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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."
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.
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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!
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!
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
The "Design Eye.." site is great. Especially if you're on 56k. I just went to the store, bought a steak, cooked it, drank 3 beers, had sex with my gf, and the page is still loading. Thank god there isn't any flash or animated .gif's. What's he half-life of this page's load cycle.....
itadakimasu
Seriously, turn on your Chinese Fonts and take a mozy over to check some of these out:
-- http://tw.yahoo.come x.cfm
(Just to see what a typical newspaper looks like...)
-- http://pchome.com.tw
-- http://www.appledaily.com.tw/template/twapple/ind
This is TYPICAL of the type of design happening in Chinese-speaking contries -- FILL IN EVERY SPACE AVAILABLE WITH TEXT OR IMAGE TO THE POINT THAT NOTHING SEEMS TO HAVE ANY PRIORITY. Blink tags often save the day, believe it or not... A typical TV news channel is a CNN-scrolling-banner-induced NIGHTMARE... To say this happens in ALL Asian countries is a generalization and incorrect, but there is a definite preference and inclination toward simplicity and minimalism in Japan (and Korea to some extent...)
That isn't to say that sophisticated design is not happening in these places -- far from it. It's just that the cultural expectations placed upon design, especially one that is information-based (any media) is different in different cultures.
To me, clutter is confusing and makes the user experience difficult, at best. To others, it is expected and doesn't slow anything down.
So really, who's to say what's usable?
I've once attended a weekend seminar with Mr. Neilsen and other web-usability gurus (Tog comes to mind) and was impressed with what they had to say regarding testing and testing and testing again, so ultimately you could have a cluttered, to-my-own-eyes unorganized mess that could test positive for usability in the right market.
Go figure..
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.
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I think all those pro-WAI critics need a reality check.
The reason why the site is ugly is because he's a crap graphic designer. He says so all the time. It's perfectly possible to produce a website that is both accessible and pretty.
How often have you heard "Oh, that site is pretty damn nice" compared to "Oh, that site is sooo compatible with Lynx!"?
Every time I talk to somebody who uses Lynx? Every time a visitor finds a website through Google (the Googlebot is hardly a state-of-the-art browser, you know).
In any case, you are confusing four separate issues here:
These are all mostly separate issues. Jakob Neilsen talks about usability, not browser compatibility, accessibility or aesthetic appeal. If you don't understand the difference between the issues, perhaps you aren't in a position to criticise. If you think you can have a go at him without even being able to distinguish between these different issues, it is you who needs the reality check.
Listen, a document that focuses too much on form and thus takes away from its function is just as poorly designed as a document that focuses too much on function and ignores form.
That's utter rubbish. If something is pretty but doesn't work, then it doesn't work. If something is ugly but works, it works.
It's a balancing act.
Yes it is, and Jakob Neilsen says this quite a bit. He talks about when things actively work against the user, and backs it up with user studies and numbers showing reductions in online sales, amongst other things. He isn't qualified to talk about aesthetics, so he doesn't talk about them.
Ever google for an online store and reject the first couple of results because you didn't like the way they looked? They might be the most usable pages in the world with well designed shopping carts but if it doesn't have that look you expect from an online store you'll keep searching because you think it looks sketchy.
And at what point does Jakob Neilsen argue that things should be ugly or that aesthetics are unimportant? He says the exact opposite whenever he is asked. You are attacking a straw-man argument here. He doesn't say the things you appear to think he does.
Bad Panda! No Bamboo for you! In matters of importance ACs will not be responded to. Want to say something critical,OK
I own it too, and I agree. However, I still think that it's a worthwhile read.
The trouble is, when people learn how to design websites, they inevitably copy everyone else. Including everyone else's mistakes. Not only that, but they make a few of their own.
The ones that go on to be professionals inevitably get caught up in doing the actual work and don't think about how to improve their practices enough. So the mistakes get ingrained and replicated across hundreds of designs.
Nielsen's book is good because he has a knack for showing people their designs from a user's perspective. It challenges those ingrained bad habits and gives you ideas on how to approach the field from a better angle.
If you read the book expecting some revolutionary new techniques for web design, then you will be disappointed. But if you read the book expecting a refreshing new perspective and a starting point for improving your work, then it's a damn good read.
I hope he never takes a "clue" from either of them. Design Eye took a minute to load over a fast calbe connection, and Reuseit fills almost half of my browser window with crap that I just need to scroll past.
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
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:
Just wanted to say that I absolutely agree with you on this one. A good desiner's eye would make any site more usable. Fonts, colors, font spacing, paragraph spacing, paragraph width, etc etc all affect how usable the page is -- a nice looking page just makes the whole experience more pleasing. Heck, it's why people put art in their homes. It's why we have "interior decorators" and "landscape artists" -- yes, our home would be more functional if instead we spent all that money on useful things like changing around the lightswitches or buying new appliances, but in the end, the beauty of the home plays as large (if not larger) a role as the usability in the overall experience. I for one would absolutely hate to live in a house without plants, without good-looking furniture, without some art on the walls (even just my own photography) -- it would be bland and boring, regardless of how usable it is. The best homes I've seen balance utility and design incredibly -- the best web designers do the same thing to the same effect. Jacob Nielsen has only half the picture.
"!"
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.
It's funny you say that because designbyfire.com looks horrible to me. It doesn't fit my current window size and the actual content scrolls to more than 120 pages...
Unless of course that's the kind of thing you like
Pretty? Please, his site is ugly. I'm a webdesigner and i can tell you that if i'd deliver such a product to pretty much any customer, they'd slap me back to my office.
Right. So much better for you make something pretty and distinctive and quite often irritating to your customer's customers. So much better to have fancy gizmos that show off your customer's broadband and annoy your customer's customers on flaky dialup. You much better to use scripts and effects to wow your customer while making the site unusable for your customer's customers who have the sense to kill those malware attractors.
It may be plain and simple, but if I have to mess with a lot of it, I think I'd find stuff done like his site much less irritating and wearing.
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.
He might be confusing the issues but I think you are missing the point and trying to call him on semantics. What I think he was trying to say was that usability can be improved with the proper use of style (and even -eek!- graphics). Browser compatibility and accessibility BOTH fall under usability. And, aesthetic appeal and usability are not mutually exclusive. Rather good aesthetic appeal can increase usability just as often as it decreases it.
Jacob Nielsen, while being excellent at some parts of usability is a real loss at others, namely graphics and visual style. Like it or not there are ways of using graphics and style to HELP the user discern important information from unimportant, headline from sub header, story text from link. And you can see his site uses the bare basics of this.
This is EXACTLY the kind of thinking inside of the box that got us poor websites in the first place. He mentions how programmers use drop down menus because they are easier to verify in his article. And I am sure at the time the programmer though this would be a good thing for the user (things are nice and organized and uncluttered, the user is able to quickly select something without typing it etc. etc..) But in practice it proved to be a problem. And I think this is the case with Nielsen's site.
When I go to his site the first thing I notice is the colors are horrific, unmatching and purposeless. Now you may think I am a crackpot and that color is subjective but it has been scientifically proven that certain colors elicit certain emotions. The next thing I notice is that the text seems unorganized and basically in a big blob. Things most people would look for as navigation links (such as about this site) are at the bottom left of the site mixed in with articles and are generally indistinct. News on the left has the news organization bolded while articles on the left have authors and dates. His use of bullet points is wrong, he doesn't indent the second line of the bullet which is automatically done in html with lists. Anyways I could go on and on.
My point really is this -- we need to open up our minds and stop thinking about things from our own perspective. JN is VERY good at this but, like us all, he blocks out portions of the picture and sometimes those portions are big.
meep
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")
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.
Good God, the first thing one notices when going to those sites is ... fixed width design. Half my browser window suddenly has no content. Tiny fonts. One had a nice logo, but that's about it.
It's tragic that designers just can't seem to help themselves. The greatest pain in my occassional web designing life is trying to help my sister out : she was a professional graphic designer (before becoming a retailer)... no matter how many millions of times i try to explain to her the concept of web pages, and non-fixed resolutions... she just can not seem to get it. Yet another fixed design, with comlicated overlapping elements... which tend to break on any non-ie browser, and load horribly slowly on modem.
Ah well.
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.
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You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
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.