sidebar
-statusbar
-searchbar
-but difficult to turn off
*overwhelming options
-View has 16 sub options for instance
*pdf metaphor broken
-PDF: Unfit for Human Consumption
"... Users get lost inside PDF files, which are typically big, linear text blobs that are optimized for print and unpleasant to read ...J.Neilsen"

Please refer to Jakob Nielsen's excellent AlertBox column on why PDF's should not be used for anything other than printing: PDF unfit for human consumption. In short, PDF's present a critical usability problem. Issues include: jarring user interface, linear exposition, lack of editability, and loss of navigation tools. It is true that some PDF files do not suffer from all of these problems, but most do.
I am still in shock that the Dept Of "Justice" did not require MS to open its file format as a result of being found to have abused an illegal monopoly.

Huh? this is supposed to be a usabillity standard? My boss would fire me for making crap like that and rightly so! This is a usabillity nightmare!

Huh? this is supposed to be a usabillity standard? My boss would fire me for making crap like that and rightly so! This is a usabillity nightmare!

ouch.. what a narcisist !

Of all the nerds I've seen, this one must have the most pics of himself online.

To add to this, one can follow all the rules making pages comply yet still provide poo usability due to ill-thought layout and navigation on top of a good framework.
For starters, if you're not familiar with him, here is Jacob Nielsen's site. He is usability guru formerly from Sun.

This sounds like a fresh coat of paint on the old Fifth Generation Computing program. For you youngsters, this was a Japanese effort launched in the early 1980's to develop "intelligent" computers capable of natural language interaction, etc. At the time it was perceived as a major competitive threat to US and European technology companies.

Of course it was a colossal failure. Japan has gone from being a contender in the computing world to a nonentity. If Japan wants to get back on track, it would be well-advised to take smaller steps. Try making a robot with the intelligence of a cockroach first.

Of course the problem with the whole approach is that producing an AI is not yet an engineering exercise (as Apollo was in 1963).

The HTML version was generated from the PDF version using pdftohtml (you can see it in the source).

The real question is: why did they use PDF in the first place? Users hate PDF. If you want to give some quick, easy-accessible information, use HTML.

PDF is great for one thing and one thing only: printing documents. Paper is superior to computer screens in many ways, and users often prefer to print documents that are too long to easily read online.

1) No matter how fun or exciting your text content is, keep site design simple.

2) Personally I like the idea of a navigation bar on the side that reminds the reader where they are in the text, like the Outline view in Acrobat Reader (but don't use PDF!)or the way Google Groups shows threads.

3) Don't do things that break printing. If people need to print out a section, it should print properly. I can't tell you how many times I curse at web page designers when I print out a page to refer to later and the text flows off the right edge of the page!

4) Keep blocks of text small; I am of the opinion that scrolling through large blocks of text on-screen is mentally tiring and turns readers off. By the same token, don't do things that slow page loading down for dialup users!

5) If you include figures or pictures, use inlined thumbnails that load quickly, but are also links to full-sized (and printable?) images. Wrap text around the images in a way that is eye-pleasing and makes sense. Excess white space looks as unprofessional as too little.

6) Avoid flashy things that add nothing to the information you're trying to convey.

7) Read anything written on the subject by Jakob Nielson.

1) No matter how fun or exciting your text content is, keep site design simple.

2) Personally I like the idea of a navigation bar on the side that reminds the reader where they are in the text, like the Outline view in Acrobat Reader (but don't use PDF!)or the way Google Groups shows threads.

3) Don't do things that break printing. If people need to print out a section, it should print properly. I can't tell you how many times I curse at web page designers when I print out a page to refer to later and the text flows off the right edge of the page!

4) Keep blocks of text small; I am of the opinion that scrolling through large blocks of text on-screen is mentally tiring and turns readers off. By the same token, don't do things that slow page loading down for dialup users!

5) If you include figures or pictures, use inlined thumbnails that load quickly, but are also links to full-sized (and printable?) images. Wrap text around the images in a way that is eye-pleasing and makes sense. Excess white space looks as unprofessional as too little.

6) Avoid flashy things that add nothing to the information you're trying to convey.

7) Read anything written on the subject by Jakob Nielson.

1) No matter how fun or exciting your text content is, keep site design simple.

2) Personally I like the idea of a navigation bar on the side that reminds the reader where they are in the text, like the Outline view in Acrobat Reader (but don't use PDF!)or the way Google Groups shows threads.

3) Don't do things that break printing. If people need to print out a section, it should print properly. I can't tell you how many times I curse at web page designers when I print out a page to refer to later and the text flows off the right edge of the page!

4) Keep blocks of text small; I am of the opinion that scrolling through large blocks of text on-screen is mentally tiring and turns readers off. By the same token, don't do things that slow page loading down for dialup users!

5) If you include figures or pictures, use inlined thumbnails that load quickly, but are also links to full-sized (and printable?) images. Wrap text around the images in a way that is eye-pleasing and makes sense. Excess white space looks as unprofessional as too little.

6) Avoid flashy things that add nothing to the information you're trying to convey.

7) Read anything written on the subject by Jakob Nielson.

Is this press release meant for screen reading or printing? If it really meant for printing, I guess that's fine, but if it is meant for online reading it is stupid to use the PDF format. Jakob has some comments on this topic, if you care. Then again, some people think he's full of crap.

an SVG graphic on a webpage I was asked to download a viewer, and 30 seconds later I saw the image. That's not a real inconvenience.

You weren't browsing the web via a braille-interface.

Nothing like making the world block, more-entirely, ones already blocked by circumstance from participating...

exclusive, rather than inclusive, humanity...

sometimes it's necessary, but...
sometimes it isn't.

why not an alt-version, using -pre- tags, and text-graphs, for display of information?

... if eyeball-blind people are worth enough to include?

Try some of these:
The WWW Consortium's accessibility checklist, and Jakob Nielsen's bi-veekly Alertbox: current issues in Web Usability.

Payments of over a dollar have worked quite well on the web for a while, and payments of about $3 on up were working fine in several ways even before paypal. As you move the line lower and lower, the schemes become less and less successful. Below $.50 it becomes very hard, and below $.25 (which is getting to what I consider to be truly "micro") it becomes nearly impossible, not only because of the transaction cost as far as technology goes, but because of all the descision making that goes along with it. It's one thing to send someone $3 for a Pez dispenser on eBay, it's quite another to decide 30 times a day if you'll spend $.10 on an article that you don't even know (having not read it yet) is even worth your time to read.

So yes, there are some successes, but I don't think anyone should say micropayments work everywhere just because the iTunes Music Store is making it work at $.99 a throw. I'm just going by the definition of micropayments I first heard of in 1996-1997--payments from <$.01 to ~$.50. The kind of system Jakob Nielson talked about here in 1998, which he said would be here in 2000, which still isn't in place today, mid-2003. He talks about it costing $.10 in time to wait 10 seconds to download a page, but real life isn't that granular, nor is it worth the time to be. ("Simply waiting for a typical banner ad to download costs about 3 cents in lost employee time, so that could be a possible value of ad-free pages.") That is *exactly* where subscriptions work--"I'll pay $10/month to never have to look at (or wait for) an ad, ever."

Does your employer knock $.75 off your paycheck if you go to Taco Bell for lunch and spend an extra 5 minutes in the bathroom? Does he add $1 to your check if you eat lunch in the cafeteria and get back to your desk 10 minutes sooner than if you would have gone out to eat? That's the biggest thing--as you get smaller and smaller, you're requiring people to spend proportionally more and more time thinking about transactions that are worth less and less. So yes, there's a big gray area in what is considered micro, so I'll qualify my response: online payments for less than $.25 will never become wildly popular, or even marginally accepted.

Plus, I'm reminded as I type this, there's not even a cent key on a keyboard. Maybe that's what's holding everything back? :-)

pudge, fucking warm us with a [PDF] like google does when linking to shitty PDF files. Thank you.

Jakob Nielsen's Alertbox: PDF: Unfit for Human Consumption

Netscape4.x. Yes some people do still use it, for instance in businesses where they can't/won't upgrade for whatever reason or old macintoshes. There are all sorts of odd browsers knocking about that cannot understand css.

Absolutely. That's why CSS was specifically designed to degrade gracefully. Unless the author was particularly clueless, HTML + CSS is still useful when the user-agent cannot understand the CSS.

For all the whining about tables here they are still the best way to get a page to look the same in all browsers.

That's not only an impossible goal, but an unreasonable and stupid goal. I don't want pages I read to look the same as people who surf with 640x480, and vice versa. That's what PDF is for. The same applies to all sorts of differences in surfing habits.

Yes CSS is technically a much better way to do it, but web designers don't earn money from being technically correct, they earn money from making pages that work.

Nice word play, but CSS does work. It has different tradeoffs with table layouts, but you're kidding yourself if you think that tables are just plain better and more compatible than CSS. That's nowhere near true (and the reverse is not true either, use the best tool for the job and all that).

But you can be guaranteed that when mr X shows his friends his new company website you are asking him 5k for and it doesn't even work on his friends "old" pc you ain't gonna make that money. This is the situation in my experience.

No offense, but you don't sound very experienced. Any agency that acts professionally will explain the tradeoffs being made at every step of the way. Cost (development and maintenance time), and quality (usability, accessibility, load times) usually outweigh the one or two percent of people who can't understand the CSS.

Here's something to chew on if you think that table layouts are reliable. Expect more problems in the future.

Feh.