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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.'"
I can't believe this guy is a design/usability guru. His web site is easily one of the most garish and unfriendly pages I've ever seen.
Taking guns away from the 99% gives the 1% 100% of the power.
The blurb didn't make much sense to me, so I thought I'd actually *gasp* RTFA...
His idea about calling RSS feeds "News Feeds" makes sense to me (c'mon Apple, do you really need the blue RSS badge in Safari's bar? I predict this is gone in Safari 2.5/3 - replaced with an aquafied version of the universal newsfeed icon)
Beyond that and what appeared in the summary, there isn't much to the article. How does one "design" for a blogging audience? I can understand his point that bloggers, while influential on the web, are a vast, technical, vocal minority - but what does that mean in terms of design? What does it also mean that, with regards to MySpace, one of the most popular destinations on the web is also one of its most amazingly poorly designed? I mean, it's slapdash - but it's agile, meaning that they've succeeded by throwing a whole bunch of stuff to the wall, and seeing what sticks.
concrete5: a cms made for marketing, but strong enough for geeks.
Blogs will penetrate the masses much more than Mr. Gomes thinks. They are the journals of our age and may not be read on a regular basis by the masses now... but think about future generation being able to go back and read the blogs of the past.
Journals and diaries have fallen into disuse. Our old blogs and emails are what OUR children will be reading when we die.
(end of post)
It may be Nielsen talking on a subject that's newer than his seminal book (which is now over 5 years old, an eternity in Web time), but he's just hitting the same old points... broad usability, design for the broadest audience, etc.
Why should I design for or even think about my grandmother's tastes if I'm doing a coding blog, or a baseball blog (that's assuming Grandma isn't a rabid Ichiro fan)?
I view Nielsen as someone who has taken a good idea and turned it into ideology. And when you do that, the goodness begins to evaporate.
Design for two audiences... your users and Googlebot. That's my motto.
- G
Start a happiness pandemic
one of the real strong recommendations is to stop calling it 'RSS' and start calling it 'news feeds,' because that explains what it does
... LTD, MARDAT, APRP, CLSPMT, CSR, etc. It's insanely hard to work with! Call it what it is ... not by some stupid acronym.
I've been trying to convince my work that for years now! But instead we have systems named
Nielsen has an interesting riff in this very slight interview (couldn't WSJ have expanded the online version of it?) on what to call RSS. It's an excellent point -- lay people don't know "RSS" the way they know "web" or even "Myspace". It is useful technology that could help a good number of people. But between the utter proliferation of newsreaders and naming conventions, it far too fragmented to cement widespread public understanding.
For a guy who loves to throw around numbers, I find Nielsen's comment about blogs incoherent and worthless. Is there evidence that blogs are being designed for the technical elite? What is this "one extreme edge" that bloggers are on? Is there evidence that blogs are corporate marketing tools even are trying to find a broad audience? These are incredibly dubious assertions. Any thoughtful strategy for reaching out to customers is going to combine blogging, email, RSS and other technologies in an audience-specific way. Duh.
Online citizen journalism from the inner city: The View From The Ground
Stop saying "blog". It's by far the stupidest pseudo-word ever.
I don't need no instructions to know how to rock!!!!
The nice thing about email newsletters is that they look just like your other communcations; you use one tool to manage them.
But email is a two-way communication; RSS is really primarily one-way. That makes for a technological difference: with RSS, because it's fetch, you know you're not getting spam. Email is push, and so it's hard to distinguish newsletters from spam. And it's one more site to give your email address to, meaning one more opportunity for spammers to steal/buy it.
Getting newsletters out of the email loop will make it easier to support some anti-spam technologies. Newsletters are one of the downfalls of pay-to-send schemes, because a free newsletter emailed to a million people at $.00001 turns into real money.
I like integrating RSS into the email stream. Some email apps already support RSS, and I would like to see them show up in just a single queue of "stuff to read".
The fanatics are just as likely to subscribe to a newsletter as they are to go and visit a blog frequently. Unless you force users to sign up to a newsletter, fanatics will be the only informed ones, anyway.
My name is Wootzor von Leetenhaxor
Jakob is a great pundit but I think he's becoming aware of the fact that most of the sage advice he compiled almost a decade ago has becoming common sense. Aside from getting interviews he hasn't really contributed anything new or exciting to web usability. First the design community figured this out and stopped buying his books, and I think now those designers' bosses are starting to realize that the $5k they spent sending their people to Nielsen conferences would be better spent on talking to their customers and doing more testing [and doing it themselves cheaply instead of hiring NN Group to do it].
It's nice to have a face for your industry but I'd really rather see someone like Steve Krug, Luke Wroblewski or Jennifer Tidwell who have done more than design a pre-Cambrian version of Sun's website and a bunch of pie-in-the-sky concept projects. The fact of the matter is that "real artists ship".
Actually, it's a typical newspaper method of trying to pack the headline with as much information as possible. Most folks who read the WSJ may not know who Jakob Nielsen is, but they can understand the concept of a Web-Design Expert. The second half of the title refers to the content of the interview, with the main point highlighted. So, to summarize, this newspaper headline could be translated as "Web-design expert Jakob Nielsen believes that ease of use and clarity are essential for firms," thus satisfying proper English usage requirements at the cost of valuable newspaper space. Ironically, an English major would have had a good chance of recognizing this as a newspaper headline instead of an attempt at a properly constructed sentence. Please do not misunderstand; I merely am pointing out a situational irony, not condemning anyone's intellectual prowess.
Meh, a real sig would take too long, and I have an MMORPG to play with....
"It's really dangerous to design for a technical elite. We have to design for a broad majority of users."
By "dangerous", he means just to the corporate bottom line. by "we", he just means businesses.
The rest of us "elite" are being designed for just fine, thanks.
He does have a point about the difference between email and rss. That's why I swear by rss2email. it scans feeds, and wraps up items into my email inbox. best of both worlds.
Says who? TBL's first version of H T ML didn't include IMG, and his first web browser couldn't display graphics.
Constitutionally Correct
I was in exactly the same situation. My inbox stopped being about communicating with people and became a time-sink for keeping up to date with various things. So I went through a phase of unsubscribing from every mailing list, and once unsubscribed, I'd try and replace the information with an RSS feed. If I couldn't find one, I'd email them, tell them why I unsubscribed, and ask for a feed. Sometimes I was pleasantly surprised to find that they had one squirrelled away and not linked to on their site.
It sounds like I'm just shifting the burden elsewhere, or "hiding the mess", but it's amazing how much quicker things flow when you don't open your mail client in the morning to find dozens of things you need to sort through. And no, mail filters don't do the job for various reasons. As much as I hate to sound like a self-help book, it changes from your information controlling you to you controlling when and how you get that information.
I believe people interact with periodical articles in a fundamentally different way to normal email, and that email newsletters lead people into trying to handle both of them in the same way, resulting in chaos. Email newsletters might be the most effective way to reach your audience, as Nielsen says, but that doesn't mean that email newsletters are the most effective way for your audience to be notified of your articles. So leave your audience members who don't know any better reading your email newsletter, but make sure you give people the option of an Atom feed.
By coincidence, Nielsen's was one of the newsletters I unsubscribed from. He didn't provide a feed, and when I emailed him to ask if he had one, I was told that he'd get back to me because he was on holiday. He never did, so he has one less reader now.
I can accept that he believes that email newsletters are better than feeds, but I think it's uncharacteristic of him to not even allow the possibility of handling his Alertbox column in the way that fits into his readers' workflows best. It's not as if offering the option will harm usability for the people who don't want or understand Atom feeds.
Bogtha Bogtha Bogtha
He's gone into more detail in his latest Alertbox column. One thing that caught my eye:
This makes no sense whatsoever. If you are reading a feed, the website is a click away. If you are reading an email newsletter, the website is a click away. In both cases you aren't reading the information on the website.
It only make sense once you substitute "some of our users" for "some publishers". Email newsletters don't really have a strong tradition of including the entire article in the notification email, but plenty of people complain if you only provide partial feeds as opposed to full-text feeds.
I've seen a lot of resentment from some publishers because they think that because the person is reading their article, that they should be able to dictate that they read it on the website. But I've never seen any users complain that Atom/RSS feeds aren't "serendipitous enough". That makes no sense.
Bogtha Bogtha Bogtha
- Jakob and the people at the Nielson Norman Group are *giants* in the useability field. While he has his opinions, he tends to base his work off what *they actually see users do*, not what they say they do or like. He's also fairly clear about his preferences vs. what average people tend to prefer (HTML email is an example)
- Jakob has a new book that follows on this last book, in which he re-evaluates his recommendations in his first book. Again, he makes his recommendations based upon what users do ( or have, when it comes to something like monitor resolution. ) The first chapter of his new book covers his methodology, and frankly, I doubt many people here have come anywhere close to doing the kind of user testing he's doing.
- In his latest book, he makes no claim to cover every demographic and says so. If you are targeting kids or teenagers, his book is not necessarily for you. If you are targeting adults, you'll find plenty of good material.
That being said, I do think he leans towards the austere, but thats a perfectly valid stance to take (hello Google!), but he's not telling people how to design. He's telling people what his research is revealing and how we can avoid common pitfalls. I think more people here would do well to actually RTFB before commenting.Well, you're probably looking for "tags" rather than keywords....
SO YOU'RE GOING TO DIE: The Comic for Dealing with Death
>> The web is, and was intended to be, graphical, and RSS by extension is the same way.
HTML is now graphical; RSS was, in my opinion, designed to be easily machine readable. I do now have filters built in now, but I am still discovering additional creative techniques people have for complicating something that was supposed to be simple, which then requires more code;
If you want to publish HTML data to your customers, I recommend using HTML.
As the old saying goes, email newsletters are just a (poor) reimplementation of USENET.
2^5