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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.
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)
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
What's the worst Web site you've ever seen, and why?
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Wage Slave Journal
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 ?
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?
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
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?
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%?
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."
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.
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?
(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.
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.
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?
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?
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
Because of PHB who don't understand the technology or the content who are put in charge of building websites?
(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
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?
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?
It's perfectly acceptable for example.com & www.example.com to point to two totally different websites, for example here & here. It's also very common for there to be no hostname associated with a domainname, simply because there is no 'obvious' host to associate with the domain. While the http protocol is very pervasive, there may well be a better candidate in the default telnet server or some other protocol.
Don't be lazy, a URL contains a protocol, a full hostname and a file reference. Enter all of them at all times.
Newbies? I get confused when I go to a site and can't clearly see where the links are.
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
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.)
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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 ||
You specify how you want to view web-space, and all websites would conform to the format you specified.
I think a LOT of users would be willing to spend a few seconds, customising their view, in preference to spending hours searching for where some wannabe web author hid the button bar. And to be able to eliminate frames or tables, for some machines, that would be digital heaven.
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)
Actually, it would be at +6, if it were open-ended. Besides, you're probably just jelous. Try posting relevent comments, or sensible questions, as opposed to trolls, flames, verbal abuse, or other tosh.
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)
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?
Any thoughts on cell phone and other tiny device interfaces? As neat as these things are, is there a utility to those microscopic screens?
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]
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?
hmm, really? i was not aware of that. seemed nice the few times i used it. *shrug* i prefer emacs anyway :)
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?
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?
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
Not on the archived stories, they are stored statically as flat, not dynamically generated like normal stories. I really wish they were at least nested.
--
"L'IT c'est moi!"
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
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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?
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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"?
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Men with no respect for life must never be allowed to control the ultimate instruments of death.
GW Bu
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?
The Masters degrees, though, come in three flavours. MPhil (Master of Philosophy), which is pure research, MSc (Master of Science), which is about 50% research, 50% exams, and MRes (Master of Research), which has no real research at all and is pure exams.
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)
Well you don't need multiple columns onscreen you know. You can just keep scrolling down and down and down...
besides, aspect ratio aside, reading narrow columns is still easier. a tabloid is much wider than a monitor but you don't use a 1 column layout.
-- This and all my posts are in the public domain. I am a lawyer. I am not your lawyer, and this is not legal advice.