Slashdot Mirror
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.'"
Nielsen says in this article that he prefers email newsletters to news feeds because "the email newsletter comes to you; it arrives in your in box, and becomes part of the one place you go to get information. That's the great strength." This is an interesting idea, but I don't think he realizes that it doesn't scale. Sure, a couple newsletters would work fine, but a few years back, I was subscribed to so many newsletters that I started filtering them into folders and essentially treating them just like feeds.
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.
ttuttle is a rankmaniac
What planet is he browsing? Here on Earth, we have blogs that get updated in response to the day's events, often as fast or faster than the MSM. Want to know the latest on the SCO vs. IBM case? Where are you going to look, CNN or GrokLaw? Ditto the Plame leak investigation, the hunt for Mersenne primes and extra-solar planets, cheese making, and on and on... There are blogs on all these subjects updated daily. What newsletter can beat that?
And his subsequent comments about only the "fringe" readers wanting to have a conversation misses a key point: everybody is "fringe" on some subject, and will talk your ear off about it, given the chance.
Combine these two facts and you'll immediately see why blogs took off: rather than everyone waiting around some central font of information for the weekly newsletter that--if it's done right--might touch on a point or to that interests them, they're all going off to have conversations about the things that matter to them.
Short response: This guy is clueless.
-- MarkusQ
It's worth nothing that the political blogosphere has already started to consolidate along "MSM lines." I predict that within five or six years that "blogging" will be just another way of maintaining an information-rich website. Now, no snickering about how valuable that information might be from the anti-bloggers. The point is that "blog software" represented a commoditization of CMS software in a way that your average user could handle and is thus a step forward. It is now much easier thanks to WordPress and Movable Type for people to maintain small websites, and WordPress can handle very big ones as well.
The problem with the blogosphere is that it is "democratic" by nature, but the future evolutions like vlogging and podcasting will not be democratic. They can't be. If you aren't making serious advertising money, the bandwidth fees from your amateur video hour would actually run into bankrupting-levels if a blogger got hit with several "instalanches" in one month on top of say, 10,000 regular viewers a month.
The interesting part is the software. WordPress has proven to be particularly powerful in terms of forming the framework for websites, as ZDNet has proved with their TechBlogs.
I maintain about 12 blogs on various topics, originally because I would repeat myself so often in e-mail every day to various people. The blogs were initially a time-saving tool for my friends, family and customers. Over time the blogs started gaining an audience, and using RSS much of that audience returns daily. By hyperlinking the various blogs with one another, the audience grows even more-so. Sure, they're fringe topics, but the fact that outsiders can now look into my e-mails and start commenting on them is a very big step to me gaining more information to make my businesses more profitable.
In the past 6 months I even started to help some of my corporate customers create their own blogs. By next week my company will maintain 6 corporate blogs which seem to be making big strides in keeping my customers' customers happy and informed. Again, fringe topics, but who cares if the production creates a profit (financial or informational).
I think a lot of old-media promoters will find many ways to downplay the strength of the lone blogger, but it is more than just fringe opinions and a dozen return readers -- it is about creating that "social networking" structure within your social group, and then finding ways to involve your group with others. I believe it is working very well, and I think the future is huge for bloggers, wikis and all sorts of odd social-networking web interfaces.
I don't konw about you, but for me, "memorable" comes from content. I don't care about flashy (or flash). I want content.
The "brand" is the information and insight.
No, the problem (as I see it) is that people don't realize that there comes a point when they have made their statement and should just shut up.
Instead of shutting up, they try to post more "content" on their site. But they've run out of interesting, insightful material so they end up posting
Focus on you point/message/concept and polish that.
Again, look at his website. What do you get from that? 90% of the material there is crap. It's all about interviews that he has done. It's him posting about sites that are "interesting" because they've posted about him because he was "interesting" when he commented on sites that he thought were "interesting". That's just derivative. Get rid of it. If you must have the "I love me" crap, then make it a single link off of the real content of your site. But stay focused on the real content.
Yes, that is one of the ways that people remember sites. But that is primarily useful for "branding" something. If you're pushing your "brand".
But you need to have some content for the branding.
Selling empty Coke cans
Thanks for the correction. I should know better than that. :-P
What annoys me about Nielsen is that he preaches usability, yet his homepage is practically unusable unless you think the same way he thinks. If you're a more visually oriented person than Nielsen seems to be, or you're less of a linear learner--basically, if you approach his homepage in any way he wouldn't--then it's going to be a total nightmare to navigate. His vision of "usability" works well for him, it seems, but Nielsen isn't the world.
And now, a PSA from David Lynch.
He's right though. Blog-readers (who are often unusually voracious readers anyway) tend to think that everyone else uses the internet the same way they do, but it ain't so. For most companies (yknow, except flickr and textdrive etc), setting up and maintaining a blog is going to have the smallest ROI of any of the approaches you mention, because it will reach only the voracious readers and news junkies of the Internet.
Reading Nielsen's quotes used to make me curse, but I really see him as a pundit whose era passed him by.
Most of his pronouncements in this article show a shocking resistance to the current directions of the web. His 82% of user are unaware of RSS almost directly correlates with a MSFT browser share - and it being unable to handle it. You've got a massive population frustrated by the lack of tools to monitor fresh web content, including blogs, that will suddenly tune into the infinite channel network of the web, because they can do it without wasting their time visiting sites serially. So in a year or so when Vista and a new Explorer are launched watch that RSS/Atom, etc penetration explode.
Ooh, sesh-ual that.
lisa bonet ate no basil
I can't be the only one who does the majority of my surfing with stylesheets turned off. On well designed sites it works amazingly well. I get the content and just the content in a nice linear format that is easy to read. Lite mode used to be nice here, but since the redesign it has gotten a lot worse, so I am doing my /.ing with no stylesheets now too.
What we need is a tool that gets us the info we want, in a timely and convenient manner, right?
So here's what is needed: A web-based service or client-side program (either one would be fine, I think) that lets me set up finely-tuned RSS "smart folders".
Let's say I am shopping for a 120 gb hard drive.
* First, I tell the folder what feeds I want it to check: DealNews, Fatwallet, etc.
* Then, I tell the folder what criteria or terms I want it to look for. Ex.: Show me all items that, in the title or text, include the word "120" AND "drive" AND ("hitachi" OR "seagate" OR "toshiba" OR "samsung").
* From then on out, I can see the results with just a single click on the folder, like a smart playlist on iTunes or a search folder in Thunderbird.
I've tried doing this so far with Vienna (mac) and Thunderbird (pc). Both support smart folders, but are crippled because they don't allow finely grained searches, (I can't believe no one has written an extension that improves on T-Bird's rudimentary filtering criteria!) like regular expressions.
To me, this sounds like the perfect solution. Does anyone know if it exists?
- AJ
Atom/RSS became popular long before browser support came about. I don't see why you are tying news feed ignorance to Internet Explorer's lack of support - any Internet Explorer user can sign up for a web-based aggregator today, without any special support. Users aren't hampered by Internet Explorer in this respect, it's their own ignorance, and probably at least partially because it doesn't do much for a lot of people. Not everyone's a geek.
Bogtha Bogtha Bogtha
Jakob Nielsen was once an important voice on usability issues, but that's only true today if you use Lynx or some other text browser. He recently tried to apply his expertise to the topic of "banner blindness" (the tendency of Web users to ignore ad banners) and how it was also undermining contextual ads like Google's AdWords. A lot of bloggers and site owners were concerned about this, given Nielsen's reputation and his use of EyeTracker (a really cool tool) for the research. It turns out his work on "text box blindness" tested pages designed with poorly positioned text ads that were so lame they failed to even follow Google's own heatmap for optimizing ads. Note that the ad in Nielsen's test page is in the least effective spot on the Google heatmap. All he proved was that people who don't pay any attention to ad placement won't get any clicks. Good thing Jakob's not relying on AdSense for his income.
RichM
Data Center Knowledge
My previous employer went the other way and chose cutesy marketting names for their internal systems. They were a little more memorable, but still not descriptive:
What happenned to simple names like "Billing" or "Proposals" or "Sales"?
Check out this rewrite of Jakob Nielsen's alertbox on Guidelines for link design.
Original: http://www.useit.com/alertbox/20040510.html
Rewrite: http://www.designbyfire.com/deye_web/alertbox.htm
OK, not "all", a few of you seem to have your heads on straight. But most of you seem to be deeply in denial. I don't blame you; most of your blogs are likely BAD (Sorry, Joe, but your page is entirely unreadable).
Nielson's views have changed as his research (real research using scientifically sound principles). For example, in the last century he advocated, based on studies of users, that long pages were bad design. Folks didn't know how to scroll, and long pages ate some of the primitive browsers (and computers) of the time.
He's changed this. Scrolling is now part of computing, and computers can handle it. Someone please tell ZD Net and CNET and the Chicago Tribune!
I'm a former art student (note that page was written 8 years ago, and yes, not having line breaks between paragraphs IS bad design). Admittedly my instructors were minimalists. One design principle they taught is universally ignored these days: Form follow function.
One poster above mentioned designing for your prospective audience, and that's exactly correct.
My old, long-gone (it's still in the wayback machine) Quake site broke quite a few design principles, but the broken rules were broken for concrete reasons... well, usually. Some things got complaints from readers, like the animated Strogg dancing to the Quake theme. I eventually moved the music to a different page. And got rid of one of the Stroggs.
Content is king! Nobody goes to your site for the way it looks. The Prisoner's number two was right- "we want information". (and porn;)
Some of you even deny your own perceptions. Nielson is exactly right; if it's animated, it's an ad and is dismissed. I know I'm like that, and eye tracking studies show that everyone else is, too. He's done the fcking research! There's no way you can contradict that, except by pointing to conflicting research. I haven't seen any of you do that.
My old Quake site was pretty popular, considering how sparsely populated the web was, and that it was a niche site. I had a Google Pagerank of 7. Its "cheats" page is still widely plagairized (I should hire a lawyer?) and I attribute a large part of its success to the fact that I wanted it to be useable. When people wrote bitch letters, I listened and considered what they were saying.
I got a lot more letters saying how much the site rocked than how shitty it was, and quite a few mentioned how easy it was to find INFORMATION (and humor and music and gossip and links and... and...).
Slashdot has always been pretty useable.
If you have a web site or blog, you ignore useability at your own peril. Nielson has done his homework. Few of you seem to have. The major newspapers certainly haven't.
mcgrew's razor: Never attribute to stupidity that which can be explained by greedy self-interest
That's strange, maybe you should check your browser settings. It takes me exactly as long to open links in a new tab with a middle-click (if I'm using my desktop) or a Cmd-click (if I'm using my laptop) as it does to left-click them.
You keep using the word "should". What is this recommendation based on aside from your own opinion? Notice that the vast majority of web developers disagree with you and consider that there may be a good reason for this.
I usually know if I'm on a different site by the simple fact that the page looks different from the one I was just reading. I can honestly say that in all my years of using the web I have never been confused about whether the link I followed was to a different site or not.
You're assuming people want to continue reading the original site, which is not necessarily true.
I believe in a) not doing unexpected things to my readers, and b) not messing with their UI by forcing new windows open against their wishes. I also trust that if they want to get back to my site after reading an off-site link they can find their back button or plan for it by opening their choice of a new window or tab.
Web consulting +