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."

Comments

Poor Search

[Waffle Iron]

But the search on individual Web sites or inside intranets is, typically, still bad. And it's bad in all the different aspects of search.

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...

Re:Thankfully

[0racle]

My eyes! The goggles, they do nothing!

not the point

[DNS-and-BIND]

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.

Favorite Search Problem

[Blackbird_Highway]

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!