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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.
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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!
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.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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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
Never is a strong word... the biggest argument I have against this is that my eyes hate to read a line of text which spans across my monitor. This is just my preference, but I have a feeling many people share this pet peeve -- if I find a site which is too wide for my eyes, I have to resize my browser window, which is not something a user should have to do to view a site.
Most designs rely on fixed widths because the page can be controlled; otherwise the widths are unknown and all sorts of things start looking like crap -- images, for instance. Lets say you have a 400 pixel wide image, and your fluid page is *usually* big enough (on my monitor) so that whatever design element it sits in is large enough to contain it. Now let's say someone looks at it in 640x480 -- the image probably overflows the design.
When you just have text data, and it looks like crap (Nielsen's site being the prime example), then yes, fluid designs are preferable. But when you start trying to make a site look good, be more usable, be more accessible, and work well while providing useful content in a very eye-pleasing form, then you need some measure of control of the look, and fixed designs can provide some of that. Now of course there are fixed pages which are absoulutely horrible -- just like any design, using fixed width requires thought, and some designers don't have that capability, and I'm sorry if you come accross one; but fixed widths can be useful in making a web site look better, which in my opinion improves the user experience as much as any of Nielsen's tips.
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