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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.'"
an o4erating system is busy infi;ghting
MSM. You keep using that term. It does not mean what you think it means.
I work for a large company as their usability expert and I shudder whenever I hear someone mentioned Nielsen's dogma. What he says is treated as absolute law by those who know nothing about design, accessibility and web technology in general. More often his words, which once he uttered with real conviction, are regurgitated over and over like some bizarre mantra.
This article was thankfully very short - but classic Nielsen shines through with his "design for the masses" approach to everything. Try to convince normal people that there will be no graphics and plain vanilla layouts for EVERYTHING. Yes I've attended the conferences and yes we've bought some Nielsen white papers, but his time is over. Time to wake up that the web is not run on Netscape Navigator 2 anymore and we can *gasp* put a well-designed bit of rich media on a page that _might_ not appear on JAWS.