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Ask Jakob Nielsen Almost Anything
Let's put it this way: when it comes to software, hardware, and Web usability issues, Jakob Nielsen be da man! There's been lots of talk about Linux usability since before kernel 1.0, and there has been so much discussion about Web site usability vs. technological cuteness, not only here on Slashdot but everywhere such things are discussed, that heads spin every time the subject comes up. So let's bypass all the people who have usability opinions just because they have opinions, and go straight to The World's Leading Expert. Read his Web site first to keep from asking questions he's answered over and over, then start typing (or moderating). Answers are scheduled to appear Friday.
There has been a lot of usability research concerning text printed on paper that indicates that serif fonts improve readibility, because the hooks at the ends of the fonts make words and sentences easier to follow. Has anything similar been done on the web? It seems to me that sans-serif fonts are easier to read on web sites because the low resolution of monitors (compared to paper, at any rate) make serif fonts harder to look at...
Eviscerati.Org: All Hail the Eviscerati
It is well known that Linux is, in usability terms, an unusable piece of trash, where the interface is changing widely from machine to machine, depending on what window manager is installed and exactly how the user set it up. For those who are trying to move Linux to everybody's desktop, there's a long row to hoe before it even comes close to ideal usability. So, in light of that, do you have any recommendations for standardizing the linux desktop that would provide "maximum bang for the buck"? In other words, what's the most importent thing to add as soon as possible in terms of usability?
Would you care to comment on the usability of slashdot? Good? Bad? Ugly? Be sure to read the apache section before answering that last one.
-- Don't Tase me, bro!
I'm not saying that all linux desktops will be on this standard, I'm simply talking about those who are. I'm sure you'll always be able to do what you like with your own desktop, but we need to start getting some standards for the standard distributions.
I think they do. They make me press the back button.
How much of your advice is based on experimental research, and how much on your personal experience and intuition? (And how much personal surfing experience do you get each day?)
How practical/useful would it be if computer interfaces, in general, went in this sort of direction, allowing the user to enforce the format they want, rather than relying on the programmer or web-page designer to produce something usable?
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
linux usability..
is not linux usability directly proportional to how intelligent you are versus how long you have been using winblows?
if you have been using linux for a long time it doesnt really matter what version you are using or how X windows is config'd.
Computers save man alot of guesswork, but so does the bikini
Have you considered the Amazon patent issues and your Amazon Affiliate usage?
... that is very obvious and necessary in your opinion, but is hardly ever or has never been implemented, or is implemented poorly?
And what's the biggest sin you see in most applications?
In most of your writings and interviews, you seem to be recommending short pages as always better than long ones. Sometimes you qualify this as applying only to 'navigation pages'-- but you never define that term. Aren't there more complex rules about when it's okay to have a long page? Don't you yourself find it frustrating when you have to load multiple pages, when one longer page could easily have held all the info?
From what information is available, what do you think of Eazel? Is this necessary, or are Gnome and KDE too geek-driven to ever meet consumer preference/demand? Do you think that Gnome or KDE could be modified to create a consumer-level GUI, or will it take a project like Eazel to start from scratch? How essential is all this to the success of Linux?
To what extent will people start using their browser's features to compensate for bad web sites? For example, your browser might automatically convert frames to tables, or precis long chunks of text, or concatenate lots of bitty pages into one easily-readable page. Since there will always be badly designed sites out there, do you think this is a useful sticking-plaster?
-- Ed Avis ed@membled.com
That's it. I got my five mod points, and every single one of them is going to be used to mark "Overrated" on a Score:2, me-too, bs post. Only problem is that there appears to be slightly more than five of you out there abusing your +1. Anyone want to help out with this?
Karma abusers, you will be stopped.
What's the worst Web site you've ever seen, and why?
--
Wage Slave Journal
Hot Grits pouring down the Gundam-H website!
The question just about everyone wants to know about.
Now the KDE and Gnome are usable and at least one claims to be mature. What are they doing right ? What are they doing wrong and what do the need to address in the near term ( I.e. obvious usability bugs ) and the long term ( pushing the envelope and making things better ).
How much stuff is needed at the lower levels of the system to make these projects more usable than they are now ?
What do you think is the most glaring gap among Linux applications. My favorite is a clone of "edit.com" from Windows/dos. What's yours' ?
--= Isn't it surprising how badly I spell ?
Did you ever wake up in the morning with a zombie wolf behind your eyes?
pointkilla!
You are the holder (or co-holder) of quite a number of patents. Can Open Source software builders who construct, for example, something that "prints a hyperspacial document" or "updates visual bookmarks" expect to be hearing from your attorneys?
Support the United Coalition of Trolls Against Moderation?
Do you think that a good user interface can be designed without an understanding of the process behind it ?
An Eye for an Eye will make the whole world blind - Gandhi
Go to http://linux.com/chat/chat.phtml in Netscape Communicator (any Unix version) and the fonts on the java applet will be completely unreadable. And this is a Linux site!!!
Now that Rob "CmdrTaco" Malda has sold out to banner ads, Bendover.Net, and now VA Linsux, do you think we still need to help support his Who CD habit at CDNow.com? Also, does he really need the extra cash the amazon.com link bestows upon him?
Once again Slashdot ruins a site. I wonder how many bottles of Advil will be consumed at linuxplanet.com today. Why the hell can't you guys mirror it? And if you can't mirror it (for copyright reasons) why don't you at least inform the unsuspecting, hard-working site admins that you are about to DoS them?
Yes, Slashdot is a great big DoS engine. From an objective standpoint, what Slashdot does to sites is no different than little script kiddies with packet machine guns. Except it's legal.
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My opinions are my own and no one else's.
We all would like to make standards-compliant websites, but the truth is that MSIE v. Netscape basically killed the idea of using HTML4... anything past 3's extensions and you start getting wierd rendering - is there a solution?
"They need to rethink the entire approach... They're saying let's implement a Mac-like interface so that we can have a nicer Unix. That's a nice thing, I guess, but it's not really revolutionary."
Can you describe some specific ideas and UI elements you would consider if you were designing the "revolutionary" Linux GUI?
Slightly off topic, but sort of on... I highly recommend anyone doing GUI development read Jakob's book, "Usability Engineering". It provides a great quantitative framework for evaluating the usability of an application and helps you avoid the common pitfalls in GUI design. I know we all like to say "RTFM", but the reality is that nobody does. :)
What is the bottom line with the pictures where you wave your hands like a windmill?
I'm sorry, couldn't resist myself. Moderators: beat me up.
What are your sexual preferences? Goats? Children? Gerbils/hamsters? Women? Inflatible Natalie Portman dolls?
Here's what I've come up with so far:
Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated.
What are your views on standards compliance for, baseline, HTML 4.01 and CSS-1? Are we fighting towards a goal which is universally unattainable (due to the embbeded nature of some browsers like WebTV and *cough* IE on Windows), or are we nearing a new age for web developers?
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Am I the only one who thinks Microsoft is a misnomer? Perhaps Macrosoft would be a better fit?
You are regularly accused of being excessively conservative. Absolve yourself: Would you agree that it is often better to design a great site for 90% of your customers, than to dumb it down for the sake of the other web-handicapped 10%?
Spit or Swallow?
I aggree it's annoying, the default should be to post at one, and have the option of upping to 2, not the other way round, but personally, I try and moderate up interesting AC comments, and down stupid flamebait comments, this is more important than downing comments that only deserve a default 1
Something that's been bugging me for a long time: http://useit.com/ doesn't work as a URL, one is forced to enter http://www.useit.com/. It seems to me that the ability to drop the "www." from the front of URLs is a widely accepted convention- considering the title of Nielsen's website leaves it out as well, I was wondering why this isn't taken care of, if it's a technical glitch or some kind of design decision.
SO YOU'RE GOING TO DIE: The Comic for Dealing with Death
Well, that rules out a substantial portion of the people here, me included. Will there be a Jon Katz interview at some point, dedicated to people to have opinions just because they have opinions. (It is a matter of opinion whether I am referring to Jon or his detractors.)
And for people who didn't catch the implied tag at the beginning:
</irony>
The net will not be what we demand, but what we make it. Build it well.
What do you think of Palm's new color devices? Do you think that color is the way to go on a portable device, or do you believe that greyscale displays provide all of the funcitonality needed for a PDA.
On a related note, how do you see Palm/Handheld devices evolving in the next few years?
http://fortes.com/I'm currently a user of both an older version of the MacOS and Linux, where Linux is running (on both boxes I have) a combination of Sawmill and Gnome. I've been reading a lot about Aqua, both how much more advanced the rendering library is than anything we have on Linux, and about what a decline in usability it is compared to the MacOS of old. For one critique, check the recent article on arstechnica.com; it goes into more detail than I can.
I haven't used Aqua myself yet, but I'm beginning to think that in some ways its "dock" is inferior from a human interface point of view to the panel in Gnome, depending on how it's configured. If I've set up the pager to hold minimized applications, they're not in danger of being mistaken for application launchers or links to documents or directories. Applets are dissimilar to either; although the default tiles, IMHO, need to be a little better, all of the above seem to be differentiated much better than in MacOS.
I'm not thinking in terms of a "we must have a standard and make everyone use it" schtick that a lot of people get on when they talk about improving Linux's user interfaces; it doesn't seem to have helped Windows and MacOS all that much, IMHO. But how would you change the defaults in gnome (or KDE) to improve usability? Might their relative customability be useful in usability experiments?
I guess a good question would be, even though I like it a lot, is the panel trying to do too much?
(currently testing something about signatures here)
Much attention is given to usability in GUIs and websites, (such as in your column Novice vs. Expert Users) but what about textmode and primarily keyboard applications such as text editors? Personally, i believe that Emacs has the best user interface of any text editor i've ever used (vi's a close second, calm down people :), but it's geared towards experts. What do you see for the future with regard to synthesizing novice usability and expert usability? the "smart menus" as seen in MS Office 2000 seem to head in that direction, only showing basic options unless an expansion button is pressed at the bottom of the menu. The best touch is that it "remembers" what you last used from the full menu and puts it on the basic menu. How can we smooth the curve?
>From an objective standpoint, what Slashdot does to sites is no different than little script kiddies with packet machine guns.
But... the people hitting these site (supposedly) want the information there, which is why a page/site is up in the first place. the DDoS atackers generally don't read for content, I'm thinking 8^D
It is a major PITA, though...
"It's tough to be bilingual when you get hit in the head."
Do not click on those links - they redirect to some nasty porn sites, with Javascript to disable the close button. NICE JOB, ASSHOLE!
Filipe Fortes http://fortes.com
...an hour a week of your time and expertise to help the Linux community design a UI that does the right things right?
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Don't like it? Respond with words, not karma.
Do you see computers ever becoming accessible to, say, monkeys?
What type of education did you (and others )have to receive to become a useability expert? Basically whats the best route to get a career in human-computer factors?
Thanks for asking!
(You 'da man!)
...if you're unable to volunteer, what resources do you recommend to GUI skin designers? Where can they look to learn how to design better (read: more functional/less error-prone/more productive) GUIs?
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Don't like it? Respond with words, not karma.
you go girl
release your anger
waste all your points on high karma
...richie - It is a good day to code.
It seems that all the good practices we've learned in the last ten years of GUI design are simply thrown out the window, just because an app is on the web.
Zero keyboard navigability, garish visuals, bad fonts, and unintelligible buttons seem to be the norm instead of the exception nowadays. If a company released the same interface on the desktop, they'd be laughed out of existence.
What can be done to encourage web developers to follow solid, trusted, UI design guidelines?
I can explanate how to administrate your network. You must configurate and segmentate it, so it can computate.
>But... the people hitting these site (supposedly) want the information there, which is why a page/site is up in the first place. the DDoS atackers generally don't read for content, I'm thinking 8^D
/. comments, I would seriously doubt that the average reader is reading te page we are licked to ;)
Considering some of the usual
if you truly believe in the web why have you patented a large number of highly obvious mechanisms such as "Apparatus and method for displaying enhanced hypertext link anchor information " and "Client-side, server-side and collaborative spell check of URLs" ??? I personally detest this type of behavior as do many other slashdot readers.
-- your knees hurt, don't they?
hate to burst your bubble, but it won't work in any real sense. Most of us "abusers" have well over 100-200+ karma points. Why, because over time we've posted more "good" content than crap. It only takes 25 points to get the +1, so anybody who posts good stuff for a month or so (or even a very insightful DAY) will get it. Karma whoring also works if you need it (preach the Linux party line and use big words (Sig11 showed us how)).
What we need is a higher limit on total scores so the difference between 1 and 2 is less significant, instead of a 20% quality boost.
Of course, checking the "No Score +1 Bonus" box by default would probably solve the problem, most times I don't even bother with it, although this time I'm ingoring it on purpose.
When you are a generally good person (poster) you can ignore (or at least not worry about) Karma, just like in real life.
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+&x
shouldn't you moderate down your own post as being off topic?
or are we seeing just how the moderations system works?
Dear Mr. Nielsen,
Can you please help slashdot make their site less ugly and easier to use?
Thank You,
Troll King
Thank You,
Troll King
Subscribe
not stuffing it, the next time.
Dear Sir,
You say that people don't "read" web pages but instead "scan" them through quickly.
Do you think that the reason why people don't read web pages is because of some psychological phenomena, or due to the fact that it used to cost a lot to hang around on-line and read stuff, or why exactly is that? Why should web pages be different from books? Or is the reason overtly small fonts used in almost every other page to cram as much information as possible into each page?
As a side note, an idea: I think all browsers should be able to display the hierarchical structure of the web page, and provide effective means to search data from that hierarchy. I find "search" boxes which always say "no hits" most annoying.
How are usability and aesthetics related, if at all?
Does your recommendation against frames apply to Web-based applications designed for corporate intranets as well? The applications I am currently designing will replace existing client/server systems with thin-client (browser) based applications running on the web servers. My goal was to duplicate an explorer-like interface with a navigation frame of icons on the left border. Is that a bad thing? Thanks.
Damn glad to be here.
I did an article over at Geeknews.net over devices which allow people to control their computers with electrical pulse that are generated from thinking. What are your thoughts on such products?
-Ellis of Geeknews.com
If poor web design can be so clearly explained to the average educated user (e.g. myself), then why are there still so many badly designed websites around, many of these the result of huge expenditure? Will things get better or worse?
"What I look forward to is continued immaturity followed by death."
Let's put it this way: when it comes to software, hardware, and Web usability issues, Jakob Nielsen be da man!
Do you be da man? Be you da man? Do you think that the painful use of streetwise black slang by aging white journalists makes a website easier to read, or do you think it embarrasses everyone?
In general, do you think that standards-compliant use of the English language is something we should be entitled to expect of those who produce journalism?
Bleh I prefer to post noise vs. signal just because I can. heh.. so I never use the defalt +1 option phhbt. some days I get real silly and lose like 4 or 5 karma and my +1 goes away anyways its not that big of a deal. If I really want people to hear something I have to say.. and not just people who read 0-1's I will think about it and check all my references cross my i's dot my t's (yes I know its backwards ;p) Seriously.. I mostly agree.. but its not gonna work like that :P
How would you respond to your criticts who say that rather than being a usability "expert" you're simply someone who points out the obvious? What of the people who say your views are actually limiting the evolution of the web rather than making it better place? And what about the notion that it's sorta hard to trust usability opinions from a website that is hard to find your way around?
(I don't mean for these questions to sound argumentative, I'm just reiterating things I've heard many times from various people on the web)
What sources of information are there on methodologies for doing usability testing? I've read quite a bit of your site, and there is some information there, but I'd like to know more about the methods that you and others use. Some of the usability statistics you give are very specific- you might claim, for instance, a 128% increase in usability for a certain modification. Are there methods for estimating the error in these calculations?
It seems to me then, that it's essential UI for sites to display when referred to without the WWW prefix. Many, including UseIt.Com do not. See http://useit.com.
Do you agree?
Automatic Sites, LLC
The useability rules on your site is great, but how do we get sites that have the information or product we want or need to give it to us in a more usable manner?
What is the next "big thing" in interfaces?
Surely "windowing" can't be the end-all-be-all of interfaces. Is there some paradigm shift around the corner which we can't conceive of right now? Perhaps the same "leap" which occurred going from command line/text to windows.
kuro5hin.org
Co-founder and designer at Music Nearby: http://musicnearby.com
Ditto the essays which have appeared on same site.
So much self-promotion is tasteless.
(now I remember what I wanted to ask)
Data is still relatively static and barely cross-referenced and very very rarely cross-referenced in any dynamic manner. When the data changes the user rarely knows until they requery. This however is beginning to change as bandwith and processing power open up new possiblities.
What do you see as the major differences and problems in designing for active data as opposed to passive data ? And do you forsee a standard (XML? + ?) for passing information between sources, and more importantly allowing the sources to be informed of changes.
An Eye for an Eye will make the whole world blind - Gandhi
How much longer are you going to keep pushing the "blue, underlined" convention for designating links on a web page? With more and more newbies getting online every week, and the shift from text document presentation to a more visually-oriented content presentation, insisting that users expect and are confused by anything other than "blue, underlined" styles on links seems rather antiquated and limiting. How long do we continue to conform to what worked in one stage of the WWW and miss opportunities to open new possibilities in design and interaction as the web evolves?
In the article The Internet Desktop, Nielsen states:
"Fundamentally, it is pretty silly to have a special browser for certain information objects simply because they happen to come from a specific storage location. There is no reason to treat information differently because it comes from the Internet instead of coming from your harddisk."
I've always been curious about this mindset. Generally, information on the internet is in the form of HTML or text files, and any other files need to be copied to a local location before being usable (Causing a long wait time, breaking any illusions of transparency). Internet files are also generally organized by someone who has an eye towards both navigation and graphical prettiness. The majority of the information is contained in the connections between various files, allowing for quick movements to different spots (in well-designed sites, of course)
Local files, on the other hand, are created using many different types of programs, and require a seperate application to view more often than web information does. Local information is being created by a single user for specialized use, with little view towards the overall structure of the filesystem. Information is usually contained within single files, with little relation to other files other than basic categories in directories.
Why, then, is there this idea that the same tool should be used for both types of information? I typically use a web browser for viewing HTML files: it lets me click the links that someone else has set up to ease my movement, applies the format the web author created, and gives me an interface for the time-consuming file download. Why should this be integrated with the program I use to navigate a directory tree of files that do not have links, lack an html format, and do not need to be downloaded from an incredibly slow resource to be used? And, what kind of justification is there for NOT splitting up access of a resource with millisecond responses from one with responses that can range all the way to hours?
Patents are a big issue on the Web today; while many people are protesting software patents like Amazon's, Nielsen is racking them up. I'd like to hear what he thinks about that.
Secondly, how do you feel regarding the failures of HTML as an interface delivery mechanism? The notion that the web has gone from pure information (93 and before) to presenting specific chunks of information in a taped-together layout that is built outside of the best use functionality of HTML. Do you agree that trying to put together an application interface with Microsoft Word is a ridiculous idea, so why are we trying to put together functional GUIs with a markup specific to text formatting?
Can you envision another non document-centric mechanism for bringing the web interface back in line with application UIs?
Besides the frequent complaints about X and the GUI situation on Linux, the next most frequent usability complaint is the lack of documentation, and/or it's poor quality. Do you have any thoughts or comments on the role of documentation in a complete system? Should there even need to be docs for a well-designed GUI?
~luge
IAAL,BIANLY
Here's my thoughts: interface design and usability seem to be of the "Cathedral" process of development, where a small group designs, evaluates, and iterates on an interface idea.
However, the open source process, or the "Bazaar" process, relies on a large number of people, which makes it difficult to have consistency. Furthermore, my perception is that people in the open-source world get "points" for cool code hacks, not for running usability tests or making an interface aesthetically pleasing.
Weblogs force the reader's attention on only one or a few sources, rather than the tens of thousands of available sources. Dave Winer (of davenet, the weblog of all weblogs) suggests that weblog owners regularly profile other weblogs, however I do not believe that gets at the really interesting content that I'm sure is out there. I have "mindshare" for about five daily sources of information. I definitely do not want to spend my day searching and browsing the web, but I do want to see the best ideas out there. Any ideas for an interface that would deepen the weblog experience to form richer communities?
HOWTO get better dates on slashdot
I think that the original Macintosh team deserves a lot of credit for what they did, but they had to make a lot of compromises that probably don't make sense anymore
In this Alan Kay video tape, he demonstrates a great gestural user interface called Grail. In this environment, users interacted with the system by using a tablet. For example the user could delete objects by scratching them out, instead of selecting them and activating a menu.
The other system that really impressed me was Doug Engelbart's NLS and AUGMENT systems. His system allowed the user to enter commands using a chord keyboard while operating the mouse. This seems somewhat harder to learn but much more efficient than the Mac and Mac clone system that are in common use today.
Anyway, my question. Since the study showed -- and you seem to concur -- that older people and less-educated people are the least likely to be using the internet, these groups could be considered the biggest "growth markets" for e-commerce companies. However, it seems that the techniques necessary to appeal to these two groups would be significantly different. How do you see internet companies trying to appeal to these "new" demographics (if at all) to increase their market share in the next few years?
Your web site extolls the virtue of good organization in a website, but neglects to give examples or even guidelines for good hierarchies. Could you give a really brief example of, say, an Intranet website or something to explain the difference between good and bad organization?
"There's so much left to know/ and I'm on the road to find out." -Cat Stevens
My question: do you see any emerging conventions for form fill-in? (Highlighting erroneous fields, allowing corrections, etc.)
Jakob,
Your work is chock full of terrifying statistics about what happens when we create slow, hard-to-navigate sites. When I (an information architect) try to convince my project teams to heed those statistics, though, nobody seems to listen. People continue to clamor for images, frames, JavaScript, etc.
If Ronald Reagan's speeches proved one thing to us, it's this: a well-chosen anecdote can drown out innumerable (and true) statistics. I was wondering whether you might have any good terrifying anecdotes that might scare people who are about to make an unusable web site into doing the right thing.
Ok, I've got karma to burn, so here goes:
:P
I personally think Mr. Nielson's opinions are a crock o' pooh. While I'm sure that he's thought a great deal about 'useability,' it all seems to come from a very subjective viewpoint, and seems to be aimed more at making things simple, with advanced functionality layered on for the more 'advanced' user.
That's fine and all, but, in practice, it's often a waste of time. One of the major tenants of his viewpoint is that 'learning new interfaces is hard.' While that's true in some cases, some of the most deeply functional software I've ever used has had a bit of a curve. Take vim, or even linux, for instance. Yes, it can take you a week or so to get into using vim, but once you've got the hang of it, your productivity increases manyfold. It is, therefore, a very, very useable product.
So, what Mr. Nielson is really positing is not useability, but 'ease of learning,' to which I reply - In an ideal application, the learning curve should exactly match the the depth of functionality inherent within. If that means something is difficult to learn, but infintely rewarding once learned (vis: linux), then that product's useability is high.
This idea of 'learning is hard,' btw, was also brought up by that tit a few weeks ago, who trashed linux's useability.
Fuck them all. If you don't feel like learning, go the fuck back to bed, or watch some TV, or something.
Thank you, and I welcome my journey to -1.
--
blue
i browse at -1 because they're funnier than you are.
I noticed in your predictions for 2000 that you make a pretty strong case for micropayments as opposed to clickthrough and ad impressions. How do you forsee this being implemented, in particular, would it be prone to the same problems as the adult verification services, where the customers may have to subscribe to a number of different services in order to get access to a variety of sites? Or would this be something implemented into the browser, or added onto the ISP's bill as a surcharge? Also, would this suffer the same fate as ad driven sites, where an article may be divided up into several sections to maximize revenue (where there is an agreement between the web site and the escro service for kickbacks?) Do you see privacy becoming an issue when a user's information is attached to a record of page views?
I don't want to sound like I'm attacking the idea, in fact I think it's a good one as opposed to popup banners and the customer tracking cookies currently found on most sites with any content. I'm just curious as to the what specifics you see in your prediction
mcrandello@my-deja.com
rschaar{at}pegasus.cc.ucf.edu if it's important.
We know that bandwidth is limiting our use of the web by making response times too high. Would it help if the browser preloaded some of the pages that are hyper-linked in the current page? We could even allow designers to specify which ones should be preloaded so the most often used ones will be (almost) instantly available. As you're reading, the next page that 90% of visitors goes to is already downloading, for example.
-D
Do you see any way of incorporating usability engineering into the Open Source development cycle, or is it too idealistic to get volunteer usability engineers working along with volunteer software engineers? See www.luigui.org for one attempt to bring ui and usability to the OSS world.
thanks.
I can't believe this one got moderated up to +5 ...
Follow this link for a discussion he's having with Dave Winer on this very subject.
Well, SlashDot clearly violates Jakob's page bloat guidelines but huge margins. Especially the "Older Stuff" section on the front page where you can't read the article text without downloading 300k of comments that are impossible to read because they use the "flat" threading mode.
He's a karma whore and he even admits it!
Who wants to go to that much trouble just to view a web site? How many users are going to waste time on something like that?
I smell a conspiracy. Why does this nitwit always get moderated up? This is a totally inappropriate question for the Usability God. How the fuck should he know? Moderators, THINK BEFORE YOU MODERATE!
Which did you prefer, the Naked Gun trilogy or the Police Squad television series? How do you think your role in Airplane prepared you for each?
You're right brennan - sans-serif fonts are easier to read on a monitor.
see
Bruce Tognazzini's explanation (Tog being an original Macintosh UI guy among other things - he's up there with Jakob in the UI / Usability field).
If you're really interested and want academic literature, start at the Human Computer Interaction Bibliography at www.hcibib.org, search for serif for a couple references.
... what insight can it possibly provide?
Jakob mentions that sometimes things are implemented the wrong way. (Web navigation should be on the right near the scroll bar to minimize cursor movement) but because it has been done that way for so long, switching to the proper way decreases usability. (Right side web navigation is a little awkward because we've all been trained to look to the left.) Do you think that some of the radical changes in Aqua will cause a usability decline even if the change is to do something in the "scientifically" correct way?
Also, with browsers refusing to implement standards properly do you endorse the use of tables to create page layout even though the specs say we should use CSS-P? I want to create pages to spec, but because of lousy browsers I'm forced to use tables if I want the output to be predictable across many browsers. (I don't want to have to write multiple versions and use browser detection.)
_________________________________________
I'd say "yes" since he had to actually *work* to earn those patents.
As time passes, more people grow up with on-screen interfaces as their primary education and entertainment media. How will this affect the science of usability, and affect our notions of complexity in user interfaces given more sophisticated (or at least tech-acclimated) users?
Marc Siry || interactive media professional, motorcycle enthusiast ||
We have all read Tog's preliminary review of Aqua at www.asktog.com, and it was rather negative. I would love to hear a second opinion on Apple's next generation interface, if only to avoid copying Apple's worst mistakes.
I haven't really had much trouble getting standard HTML 4.0 Strict and XHTML 1.0 Strict pages to view nicely on all the major browsers with CSS1.
As for even table widths, this is supposed to be the default. Unfortunately, browsers routinely screw this up, so try setting each column's width with col width="1*"...
I think the biggest key is that the Mac is easy to learn, but way too hard to use. NT and Linux win big in useability by allowing me to open up a window and start typing short commands.
Sites are geared towards maximum exposure to banner ads. Most of them have their meager content spread across 20 or more 2 paragraph pages, with each "next" click bringing another few paragraphs along with a fresh barrage of advertising. There are all sorts of other sneaky tricks that have just made the WWW an unpleasant experience for me overall. I come here and maybe 2 or three other sites but that's about it. The rest is dogshit as far as I'm concerned. I've pretty much given up my search for intelligent life out there and have reverted to usenet when I'm looking for something intellectual. I've given up. Let the morons have their neoTelevision, I'll have no part of it.
What process are you referring to?
I'm not a moderator, but I prefer children.
The smart menus are an unmitigated disaster, right up there with the dancing paperclip. It wasn't Microsoft's idea either. This stuff has been tried and debunked by usability tests literally decades ago!
Actually, you've hit on something with embedded browsers. HTML 4.xx is way to large for that purpose. XHTML 1.0 (the current version of HTML) improves the situation by providing for XML parsing instead of SGML, but we won't have a full solution until at least XHTML 1.1 with its modularity features.
Mozilla is already moving towards compliance with HTML 4.0 and CSS1, and I suspect MSIE will have to keep up or return to the days when even newbies wouldn't use it because it was so far behind. Microsoft will be over an especially large barrel once AOL switches to Mozilla (and if you believe AOL when they say they're staying with MSIE for the long haul, you're too stupid to live). Combine that with MSIE's size and other disadvantages for embedded use, and MSIE will *have* to be good just to survive over the next 5 years or so.
I dont know what your post is all about. But all the people who say that "elian belong with his dad" do not understand that cuba is a communist country. where religion is oppressed all the time. It is necessary that elian grow up in a Christian family and that can only happen here in the US. there is no other way other than Jesus to bring up a child. that is why elian must stay in the united states and the united states must fight Cuba untill they stop oppressing Jesus. I have thought long and hard about this and elian cannot be send back to cuba.
Please step away, the stench from all that greed oozing out of your pores is bothering me.
Of course he won't be living proof for very much longer.
Given the controversy about the Amazon.com patents related to basic web technology, and as a holder of several web-related patents, how do you feel the US patent process has helped foster or hinder development of new web technology?
Do you consider the information overload of the Internet to be a usability / user interface issue? If so, do you think there are any reasonable solutions, like the use of meta data tags to stratify content, that can make the web easier to browse?
Frames still break the reload button, the browser history list, and the bookmark system. They still cause parts of a window to scroll independently of each other. They're still an abomination.
The only improvement relative to frames on the Internet is that you don't have to worry about users not being able to view the page, since you can easily ban people from using Lynx or a browser-for-the-blind.
Tlack of moderation to this comment raises another question. Do any Slashdot moderators have sex at all? AJ
I've still yet to see an example of a case where frames were ever the best solution to a problem.
How do you feel about the slow-moving, but imminent trend of using scripting to make web pages work more like applications than documents?
With W3C standards like DOM Level 2 and SVG coming down the pipes, developers will have more and more power to make the browser much more intelligent than it is today. This opens up a whole new world of user-interfaces where a website may not be seen as a hierarchy of "pages" but a single application with it's own functionality.
When more browsers support these standards, do you advocate more developers use this "dynamic" paradigm, or do you prefer that the browser just download static pages which link to other pages?
The obvious reason HTML fails to provide for decent interfaces and layouts is that it's not designed to do things like that. HTML is designed to describe the structure of hypertext documents, links, paragraphs, etc. It doesn't care how they look, hideous Netscape extensions like FONT obviously aren't sufficient to change that.
En otopisk optimistist,
Tommy . Thorn @ BRICS . DK
As I recall, GNOME requires you to click both mouse buttons in order to bring up a menu... This is probably the worst interface mistake I've ever seen. How many people found the menu on their own, much less figured out how to exit?
Frankly, the studies Nielsen cites are far less subjective than your post.
Are you really saying that when you visit a new site for the first time, you're willing to spend weeks learning to use it before deciding whether you like it or not? Personally, I just click back and move on if it isn't clear what the site's for and how to use it.
Do you really think the software examples you list wouldn't be better if they were easier to learn and use, if they could be made easier to learn without losing functionality?
Hmmmph,
Am I out in the cold, or should I say code? I've been thinking that Peter Bickford was the interface design god... Don't have a URL for him though... Someone care to enlighten me?
Lando
/* TODO: Spawn child process, interest child in technology, have child write a new sig */
Any thoughts on cell phone and other tiny device interfaces? As neat as these things are, is there a utility to those microscopic screens?
My question is this: Do you feel that more warm and fuzzy interfaces like Enlightenment are better or worse than sparse, direct interfaces like CDE? What kind of improvements would you like made to something like CDE, and what are your thoughts on that particular style of UI?
On your website you use the fact that we require a 1sec response time to be happy, and from this premise conclude that webpages should stay under 100k. I would tend to think that the 1sec response time should only apply to the first screenful. Couldn't you have pages larger than 100k as long as the person could start reading the first screenful in that 1sec window?
Well one thing is to find usefull thing on the web, but another point is how to not lose what you find. I think that current bookmark management systems menus and submenus sucks.
/., freashmeat, lwn, linux.com bookmarks are usefull because what is interresting is the site (globally) and you have only a handfull of this site in your bookmarks. But one day you search for say, a cookie recipe that you find on yahoo, may be you will add it to your bookmarks, but a month later, many more bookmarks added, it will be very difficult to find this page again only with a short title.
Menus systems, with only short text description fit well only as shortcut for known sites but not for content retrieval.
For example
And more you surf, more it's difficult
A better description would include a screenshot of the page. And may be some other visual elements as relationship on so on...
A+
I'd like to know who edited Jakob's latest book... they did a horrid job of it. There's a multipage spread of miscaptioned browser demos (it's the one of table compression), some missing words here and there, and some invalid internal references.
Aside from that, I'm wondering how much of Jakob's consulting work is actually in site creation as opposed to site recommendation, as it seems that the Web Usability book is more of a wish list than practical building advice.
Don't get me wrong, there's a lot of interesting data in his book, as well as a lot of good ideas. But the book is substantially lacking in useful ideas. It's the difference between "How things should be" -- inclusive of the alternate media meta tags and prettily formatted related article results (which probably came from a database, not some poor static HTML twonky) -- and how things are "Don't use new tech until it's utterly ingrained in your users' browsers." (And even that is a "Don't" do this instead of a "Do" some other thing.)
If you're looking for useful idea's O'Reilly's Polar Bear (Information Architecture etc) has more at half the price -- they didn't make every page a 256-color glossy.
1) When the web was a rowboat, everyone updated their browser within days of the new version coming out.
Now the web is a gigantic ship, and to make our sites easy to use and accessable to all, we have to make them backward compatible to HTML 2.0.
When can we abandon the slaggards? When our web logs say 5% of our visitors are on HTML 2.0? Or is
that leaving out too many people?
2) Many have guessed that we are in CaveWeb times. That the internet is in its infancy and there are far more innovations to come than those that have occured.
What are your views on the future of the web as broadband access becomes more widespread? Beyond video, can you guess probable future web applications?
23. Nielsen, J.: Tooltips on webpages, U.S. Patent 5,937,417 (1999)
11. Nielsen, J.: Password helper using a client-side master password which automatically presents the appropriate server-side password to a particular remote server, U.S. Patent 6,006,333 (1999) [don't Windows .PWL files do something similar?]
50. Nielsen, J.: System and method for temporally varying pointer icons, U.S. Patent 5,784,056 (1998)
A whole number of them are from 1999, which means that you're frantically inventing great new things and spend tens of thousands of $$$ just patenting the things... There are about 30 patents listed in 1999, which means 2 patents every three weeks, for an amount of at least 500$K patenting costs and patent attorney fees to get them patented...
This all seems very Amazon-like, and either I've missed something really important, or is something else going on?
Okay... I'll do the stupid things first, then you shy people follow.
Okay... I'll do the stupid things first, then you shy people follow.
[Zappa]
The holy grail of usability seems to be to create a single system which is completely intuitive and instantly usable by all kinds of users. Many systems with steep learning curves (like Linux) are deemed "unusable" because their functionality is not immediately obvious to new users. However, once users have become familiar these complex systems, they can often work more efficiently. Consider the user experiences of expert Linux users versus expert Mac users.
With this in mind, what is the relationship between learning about usability? Is an efficient but hard to learn system really less usable? Or is it just differently usable?
If they are dying, what kind of alternatives would you suggest?
Well, I suppose you know this joke:
It's Bill Gates'wedding day and the two lovers are eager to know more "deeply" each other, so they leave the ceremony and go in their wedding room. They begin to take their suits off until Bill's new wife get to the interesting spot "Hu, I understand why you called your company Micro-soft now".
Sorry, I couldn't resist :)
"The obvious mathematical breakthrough would be development of an easy way to factor large prime numbers." Bill Gates,
Jakob:
You're a proponent of micropayments. You also claim advertising on the web doesn't work. Would micropayments then replace advertising as a means of advertisers tracking users' purchasing habits? Is micropayments any closer today than in 1998?
You have suggested a number of times that the Internet needs a centralized user identification system that would allow you to login once and dispense with annoying site-specific accounts.
Yet the meager privacy guarantees we have now are already insufficient. Our own government is untrustworthy as an identity-registrar given their history of ignoring the law, and I doubt that Microsoft or almost any other company would be acceptable, given the lack of respect for privacy that the corporate world has shown us.
In short, how do you envision such a system working when the current privacy situation is already horribly broken? Doubleclick already has access to your browsing habits and a database to match that to your address and credit-report, and that's without any 'global login.'
You of all people are aware that computer displays, in their current low-dpi, high-glare state, require different style for optimal readability. To this end, you have suggested that sites bow to the user's own font size settings and respect the rule that blue is for links and purple is for visited links.
But why is there this inherent assumption that the user will be reading with a white background and black text? Staring at even the most wonderful CRT is straining in this format, and black backgrounds with white text are much easier on the eyes.
Yet setting your preferences in any modern browser or graphical OS to black background, white text will leave you looking at many sites or applications that are illegible due to their myopic dependency on specific colored backgrounds. Is this ever going to change?
I would like to ask Jakob how to go about getting the people who call the shots to get serious about the things Jakob talks about. I get tired of telling them "it shouldn't be done like this," "it shouldn't be done like that," etc. and would really value his opinion on how to get the senior managers to take this seriously.
A college near me (Georgia Tech) is offering a master's degree in Human/Computer Interaction. Do you think formal programs in HCI (and this one in particular) are worth the money and effort, or do people get at least almost as much benefit from reading and doing on their own?
Jakob,
How many bowls of hot grits do you pour in your pants?
Thank You.
I've read Alan Cooper's book "The Inmates are Running the Asylum", and a part of it that really irked me was Cooper's opinion of how much developers should be involved during the useability planning, i.e. none. He made developers out to be clueless philistines that should be left in the dark until the UI is done, so that they don't pollute the UI design with worries about implementation. ThoughtMill, on the other hand (from their website http://www.thoughtmill.com) seems to take more of a approach of working with the developers. Which method of collaboration do you think works better when designing applications?
You have posted reasons on your site why it has almost no graphics. One of the reasons why is that you are not a graphic designer. If you had a graphic designer helping you, what kind of graphics (or layout) would you include? Do you think some graphics could help usability or is split-second download time the most important consideration?
If there is information that would best be presented in a graphical format (maps, diagrams, wedding photos, etc.), would it be appropriate to include it and indicate to the user that it would take longer to download? Are thumbnails the best way to do this?
Lately I've seen several sites which in my opinion try to give the visitor a richer experience by (re)creating a(/the) user interface for them (using a lot of CSS, DHTML, CSS-positioning, Java, etc) which shifts quite a bit of the focus from the content part to the presentational part. It looks really nice, but suffers slightly on the content side.
Do sites like these represent a step in the wrong direction regarding usability? Is it wrong by them to explore the boundaries of the medium like they do?
Some advocates of Linux say that Linux is ready for the desktop - ie, "Grandma can use it". Other advocates are more moderate, and say "It is almost there". Detractors on the other hand, either say it is too difficult to learn, or that is will never "get there".
My question is this: In your opinion, what happened to people?
Specifically, are people more ignorant now? Why is it that not long ago, everybody and their brother could use the command line from DOS, and the really good ones could modify their AUTOEXEC.BAT and CONFIG.SYS, but today, most people don't "get" a command line? Has the WIMP interface dumbed people down? Why are a lot of people even decrying Windows as "too difficult"?
Reason is the Path to God - Anon
It's a well known fact that anti-aliasing makes fonts easier to read on a monitor.
I've wondered for a long time why it not implemented on any personal computer system I've ever used, I never got an answer to my question I guess.
Johan Veenstra
This guy should have received a score of *minus* two. It is exactly his type of thinking that makes most web sites suck. Browser compatibility does not equate to removal of features (just get rid of the you-must-use-M$IE tunnel-vision and use them intelligently), and neither equates to ``dumbing down''. The best ways to dumb down your site are large images without alternate text, the use of JavaScript and Java to make your site not function at all unless you have those untrustworthy feature turned on, and corporate mandates from the top brass located somewhere on Mars on what the web site looks like or functions like. And how dare you call this guy ``conservative'' when 90% of the web is broken and he wants people to fix it? And don't call us ``web-handicapped'', troll.
--
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This web site will cure all your ailments.
It's true, we're still stuck in the stone age of user-centered computing. The recent popularity of Linux hasn't exactly helped to promote the revolutionary ideas that Jakob Nielsen et al. have proposed _years_ ago. Linux is so badly stuck in the past, it would take a complete redesign to turn it into something that approaches my vision of a 21st century human-computer interface.
And yes, traditional filesystems are dead.
Why is it ok for Slashdot and Jakob to use Amazon, heck, to even ENCOURAGE the use of Amazon, but, we little geeks (the unwashed), are supposed to sacrifice convenience and quality service?
The Linux/OSS/GNU/1337 class wars have begun...
"Don't try to confuse the issue with half truths and gorilla dust."
Bill McNeal (Phil Hartman)
Should the people who wrote Slashdot be merely shot, or should they be hung, drawn, piereced with many pieces of glass, and beaten senseless before being buried alive? No offense, guys, but I almost couldn't even find the #%*@$ Reply button.
I was a bit surprised (but not really) to learn that Donald Norman (author of The Design of Everyday Things) is your partner. The chief flaw of your book, in my opinion, is its cover design. What are these silly flaps for? Am I supposed to use them to mark my place? If so, why is it neither of them is long enough to reach the center of the book? Did Donald give you hell over this?
Microsoft has spent a lot of money on usability engineering. One of the key philosphies appears to be the prevalent use of the mouse as the input device.
- -----------------
First, is this a good goal? Right now, Linux users always have a console open, and GUI interfaces to standard idioms are slowly emerging. (Any good filesystem browsers out there? Any GUI print queue tool? Any process monitor with sortable columns and "right-click" kill?)
Second, the console interface is often associated with the "power" interface to the OS. Any insights on providing that power along with usability? Or should we just layer the more usable/less powerful interface on top of the less usable/more powerful interface?
-------------------------------------
Sorry about this pointless comment, but it was driving me nuts to read "average users don't read (ie, scan), they scan (ie, skim)!"
You are in a maze of twisty little relative jumps, all alike.
You've written about micropayments before, but haven't made much reference to payment methods.
What is your opinion of the current generation of web payment and ordering mechanisms? Can digital cash be made usable? Or are we doomed to use credit card ordering forever?
Quite often I've read about how reading online and electronic books are never going to replace real books (see Neil Postman, Sven Birkerts) because a real book is natural, the pages turn over and the feel is natural. Where as electronic books can't be read in the bath (well, not safely) and don't have the same feel.
But, whenever I see a Japanese person reading (their books go backwards) I feel a sense of un-naturalness about it, whereas to them, it's completely natural. I realise that the people writing these comments have grown up in a culture of traditional book reading. My point is, with electronic books, if one is brought up reading them, and reading online, then reading an old style book with paper and pages may seem just as un-natural as electronic books do to us today.
Comments?
-- Huh, what?
I wonder which elements of web design Jakob feels will most be influenced by broadband web access and which will aspects of web design will continue to be necessary despite broadband?
Linux is in an enviable position in that a large proportion of its users are also its developers.
1) There's a huge pool of users that can be drawn on for usability testing.
2) There's not a huge amount of money for traditional usability testing (although I'm sure there is apparatus available)
What's the best approach to take with this kind of scenario, in order to usability test on a large scale and get improvements both for developers, and for end-users with little or no development interest?
I figure there have got to be good strategies to improve usability, using our huge pool of linux resources, the people. (hey, with a slogan like that I should be in PR *snort*)
Morf
-- Why should I question authority?!
sorry if i sound like i am cutting you down, i just want to have your expert advise on these things.
After perusing your website, I have only one question. What do you see as the next generation of user input outside of mice and keyboards?
Personally I would prefer touch screens and voice recognition ala star trek, but even these would seem to be similar to the windowing systems we currently use.
A alternative solution (to me at least) would be a 3D holographic display that would let you truly navigate the web or hard drive by just pointing/touching in the general area you are interested in and having the display change accordingly. But all this goes back to my original question, what interface (or combination of interfaces) would be the most intuitive in your opinion?
More specifically, what do you think of the NeXTSTEP GUI in particular? Do you think it is still viable? If you have any problems with it, what should be changed?
I am chiefly interested in your answers because I intend to send them to the GNUstep mailing list as professional suggestions/opinions. Thank you!
Hi Jakob,
Q2. What are the areas that need attention?
I ask this because the code for the slashdot site, (slashcode) is open sourced and many (new) developers use slashdot as a guide for developing their own sites.
peterrenshaw ~ Another Scrappy Startup
Method and apparatus for managing subscriptions to distribution lists
So, did this guy try (and succed) in patenting the mailing list?
And there's this one too:
Method and apparatus for receiving electronic mail
Apparently, he's also patented email, or at lest the act of recieving email. I'm starting to lose a lot of respect for him.
Got HTML? Want LaTeX? Try html2latex
On your website, you mention quite often the need
for web site developers to design interfaces that
can be understood almost immediately. At what point do you feel that the need for power outweighs the need for usability? I speak specifically about operating systems. As an operating system is something that remains relatively constant over long periods of time, should users expect to put in more work to get the full benefit of their system, ie is it that bad to have to descend into a command line occaisonally to get some work done?
Visit the
REDUCING CURSOR MOVEMENT? YOU MEAN THERE ARE STILL PEOPLE WHO DONT USE MICROSOFT SCROLLBUTTON MICE??? NO WAY!!! MICROSOFT RULEZ!!!
And if 90% of the web is broken to your browser, it's about time you realize that your browser is what's really broken -- so go get a real one, dickhead. Tune in next week, and I'll teach you the meaning of the term "de facto standard."
These might be good ideas, but I simply don't believe that it's practical to implement them in an environment where "everybody else's" Windows program works some other way.
(This is completely apart from my opinion that these things comprise fundamental computer literacy and that, contrary to Cooper's assertions in Inmates, computer literacy is not a polite way of saying 'stupid willingness to tolerate insufferably poor design -- I don't think HFS' are poor design.)
But, my question would be (yes, there's actually a question buried in here) this: you, Jakob, seem to go the other direction, displaying an almost slavish devotion to the installed base, even if a) it's a poor design, objectively, and b) there's an obviously better one.
Color choices for links would be my favorite example. My weblog, for example, uses a dark teal text color (dark enough for good contrast on white), and navy blue for links -- which drops back to the text color, while still staying underlined, for visited links.
Obviously, this wouldn't work on navigational elements rather than in-line links, but I'm honestly not at all certain that visited-ness is pertinent there, and it might actually be confusing. (I mean, here, the sort of things many people put on 'tabs'.)
I'm an engineering type, so I suppose I'd rather have it 'right', even if it means I have to work harder training people the first time, because if I teach them to fish (discerning rules for link changes from looking at a site) rtaher than feeding them (blue means link, red means visited), then my long-term support load decreases.
Do you think that people, in general, are really so untrainable that this is an unreasonable approach? Or that making them think, even just a little bit, is really that much to ask?
Cheers,
-- jra
-----
There is no "STATE of New York" that is not part of "CITY of New York." Albany, Buffalo, Niagara, Ithaca... these are what we call boroughs. This is why Rudy Giuliani is wayyyyyyy more influential than Pataki can ever hope to be.
Master of Philosophy? Why would you do your thesis on webpage customization for a philosophy thesis? Unless MPhil doesn't stand for Philosophy, but I can't think of anything else.
This is the man you will be asking questions of! Just thought you should be warned.
1 MB JPEG.
Windows 98 (and 95 with Plus!) and MacOS (as well as BeOS, according the the reply above mine) all come with built-in Anti-Aliasing. They dumb it down and call it "font smoothing" usually.
Anybody know where the term "anti-aliasing" comes from?
Further, how do you propose to balance the useability enhancements against people who take advantage of them -- we're seeing all sorts of exploits of browser bugs, unexpected software behavior (ie, gohip.com) or straight out spying (lets send the URLs you visit + passwords, such as dash.com). Personally, I'd rather have a _less_ useable web if it allows me to maintain a semblence of privacy and control over my information -- when you browse, how do you feel about being tracked (ie, doubleclick style) and do you take steps against it?
I thought you were going to say what I am about to say:
http://www.webpagesthatsuck.com/ is one of the worst webpages I have ever seen. It was funny the first time I saw the URL, but now it is just a launching pad for some guy to to tout his book about (surprise!) web pages that suck. His own crappy site should be the first one on his list. It is horrible. For real webpages that suck, go to any site on Geocities.
The answer is already here on slashdot.
They do not know how to reed.
There's nothing wrong with having no web server at domain.com. I would argue that is the more correct way to do it. Aliasing domain.com is ugly.
You can't cname domain.com to www.domain.com. You must either use duplicated A records or alias www.domain.com to domain.com. The former is an administrative headache. The later re-enforces notions that a) the Web is the Internet and b) DNS is a flat name space where everything is domain.com
check out his bio at useit.com. What bothers me about this is that although not many people think about making their web sites useable, it's still pretty much common sense and shouldn't be patentable.
-- ATTENTION: do not read this sig. It doesn't say much.
Looks like a pattern to me... :-)
I remember using some of the latest Mosaic versions. It had a feature that I liked but I have not found elsewhere.
The links used one color for visited links (say blue) and another for not visited (say red), as usual now. But the color was continous. If I have visited the URL, one day ago it was a bit redder than the one just visited. And so on. A link visited one month ago would be as red as one never visited.
Do you think this feature added in usability?
I find it better than the current discrete model.
--
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Men with no respect for life must never be allowed to control the ultimate instruments of death.
GW Bu
I have read your column "URL as UI" and Tim Berners-Lee's about Cool URIs.
.html)? And the rest of the T B-L's comments?
What do you think about Berners-Lee's recommendation to keep extensions off URL (I see you site uses
--
__
Men with no respect for life must never be allowed to control the ultimate instruments of death.
GW Bu
What's your recommendation for the people that for religious (patent) questions want to use a free format like PNG instead of a patented like GIF?
--
__
Men with no respect for life must never be allowed to control the ultimate instruments of death.
GW Bu
What do you think about the Java Swing user interface?
What do you think about the dilemma "1 interface, many platforms" / "1 platform, many interfaces"?
--
__
Men with no respect for life must never be allowed to control the ultimate instruments of death.
GW Bu
Flash has so far ben used for complicated functionality but could be used for simple things too. Compared to html it is faster to download, easier to design for, can download in the background and offers complete control of the image. The pdf format offers similar advantages. Do you have any objections to using these formats instead of html?
Check out http://www.acm.org/cacm/AUG96/antimac.htm .
There he is saying exactly what I've been feeling but haven't been able to express about graphical user interfaces.
The see-and-point principle states that users interact with the computer by pointing at the objects they can see on the screen. It's as if we have thrown away a million years of evolution, lost our facility with expressive language, and been reduced to pointing at objects in the immediate environment. Mouse buttons and modifier keys give us a vocabulary equivalent to a few different grunts. We have lost all the power of language, and can no longer talk about objects that are not immediately visible (all files more than one week old), objects that don't exist yet (future messages from my boss), or unknown objects (any guides to restaurants in Boston).
Hi Jakob,
What web site testing method would you recommend for usability testing? Is there a guerilla version of that method for when I'm in a hurry?
-- anagram #17 of peter boersma: some part beer
Some questions for the mighty guru Jakob:
1. Do you think its likely that the open source community could develop a truely usable product, from non-tech-person point of view? As Donald Norman and Alan Cooper have said in their books, programmers tend to "design" software for like-minded people (in other words, other tech-people) even though the needs of the end-user are often very different. Also, open source projects tend to suffer from major feature-creep, which results in software too complex for real people to use. Programmers want control and complexity, users want simplicity. Even when the various Linux magazines have articles on Linux GUIs, the authors' own words show a level of disdain for non-tech-oriented people who just want to use computers to get some work done.
2. Assuming the open-source community could develop a truely usable product, do you think its worth the effort to try to improve Linux, or should we start a new OS from scratch (or at least based on a Linux/BSD kernel) built from the ground up targetted specifically at average people, not techies? Most Linux distros try to put on a pretty face during installation or on boot-up, but the tech-orientation of Linux still shows through. Users still have to drop to the command line to execute cryptic commands, edit arcane config files and manually compile apps. (I'm a programmer and even I don't want to be bothered by this stuff!)
3. If some people got together and decided to build a new OS from the ground up, targetted at real people, would you be willing to offer some guidance and suggestions to the project on a continuing basis?
Currently, most software seems to be aimed either at novice users or at expert users. A good example is Microsoft Publisher vs. Quark XPress. Publisher is almost impossible for an expert to use; Quark XPress is almost impossible for a novice to use.
Do you think there is any way, in the same interface, to accomodate the needs of both expert and novice users?
Adobe Photoshop gives the user three different interfaces for a similar task: the brightness/contrast dialog, the levels dialog, and the curves dialog. All three make global changes to the amount of detail in an image, with the curves dialog being the most powerful and the least intuitive, and the brightness/contrast being the least powerful and the most intuitive.
Microsoft Office 2000 hides menu items that it thinks you don't need, and hides toolbars until you tell the program to display them or until you start on a task that uses one of those toolbars.
Do you think either approach makes sense? Do you think that the needs of novice and expert users are so fundamentally different that it's best that the two groups use different pieces of software?
It sometimes seems as though you at least tacitly support the idea of 'taming' the Internet and abolishing the freedom, self-regulation and technology that is laid bare for all to see and to understand if they choose to, handing over control to centalized authorities, presumably government and/or big business. I'd be interested in knowing explicitly how you see the network and how, if at all, to reconcile usability issues with the freedom, decentralization and technical transparency that are such important parts of the Internet to many of us.
This ``moderate this guy down'' stuff was my anger showing through more than anything else. I'll try to be less inflamatory here. This guy might have brought up a valid question but he's also slighting people just because they're not running the latest whizz-bang super-dooper applications. These are people behind all those keyboards, running all different kinds of operating systems, web browsers, etc., and the Web does not need to exhibit that kind of intelligence-insulting classism towards them. This kind of thinking slights the blind. This kind of thinking slights those who prefer speed over looks. A browser that's either missing certain feautres or is configured not to use them because I don't trust them is not broken by any definition of broken. Especially if those features (Java, JavaScript, Flash) are by no means essential to what people on Earth go to web sites for. Most people care about being able to get information from a web site. Most of that information is text. They don't care about being impressed by slow glitzy graphics. I know that some web sites are trying to make artistic statements, but if they're trying to make artistic statements and provide content, they need to keep text and graphics in mind, which any good web designer can do. So am I wrong for wanting speed and user-friendliness instead of slowness and sugary pretentious prettiness? Am I wrong for not trusting certain features in my web browser, especially if they slow it down or crash it (Java) or have had a long history of security holes (JavaScript)?
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This web site will cure all your ailments.
Right you are...
For years I've been saying that if Icon based languages worked, we'd all be writing in Chinese. Why is it supposadly easier to use an interface based on arcane pictures than words? I'd like to point out that you can still have a "point and drool" interface where you point at buttons with words on them. How am I supposed to know that circle squiggle red splotch means undo and circle squiggle green splotch means redo? It is my contention that good Interface design has little to do with text versus graphics. I've seen both good and bad text and graphical based UIs. It seems to me that the one area that graphical UIs have an advantage is with the illiterate user. Another rant that I frequently have about GUIs is their lack of flexibility. They are supposed to be easy to learn. English would be easy to learn if there were only 12 words and you weren't allowed to make sentances. It's one thing when a UI holds your hand, it's another when it refuses to let go.
You are correct -- for typeset pages -- that it is good to have about 45-60 characters or 6-8 words across a line for optimal readability. Once we are online, however, all (most) bets are off! We cannot read online at all as well as we can read text in books. But it would certainly help is so-called Web designers spent a little time thinking about the aspect ratio of a screen (wide) vs. a book/magazine/newspaper (long), and skipped the endless scroll-to-read-then-scroll-back-up columns!
Do you think that Mozilla has changed any of your conclusions? For instance, you've noted that browsers are getting larger faster than bandwidth is increasing, so few people download them, but Mozilla is smaller than previous versions of Netscape. Also, there is extensive user feedback on the browser features that may make the browser itself easier to use.
Dr. Jakob Nielsen
In a recent amazon.com interview you said that one of the aims of your new book Designing web usability: the practice of simplicity is to "Make the Internet easy to use: if we want to build a new economy, we have to make it simple and pleasant for normal people". What then are your thoughts on amazon's 1-Click and affiliate patents?
PS: After reading the rms boycott call I cancelled my amazon.com order for your book, and got it for US$5 less with a books.com discount thru B&N.
CowboyNeal for president!
"Hit any user to continue."
Unless you're creating a page for that 5K contest... (-8