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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."
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!
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?
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
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
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!
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.
Basically, because it breaks how people navigate pages.
1) You can't bookmark an individual page. In that scenario, you can only bookmark the page that holds the frameset.
2) Similarly, you can't link to an individual page. If you do, they'll get that _just_ that page, no table of contents.
3) If you hit the refresh button, it refreshes the frameset page, which puts you back at the "default" page, not the one you were looking at.
4) Doesn't work with the "History" that browsers keep.
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 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.
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
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
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 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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.