Jakob Nielsen on Design, RSS, Email, and Blogs

Carl Bialik from WSJ writes "Jakob Nielsen took some time to chat with the Wall Street Journal's Lee Gomes about RSS, email newsletters, web design and blogs. When asked whether blogs must maintain a 'conversation' with readers, Nielsen says, 'That will work only for the people who are most fanatic, who are engaged so much that they will go and check out these blogs all the time. There are definitely some people who do that -- they are a small fraction. A much larger part of the population is not into that so much. The Internet is not that important to them. It's a support tool for them. Bloggers tend to be all one extreme edge. It's really dangerous to design for a technical elite. We have to design for a broad majority of users.'"

Comments

Re:What a joke!

[nv5]

you may still not be impressed, but but he does explain his reasoning for the absence of graphics.

Ahhhh

[drpimp]

"For Web-Design Expert, Ease of Use And Clarity Are Essential for Firms"

I'm definately not an English major, but I believe it should either read

For Web-Design Experts, Ease of Use And Clarity Are Essential for Firms

OR

For a Web-Design Expert, Ease of Use And Clarity Are Essential for Firms

Almost sounds like a post from engrish.com

Re:Ahhhh

[matantisi]

It's actually "headline-ese": "Web Expert" here, refers to Nielsen. Newspapers use this kind of locution all the time in headlines.

Re:Email newsletters better than feeds?

[Billosaur]

What I prefer to newsletters is user-requested content, where you can say "Send me an email when you write a new blog post/article/whatever about $SUBJECT". I'm not usually interested in everything a site has to offer, but if they're willing to pick out the things I would be interested in, I'm much more likely to want to see it

I agree. I'm not a big fan of blogs, but there are occasionally ones that contain useful information and come across with some thought-provoking ideas. I like this idea of the customizeable email alert; I get these already from my bank and credit card company, and from CNN, why not a blog? When you think about it, it's similar to doing a search on a topic and following the links, except that instead of getting a lot of irrelevant crap, you get a more focused set of data. THe only caveat would be to make sure that if it's keyword based, there's some kind of threshhold that says, "alert me is $SUBJECT comes up, but only if it's talked about at length." Someone might mention a keyword once in a blog, but that shouldn't be good enough to trigger an alert -- it should only get sent out if there's enough about that subject to make it worth reading.