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

Email newsletters better than feeds?

[ThinkingInBinary]

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.

What a joke!

[XxtraLarGe]

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.

Re:What a joke!

[Pink Tinkletini]

Indeed. He sneers at graphic design and pretty much anything beyond plaintext, claiming that "gimmicks" like animation impair usability. What he fails to understand is that when properly applied, these very same techniques can aid usability substantially (e.g. Genie effect to tell you where your windows are going).

An oversimplification of his position, I'm sure, but that's the impression he gives. As you say, it doesn't help that his homepage is an oil spill of inscrutable links, an assault on the senses.

Re:What a joke!

[ribuck]

Yeah. He didn't even bother to select a font size for the body text; he just left it at the browser default.

There are no animated graphics, and he missed the opportunity to provide an interactive Flash marketing experience.

And black text is just, like, so readable.

Re:What a joke!

[DrVomact]

I couldn't disagree more with the original poster--I think it's an absolutely great web site. The layout is clean, simple and instantly comprehensible. The purpose of this page is to direct you to information about web design...so it gives links to articles and conferences. What else could you want? A bunch of animated screenshots of web pages that dance in circles around the text? --In fact, that's what popped into my head when the original poster mentioned "garish"!

As for your (parent) comment, I think that following conventions such as using dark type on a light background, blue underlined links and legible type is not a bad thing. In fact, it's a very good thing for web pages to follow conventions. A good user interface is always a consistent interface. This principle is what made the Macintosh such a success--nearly every program that ran on the Mac had a similar menu structure, the buttons looked alike and did what you expected, and so on. (I speak in the past tense because I haven't used a Mac in years.) I hate programs that use a glitzy unique interface just to be different; you would say they are establishing "brand" identity or something--I say that they are annoying the crap out of me by having to learn a new interface just for their stupid program. (This happens a lot in games.) In this case, doing things differently doesn't make the software cool--it makes the program look amateurish.

Now, I understand that the web isn't an operating system, or a set of related application programs. Web pages serve many different purposes, and what works for one page doesn't necessarily work for another. But I have seen many more examples of web pages that defeat themselves with their unique graphics or typographical layout than I've seen examples of successful web pages that depart radically from convention. The same general rules do apply to most web pages as apply to any user interface--make me feel at home, make it clear where I'm supposed to click to do what, let me recognize a link when I see one. The first rule about breaking rules is, "Have a good reason". Break the rules only when it makes your page more effective--don't break them just to be "different".

Blogs

[dubmun]

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.

Nothing New Here, Move Along

[gbulmash]

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

Acronymns

[neonprimetime]

one of the real strong recommendations is to stop calling it 'RSS' and start calling it 'news feeds,' because that explains what it does

I've been trying to convince my work that for years now! But instead we have systems named ... LTD, MARDAT, APRP, CLSPMT, CSR, etc. It's insanely hard to work with! Call it what it is ... not by some stupid acronym.

RSS and blog design

[TheViewFromTheGround]

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.

What?

[Odin_Tiger]

It's really dangerous to design for a technical elite.

Yeah, just look at what a colossal failure Slashdot is... ... ...Wait a sec...

Fighting the good fight against irrelevance

[faust2097]

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".

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.

right, but not that right

[bitspotter]

"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.

More information

[Bogtha]

He's gone into more detail in his latest Alertbox column. One thing that caught my eye:

Finally, some of our users resented the fact that news feeds are divorced from the context of the publisher's website. They preferred the serendipity that came from visiting a full-fledged website that offered additional content beyond the current headlines.

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.