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
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
"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
-- Brought to you by Carl's JR
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".
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.
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
Yeah, just look at what a colossal failure Slashdot is...
Unpleasantries.
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".
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
"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
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
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
- 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.Uh... no.
You must be new.
Unfortunately your post will now continue to exist.
<grrr
>> 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.
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