Slashdot Mirror
Jakob Nielsen Interview on Web Site Redesigns
securitas writes "CIO Insight's executive editor Brad Wieners interviews Web site design usability evangelist Jakob Nielsen about design mistakes like poor search, discusses organizational resistance and common barriers to doing usability reviews, concluding with Nielsen's Adobe PDF and pop-up pet peeves, common redesign errors and budget advice when it's time for a redesign, either for your Web site or company intranet. And just to make it more usable and readable (so you don't have to click through multiple pages), you can read the entire Jakob Nielsen interview on one printer-friendly page with fewer graphics and a bandwidth-saving document size for people using dial-up Internet connections. You might also like to read a previous Ask Slashdot from March 2000 and Jakob Nielsen's answers to those questions."
His website, http://www.useit.com/, hasn't been redesigned and is still as useable and pretty as ever.
Honestly?
WHY??
His site violates tons of usability ideas, and while I support his in general KISS (Keep It Simple Stupid) ideas which have been in practice in Industrial Design for decades, he is very much a Luddite.
Grow up Jakob, you make a lot of money ranting against everything, but for the love of god, give it a rest and let the market decide what works and what doesn't.
Department of Homeland Security: Removing the rights real patriots fought and died for since 2001
Talk about relevant. CmdrTaco should take to heart the comment about poor search. The search capabilities of Slashdot are absolutely terrible. You can't specify any options, like searching just artitle titles, article content, or comments. Heaven forbid you want to search for two words together, you can't do it.
Now, when I need to search Slashdot now I just go to Google and do "site:slashdot.org (query)" and pray that something relevant comes up.
Come on Slashdot, upgrade that search function already!
Has anyone determined what effect things like SVG will have on web site design?
I'm doing my part to help rectify this problem by steadfastly refusing to use or post messages on websites that have crappy search functions...
Too much stuff on each page.
In a word, clutter.
I'm guessing that the people who design pages that look this way are the same people that, while still in school, simply COULD NOT take notes or work problems without attempting to crab EVERYTHING on to a single sheet of paper.
It's a weird tendency and I've yet to hear a sensible explanation from anybody who does this. THEY are fully aware that it's worse than useless to crab too much stuff into a limited amount of room (especially in light of the fact that additional room comes pretty cheap), and yet somehow they're simply COMPELLED to do so.
Good topic for a Psych Major to do a thesis on, but that's about it.
Knock off the clutter!
Is it fascism yet?
"Now, when I need to search Slashdot now I just go to Google and do "site:slashdot.org (query)" and pray that something relevant comes up"
Actually for a short while, Slashdot was using Google as the backend. Why that disappeared? Who knows?
With all due respect to Mr. Nielsen, he could have started by redesigning his own site, useit.com. It may be "usable", but it is... less than beautiful, to say so. He could take clue from this guys:
Design Eye for the Usability Guy and
Reuseit: useit.com redesign competition
i am a web developer and nielsen is a god around my office. his book, Designing Web Usability (amazon link with no developer token), is something i refer to so often to convince my boss of things.
steal this sig
Anyone know what sort of things Dr Neilson has patented?
Well then all my ID professors, some of whom knew the theater guy who invented it were lying to me.
The version you present is the "PC" version, as back when it was invented, the word 'stupid' wasn't really something you taught.
Department of Homeland Security: Removing the rights real patriots fought and died for since 2001
Whenever I read something like this, I get an image of an effete poff blathering on about art or literature that no one wants to view or read.
Web design can be an art form, and is a matter of personal taste and opinion. If you are selling it, the only opinion that matters your client's. Whatever one believes about his special blend of creativity and artistry, he can do only what someone else will pay for.
As the canibal explained to his son's questions,
"One mans meat is another mans poi, son."
the w3c tip index is my favorite usability resource. the word of mr nielsen is second. not quite everything nielsen says is right in every situation but everything the w3c suggests is a suggest worth the weight of my toshiba laptop (a hefty 7 pounds) in gold.
steal this sig
I dont believe this was in the article, but a TOC frame, and then a main page frame used to be an extremely popular design, like This [qbasic.com] But you dont really see it anymore. It would be interesting to know why this is not popular anymore. it technically saves time in loading because the only the framw which has changing content is loaded. Any ideas?
Well, the problem is that PDF documents are just not very suitable for online access because they are optimized for print, and they're big linear documents, and, therefore, they're not very good for search.
Thank you! I've been saying this for YEARS!
Web development should be about developing relevance and usability, not about putting every document you have on an HTTP server. PDF files are fine for e-mail, FTP, etc. where you pull them down and view them locally, but they just shouldn't be on the web. HTML was invented for a reason! Use it!
For people who are running the latest Gecko browsers. Does the second link consistently crash your browser?
Normally Slashdot uses the somewhat... lacking... MySQL search, but when they're under heavy load, they "fallback" to Google. Now that Google News indexes them often, and Google people being regular readers, you'd think they'd be able to work something out.
Firefox .9.1.
Although i use Windows, i have to say that Microsoft.com is the worst [professional] website to navigate i have ever tried to use. The site structure sucks, the search sucks and the layout sucks. It is almost impossible to find what you want and there are loads of pages that link back to each other, getting you going round and round in circles. I can never find information i may need or certain applications or tools i want, it's just a mess.
I don't think PowerPoint and light and usable web-pages is synonym, I think he ment pdf here too, but it's a typo.
------- In the end there are no begining
1: Ugly. Web designers tend to be arty types, this matters to them.
2: Frame Hell. Following a link in the main body of the website doesn't get rid of the frame, so it stays on the screen being annoying. Also, if set up wrong a site can suffer from Infinite Frame Hell, where the same frame gets repeated and you have lots of copies of that contents page.
3: Compatability. Doesn't support Lynx or NCSA Mosaic (...joking...). But seriously, Netscape and IE don't render frames identically. Or at least they didn't in the NS 4.7 days, now I don't know.
And, yes, it's more efficient. But nowadays no-one really cares about that... if you are serving 100k of adverts per page then going from 2k to 3k for the html is meaningless, plus sites nowadays tend to be aimed at broadband, with excessive graphics everywhere.
You can also buy this at the Tattered Cover -- the bookstore which did not turn over purchase records to the government when asked; and defended the right to privacy in
court.
(I'm not in any way associated with the cover, and this is not a referrer link)
The efficiency gains gotten from proper CSS easily outweigh anything you get from frames.
The point regarding image size also doesn't go away with a frameset, especially if the images are advertisements. I would also, as a site owner, NOT want to have ads persistent, as the chances of a person finding an ad they like might be higher the more different ones they see.
What we call folk wisdom is often no more than a kind of expedient stupidity.-Edward Abbey
The point of web design is not to make a clean, usable interface. The point is to exercise the web designer's skills, and incorporate all the latest technologies. Otherwise, how will the web designer feel? Designing clean, readable pages is hugely boring and totally unchallenging for an artist. Artists need to be on the cutting edge. HTML is such a limited medium...it's just not enough to allow the expression of the creativity that most web designers feel inside.
Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!
I'm not sure I've ever heard it called liquid, but I'd like to agree with this particular pet peeve.
There's absolutely no excuse (ever) for forcing the user to view your web page at $arbitrary_page_width. Designers that think they need to force the width to a certian number -- for roundness, right hand menus, or whatever dumbass excuse -- are WRONG. Dead wrong. There is never a good reason to use a fixed width.
It shows complete ignorance of the subject they claim to master by calling themselves site designers.
Imagine if you weren't allowed to use roads because a bus company complained about your driving 3 times. --skunkpussy
This is the most interesting claim:
The article has even been discussed in slashcode. Gathered from the discussion, there appears to be at least one engine (elixss) which uses CSS templates.for comming up with the "split long documents into seperate pages, because users don't understand how the scrollbar works, and would much rather wait a minute or two while their slow-ass modem loads up the next page" advice. Which ungodly numbers of people followed.
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
If *I* looked like that, I'm not sure I'd plaster my face all over the Internet!
Best Buy can have you arrested
+5, Insightful
http://www.bbspot.com/News/2003/07/letter_c.html
(lol!)
But seriously I do think he has gottten a little carried away. If it was up to him we would all have sites that looked like the google front page and nothing else.
The greatest barrier to usability still seems to be site overdesign. Pages are far more complicated than they need to be (thankfully, much of the blog software is well designed in this regard, giving ample space to the actual content of each page.) Once you pack in a left and right column, and fill the rest of the space with ads, it takes a good deal of concentration to focus on the actual material you came for.
Why are sites overdesigned? Why don't site designers trust the user more? (Overdesigned sites tend to crowd all of their content on to every page via hyperlinks, as if the user can't be trusted to figure out the "back" button.)
To a point, it is about ego: a designer wants to brand every single page in a unique fashion, and that usually means marking up the content and squeezing it down. But there are plenty of ways a designer can satisfy her own ego, and present the content well, with minimalistic designs. The wikipedia is an excellent example of how a lot of features can be made unobtrusive and helpful, letting the content shine through.
In the end, it is really more about company psychology. For the same reason that a bank wants to have a gigantic storefront to assure customers that their money is safe, a company wants its web pages to look expensive and permanent, and the quickest route ends up being a cluttered visual experience as the company shows off the various clever "features" it is rich enough to pay for. A "bare" page bereft of logos and menus and news from other pages seems like an admission of poverty.
But this ends up making the user experience frenetic and disjointed. Oftentimes you can get around this problem by going to the "printer friendly" page where the article or information is presented in a traditional and human-readable fashion.
Protect your liberties. Donate to the ACLU
He mentioned a couple of my favorite pet peeves including PDFs. But I've got a few others:
1) Site inconsistency - having totally different designs between pages at the same site. This is often a navigation change, but could include color schemes, font choices, and text/graphic alignment.
2) Links off the page you are on - often missing are links to the main site page, as well as links to pages within the section of the site you are currently visiting.
3) Inconsistent content - one time a link is html, the next a text file, and the third a PDF. That is worse than every link being a PDF.
4) Lack of a link to send the site maintainer an email.
5) Lack of links to send anyone in the company an email. See this quite frequently.
6) Overall lack of anything but marketting buzz on a website, not a usability issue per se but makes the site worthless.
7) Inconsistent link behavoir - some links open a seperate browser, some don't.
8) Failure to warn about popups! Personal opinion here, but a site should warn you to expect a popup and what your expected action should be if it is at all going to be unclear.
9) Webforms for submitting a contact request that are just plain broken or don't point to a valid address.
Also I've got to put in my vote for getting rid of long long long pages, experience has shown, most users won't scroll or as he said, won't retain if they do scroll.
I'll second that motion on search being broken, heck, my company's internal and external websites are worthless in that respect.
I've ranted enough, be well.
Tojosan
moderators!
where is your sense of humor?
the fella linked to one of Neilson's books
I never look at PowerPoint slides on web sites. It suffers from all of the limitations that he points out regarding PDF, and is less portable.
I prefer slides in HTML, for all of the reasons that he lists in his PDF rant. And if you need tighter control over format and appearance, then use PDF. At least it's portable.
And for God's sake, provide a link, not a button, to all downloadable materials. I don't look at PDF documents in my browser, I use a separate viewer. The same goes for video clips. No demands for plugins, please. Not having a plugin is not the same as not having a viewer.
Some material I want to see now. A browser works well for that, and can use, but should not require, Javascript and similar frills. If I can't navigate a site without Javascript, then I look elsewhere.
Other material I want to save as reference material. Don't make me view it now. I'll save those PDFs for future reference. If it isn't reference material, then it shouldn't be in PDF format.
The immediate use material shouldn't use plugins. Neither should the reference material. Plugins should only be required for material that you don't want anyone to see.
Bad Panda! No Bamboo for you! In matters of importance ACs will not be responded to. Want to say something critical,OK
(disclaimer, I didn't RTFA)
I've read Nielsen's book about usability & web design and I can assure you that it's only a common sense compilation.
He does not say anything that doesn't hit you in the eye... I do not mean that this book isn't useful for someone who has never, ever, worked professionaly in UI design, but is utter bs for anyone with some knowledge.
Take that, and take that JN's sites are kinda awful [like '95 SUN's intranet] (and not that usable - btw, I think that aestethics play a hughe role in usability) and then RTFA.
--krahd
mod me up scottie!
Check it out [ok-cancel.com]
My alltime favorite search problem was the company where a woman visited their website, typed in "confidential" and the search engine dutifully brought up every confidential document in the company! Now that's a really helpful search tool!
By the perception of illusion, we experience reality
I am so sick of Jakob Nielsen. He's a tosser with a bad haircut.
Maybe old Jakob should redesign his site, making it look a bit less like something that came out of 1994 and then start telling people how their sites should be designed.
Give an active link to the home page on the home page.
Oh, yeah that always pisses me off; when I can't go to the home page from the home page. Damn, that would definatly cost a company major bucks.
Very usable, perhaps, but it's ugly. It's easy to -talk- about how aesthetics are unimportant, but some of us have clients to please. Certainly I don't think websites should be made in Flash or giant image tables are a good idea, but realistically we need to strike a balance between what looks good and what works well. If it were up to him, design would be all function and no form.
I'm glad Nielsen brought up this problem, which has irritated me from time to time:
Obviously, he doesn't use Firefox. The ability to type multiple letters to skip through a list got added to some nightly and I was simply ecstatic, because it's much more usable from a keyboarder's standpoint.
Why are long flash animations so stupid? THey hardly ever show the company logo or product upfront and think you want to see the entire boring ad.
..tell me the company name and product EARLY ON.
I always close those down.
Annoying me prior to letting me see the content isn't a good way to make me choose your product.
Word to internet advertisers, if your advertisement takes up the whole window
If you just select the part of the page you want to print, go to the Print dialog and choose Print Range > Selection you wouldn't need to do all of that saving, editing, printing.
He (and probably most people, unfortunately) doesn't know about a nice common browser feature. If you click on the drop down menu for a select box and start typing the option you want, it will actually select it. So there isn't really an advantage in a text box over a select box, since a select box acts like a text box except with tab complete and a list of options.
Of course, it is a common flaw in web browsers that they don't make this functionality obvious.
The Ask Slashdot from March 2000, linked to in the article summary, contained this comment from Neilsen in response to a question on Linus/Unix usability and 'prettiness' of interface:
I know that Slashdot readers don't want to hear this, but the very first question is whether it is even possible to create a truly good user experience on top of Linux. Many other companies have tried to make Unix easy to use and many very talented designers have worked hard on these projects for several years without very good results.
The only data points we have say that it can't be done.
Well, Mac OS X has basically proved him wrong.
After years of many site authors putting links up on their pages labeled "Stuck in a frame? Break out of it" (which was just a target="_top" self link) and after many authorites just like Dr. Nielsen warning to not use frames, the popular web pages finally stopped using them and moved on to other annoying practices like triple-columned portal sites and static table-based layouts. Once the popular web pages left frames beaten and crying in the corner, most of the amateur designers followed suit and also abused the table-based layouts.
Now, it seems like we've been waiting an eternity for CSS to enjoy the huge popularity that table-based design has been basking in for way too long. Many sites have gone a long way to further that cause. Namely:
And his site, as another poster mentionned, is a sight for sore eyes...
A point he mentions in this article that peeves me is drop downs:
The reason I think that drop-downs are so common is that the programmers want to avoid having to validate the input, but it's not really that difficult to write a little routine that checks that you have one of the authorized abbreviations.
I've had this exact problem arise on one of the systems I'm working on. It's entering a country for your practice location. We started out by leaving it as a text input field, but soon found out that our mapquest links were working only part of the time. Investigation revealed that the country variable in the Mapquest URL can only be US. United States, USA, United States of America, America, U.S. all don't work.
So, do I write an algorithm that goes and heuristically guesses what the country of the user is, or do I friggin use a drop down? - I use a drop down.
So I'm peeved that he feels all proud and manly by stating that programmers are being lazy about validation. Sometimes, a drop down is what is needed. After all, the countries of this planet aren't in a constant flux. There is a domain of acceptable values, so using a drop down is legit.
I also don't like reading overly-wide text. However, rather than expect every site author in the world to cater to my tastes, I just wrote a user stylesheet.
My user stylesheet allows me to click the document/user style toggle in Opera (I believe Mozilla/Firefox have similar functionality) and get the page under my terms, so long as the designer used sensible, semantic markup. In my case, I used max-width to stop the content getting too wide and set sensible font sizes, colors and so on.
I'm reading Slashdot that way right now, in conjunction with the more "light" template available in the user options. I find more and more sites I use work with it these days, so it's a lot more worthwhile to do this now than it was a few years ago.
Some sites get it right or at least some close proximity to right. Then they fuck it up, badly. Old school hotmail for instance was a very clean and intuative site. Then ads were added, then "features", and now every link is a javascript link that fucks up my tabbed browsing experience. Combine that with I can't find a fucking thing, it is full of spam, and the junk folder delete function is all or nothing.
Ok back on topic, if any webdevs are reading this, if it ain't broke then for the love of the sweet zombie Jesus W Christ don't fuck with it.
There is nothing wrong with being gay. It's getting caught where the trouble lies.
You're telling me they can't even support whitespace? Try searching for a two word string with quotes around it. It won't obey even that simple convention. And I don't see why if a billion other sites have much better searches slashdot's can't be different. I mean this is really simple stuff we're' talking about here.
Photos.
it's typography 101. wide columns make for bad readability. the mind loses track of its row and scanning back and forth for each line of text is straining on the eye. for instance, on slashdot, the text would have to be more than 200% its size in order for this simple rule of typography to be obeyed. there are several cases in which Nielsen's recommendations fly in the face of decades and sometimes (as in this case) centuries of applied experience have taught us.
Nielsen, much to his chagrin, is not the voice of god, and he is often flatly wrong if not disrespectful. while it would be nice, as i believe is his goal, to allow the reader to resize their browser to the column width they are comfortable with, the prospect of asking a reader to change their browser window's width for every other page they visit is simply laughable in its utter disregard for the viewer's time and patience.
perhaps if monitors were longer than they are wide, this wouldn't be as much of an issue, but then you run into usability on the desktop where a wider desktop is more conductive to productivity, lessens strain on the neck, and a host of other factors.
mr Nielsen sees things too often in black and white and appears to form many of his opinions in a vaccuum, imho.
And here I thought it stood for "Keep it simple, shithead". Way off.
Like most of these usability geeks, he's just an opinionated blowhard, and if you take any notice of him we'll be back in the dark ages.
Consider his comments about not using drop down lists and "just let the user type it in".
That will take us back to the green screen era pre 1990 and IBM's CUA standands (if you don't know, they defined a common set of user interface standards for both GUI's and character based interfaces).
If I don't provide a list, the user has to know the valid codes to enter, and how do they do that?
Either I have to provide a search function anyway (ie. a drop down list) or they have to have a printed post-it or sheet of paper
You can still see horrible systems like these in some travel agents and airports where the poor users have reams of paper manuals listing all the valid codes and values.
In all honesty, usability experts are a waste of space. Experienced systems analysts and designers are far better at this type of thing.
As for his comments on project management and budgets - what the @#$%&#$ does that have to do with useability???
IMHO the good doctor is like many other gurus in marginal fields - trawling for work by criticizing everyone else's job and taking no responsbility for the result ("all power, no responsibility - the perogative of the whore")
I like Jakob's way of thinking a lot. Especially after working with 'web designers' who try to do the opposite just for personal kicks.
But two questions are bugging me right now: the article mentions that he holds lots of patents, presumably to do with usability. Does this mean that he's patented stuff to keep it free, or is he doing something more sinister?
Also, his own site has a list of headlines including a link to the article mentioned here. But I don't see any RSS feed for those headlines. Where does he stand on RSS and the symantic web?
"Among your Web site pet peeves, you inveigh against pop-up ads, which you once compared to selling a vacuum cleaner by first dashing someone's ashtray on the floor. "
"That's completely what it is like, yes. My screen is really precious to me. It's mine; don't go and pollute it."
See, that's THE way to start towards making a site noone wants to use. Thinking about it as "art".
From my experience the ones thinking like that are graphics artists (a noble profession otherwise) which some PHB promoted directly to web designers. Not saying they couldn't learn to be proper web designers, I'm just saying: it's a different job. You have to _learn_ to do it.
So they think they're making art. They produce pages with:
- a megabyte of funky graphics. Bonus points if it's Flash. Or flashing.
- tiny fonts,
- piss-poor organization (it's apparently artistic to group content by any other criterion than what belongs together),
- piss-poor ideas taken from another medium, and inapplicable to reading stuff on a screen. (E.g., 2 or 3 columns are nice and fine in a newspaper, but in a PDF they just make me pointlessly scroll up and down. Artistic as it may look, it's a pain to use.)
- some utterly retarded navigation, which leaves the customer up a learning curve just to find the page they want (but hey, it's artistic.) Bonus points if it involves some mandatory use of JavaScript, not to simplify things (e.g., auto-totals on a form), but to force the user to do weird and unnatural perversions he didn't want. (E.g., mandatory gesture based navigation implemented in JavaScript.)
- colors that are a _pain_ to read (cyan on neon blue, and orange on orange-ish yellow are actual color schemes I've been force to implement. You guessed, by graphics artists.)
Etc, etc, etc.
E.g., one actual idea that came from a graphics artist, and which we fought: he wanted the site squeezed in a non-resizeable 600x400 pixel window, without toolbars (i.e., also without a back button.) With wall to wall graphics. That was his artistic vision of a unique user experience.
He's also the guy who wanted the orange on light orange colours, btw. He also wanted a navigation scheme that involved a weird (if artistic) matrix that noone understood how to use. That idea fell after a multi-hour meeting with the investors, where he presented his unique vision. They couldn't understand how the heck that would work either. (And bear in mind that dot-com investors usually loved weirdness and promises of "unique user experiences.")
The other guys at the office called him "The Antichrist."
And especially during the dot-com fraud, the more clueless the PHB, the more he/she loved such ideas. Sites were created to be "unique user experiences". Except the more unique the site, the less users wanted to use it. Weird, no?
Basically you have to understand what the users want. They're not there to admire art, they're mostly there basically for the equivalent of reading a newspaper. (Except even there bear in mind that reading on a screen works best with other paragraph sizes than in a newspaper.)
They'll also tend to see the web as a whole, so to speak. Even though (or if) they understand concepts like "site", they actually like navigating seamlessly between them. They don't want to learn new skills that only apply to your site. They don't want to work hard to find the links. (Yay for links that only underline on mouse hover. Not.) Etc.
And the sooner you can wrap your mind around the idea that you're making a site for your users, and not for art, the better.
Basically it's exactly the other way around than you seem to think: all these studies are not some elitist promoting some pure art that noone wants to read, they're actually the exact opposite: studies on what actual people want to read. And it turns out that it's exactly the opposite of what many artists in ivory towers thought.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
I find Jakob Nielsen's site quite easy to use. I'm not well versed in ALL te usability guidelines out there, but it is refreshing in at least a few ways:
* It loads quickly. There are no annoying animated, graphical buttons, intrusive pop-up/pop-under/pop-in ads, or flash animations on the page.
* It does not break at different window sizes right down to 640 * 480. Sure, nobody uses a PC at 640 * 480 anymore, but I hate having to maximize my browser and cover up other stuff on my desktop so that a page will display properly. Conversely, it is quite stupid to maximize your browser and find the whoe page is STILL locked to a strip 800 pixels wide down the middle of my screen.
* The site does not override your browser's text size settings. A lot of sites use microscopic text and do not allow you to use your browsers text size feature. When you have bad eyesight (as I do) this can make a page unreadable to the point of uselessness.
* Consistent formatting is used. Links are all formatted the same way, and there are visual cues indicating there are links. I HATE it when links are not underlined or bolded or placed in button-like boxes. I also hate even more seeing underlined text in a different colour that is NOT a link. Neilson uses the same font style and colours for links throughout the page.
* Simple, neat layout. No horizontal scrolling, nothing really gets lost in the layout.
Now for what I DON'T like:
(I can't believe I have the gaul to actually suggest improvements to a recognized expert in the industry much less criticism)
* White, bright yellow and cyan is harsh on the eyes (unless perhaps you are colour blind). Even if you want a low-bandwidth, light-graphics page there is a lot you can do with a stylesheet to implement attractive font and colour selections to make a professional-looking, readable and user-friendly site.
* The news section appears not to be sorted in any particular way, and could use perhaps some subcatigories within that section.
* The page is link heavy, so perhaps they shouldn't be "in-line" formatted. "Block" formatted links that look like section titles (with non-link descriptive text underneath) might be easier on the eyes, although I don't think is needed to improve the usability.
* Font selection and paragraph spacing effectively separate the various sections, however I find alternating background colours would provide even better delineation. Think of the old computer paper with alternating pale-green-and-white bands for every five lines of text. "Alert Box" could be pale green, "Reports" would be white, "Film" pale green, "Books" white etc. Too maky colours would look dumb but two or three would look fine.
Just my thoughts. Neilson is indeed a "luddite" of sorts--it seems that in his ideal web all links would be blue and underlined and the page whould have to load on IE 2.0, but he offers critically important advice. Of particular importance I think is CONSISTENCY, SIMPLCITY and EFFICIENCY.
Ninety percent of flash animation should be eliminated, as should almost all animated, graphical buttons. In coroporate sites in particular, navigation is too complex--we have visually stunning but confusing "start-menu" style multi-level animated menus and get mired in a maze of documents (hance the need for all the serach tools). However, things seem to be getting worse instead of better. Perhaps the pendulum will swing back to the centre soon...
Less work for me to type in NL or nl or Nl or nL or holland or holand or netherlands or neetherlands or the netherlands. (and if you can't limit a text field to accept only 2 letters and in upper case you shouldn't be building websites)
Now it is up to you to program your site in a way that it can work with this. Isn't too hard. In fact is pretty easy. Mysql and PHP already come with tools for this. they can check for similarity between words.
You can argue if dropdowns or text input are better but saying that you are to lazy as a programmer just proves his point.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
PWP goodness
I have found that common sense is not very "common".
I've read a few books from this same author and he does have some good points. I don't agree with everything personally, but reading carefully I found quite a bit of information about perspectives that I wouldn't have thought of.
In my experience however, there is a crucial step that is missing. In most of the places where I have worked the "webmaster" is more the artsy type and is not interested in the technical side of the design at all. Where I'm working now, if I showed this article to our primary web designer, he would basically ignore it and continue doing things the same old way because he isn't interested in what he considers to be the technical aspects of web design (OT, once he even told me "I don't care about all that HTML stuff"). I'm sure this is different in large organizations where there are teams of people dedicated to the maintenance of the web site, but in smaller organizations where there are only one or two web designers it is important that the web designer understands *why* he must care about this information (and I'm not talking about nebulous mentions of "you'll save this much $"). Most of the designers I've worked with are not interested in perusing articles/books of what they consider to be "technical" information in an effort to improve the usability and effectivess of the web site they are maintaining.
That is why this seems like only half the story. IMO, it would be very useful to have a good preface on why it is so important to apply these techniques, and only then begin to explain exactly what these techniques are and how to implement them. This would make this kind of information useful to both the artsy, visual web designer and the more code oriented, professional webmaster.
OK, glance at the website. What is it about? Big type: it's Jakob Nielsen's Website. What's a Jakob Nielsen and what does he do? Oh, wait. Up near the top in 12 point trendy all lower-case type, it's usable information technology. Whatever the hell that means. I'm not going to see it at all unless I'm sitting at a computer and using it. So what is it? Is is Jakob Nielsen's personal website, or is is usable infromation technology? Again, whatever the hell.
Look down a bit more, and what do we see. Again, bit type but not so big. Permanent Content. Well, I'm glad that's settled! I hate those damn Ephemeral Content websites. Looking down, what's this? Alertbox. Jakob's column on Web Usability. Do I click on that? No, nothing happens. They're below. Not even indented, so I can tell at a glance that they're supposed to be under the header. The first one looks like a paragraph with a link. Then there are some links without paragraphs. There's a space between the paragraph with the link and the others, which have no space between them. Ah, so the first one must be special in some way. No it's not.
What's that over to the right? It says it's News, but the first thing is an ad for a conference. I click on it, and, ah! So somebody knows how to write a website.
Hear hear. What a bunch of baloney. Perhaps he ought to take a look at what Edward Tufte says on the subject:
http://www.edwardtufte.com/tufte/powerpoint
Something I'd wished for years ago was an override of specified table widths, something like "ignore table width attributes". Come to think of it, maybe an extension for Mozilla Firefox is feasible or already has it.
He'd agree with both of us - he sometimes refers to liquid layouts.
Copyrights, Patents, Trademarks: temporary loans from the Public Domain, not real property ("intellectual" or otherwise)
The thing I really hate is that they don't (at least in IE) play nice with the scrollbutton on a mouse; the fact that scrolling the wheel affects the dropdown even when the cursor is miles away (and even when the dropdown is not visible on the page) is completely counterintuitive.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Part of the problem is that Web page designers build their pages and view them on their own computer or on an intranet. They should drag a phone cord into their office, dial up, and then view their page the way that most users will. They might be surprised.
Neilsen is right that I'm not going to wait a minute for a page to load. I'll go elsewhere, meaning that the site's owners lose business.
Yes, in plain english, there have been times that I have chosen product B over product A primarily because I couldn't bear product A's slow, bloated Web site.
The most hilarious example I saw was a huge, bloated Web page that autorefreshed itself too quickly. On a slow dial up, the page would never finish loading!
I read his book "Designing Web Usability". While he has good points regarding the minimalist style of web design, I don't think minimalism is not applicable in today's web sites. Websites today need a certain degree of aesthetic appeal and good layout. With millions of web sites in the web, a web site designed for both aesthetic and usability is the key because it stands out from the crowd.
As a web site tends to be more simple and "usable", aesthetic appeal goes down. People remember to web sites which has the "cool" factor. For instance, while his website useit.com is accessible to all browsers, it is ugly. We can clearly see the trade-of between aesthetic and usability.
His minimalist approach does not apply to all kinds of web sites. Our company develops web sites and we have an actress client. Of course, she wants all her web sites with all the eye-candy. If we apply Nielsen's advocacy of minimalist design, I don't think she would buy the idea. If the client is developing a simple hobby site or portal, maybe we can apply minimalist approach.
Minimalist design does not apply to all kinds of web sites. It may have its uses but we live on the new of the internet: broadband, flash and fancy graphics. Minimalist design is more applicable in the early days of the web.
Seriously, I agree. It's a true shame, because slashdot is the one source where I read articles that I remember for years, and frequently find the need to revisit.
... in vain, alas, as the keywords (which I *know* I posted) don't show up in searches.
I fully agree, and for the same reason -- years later, I remember articles and want to look them up. What's worse, I remember my own posts and want to look them up
Seriously -- Slashdot could be a *much* more useful tool -- a resource to be reckoned with -- if it were deeply searchable.
-kgj
-kgj
Are you telling me that whitespace support is difficult?
It's not my job to fix the source. yeah this is taco's site and if I don't like it I can leave but that doesn't mean it's not obscenely easy to implement.
Photos.
I'm seeing a lot of complaints alleging that Nielsen's site is difficult to use but I think this is just hyperbole that people are stating to try and seem "out of the mould". I think Nielsen hits the hammer on the head; I'll concede that his site isn't the most beautiful in the world but it is perfectly usable with its simple two column design. Nor does it try to be ultrastylish like every other Movable Type blog these days.
Note to M1-ers: a curt but otherwise insightful message is not "Flamebait" or "Troll".
> I mean, would it kill him to learn basic typography?
Ok, I'll bite... Where do you learn basic typography? Do you have a URL or at least an ISBN#?
> Am I the only person who finds Mr. Nielson's site to be painful to use?
You think his site is bad, you should look at those he inspires. Try following this two-column layout with ugly ASCII graphics. It gives me a headache.
From the dark depths of his site:
"Why This Site Has Almost No Graphics Several reasons: Download times rule the Web, and since most users have access speeds on the order of 28.8 kbps, Web pages can be no more than 3 KB if they are to download in one second which is the required response time for hypertext navigation. Users do not keep their attention on the page if downloading exceeds 10 seconds, corresponding to 30 KB at modem speed. Keeping below these size limits rules out most graphics."
He definitely hasn't updated this baby in a looooong while.