Jakob Nielsen Interview on Web Site Redesigns 248
securitas writes "CIO Insight's executive editor Brad Wieners interviews Web site design usability evangelist Jakob Nielsen about design mistakes like poor search, discusses organizational resistance and common barriers to doing usability reviews, concluding with Nielsen's Adobe PDF and pop-up pet peeves, common redesign errors and budget advice when it's time for a redesign, either for your Web site or company intranet. And just to make it more usable and readable (so you don't have to click through multiple pages), you can read the entire Jakob Nielsen interview on one printer-friendly page with fewer graphics and a bandwidth-saving document size for people using dial-up Internet connections. You might also like to read a previous Ask Slashdot from March 2000 and Jakob Nielsen's answers to those questions."
Thankfully (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Thankfully (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Thankfully (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Thankfully (Score:5, Insightful)
I think all those pro-WAI critics need a reality check.
The reason why the site is ugly is because he's a crap graphic designer. He says so all the time. It's perfectly possible to produce a website that is both accessible and pretty.
How often have you heard "Oh, that site is pretty damn nice" compared to "Oh, that site is sooo compatible with Lynx!"?
Every time I talk to somebody who uses Lynx? Every time a visitor finds a website through Google (the Googlebot is hardly a state-of-the-art browser, you know).
In any case, you are confusing four separate issues here:
These are all mostly separate issues. Jakob Neilsen talks about usability, not browser compatibility, accessibility or aesthetic appeal. If you don't understand the difference between the issues, perhaps you aren't in a position to criticise. If you think you can have a go at him without even being able to distinguish between these different issues, it is you who needs the reality check.
Re:Thankfully (Score:5, Insightful)
Jacob Nielsen, while being excellent at some parts of usability is a real loss at others, namely graphics and visual style. Like it or not there are ways of using graphics and style to HELP the user discern important information from unimportant, headline from sub header, story text from link. And you can see his site uses the bare basics of this.
This is EXACTLY the kind of thinking inside of the box that got us poor websites in the first place. He mentions how programmers use drop down menus because they are easier to verify in his article. And I am sure at the time the programmer though this would be a good thing for the user (things are nice and organized and uncluttered, the user is able to quickly select something without typing it etc. etc..) But in practice it proved to be a problem. And I think this is the case with Nielsen's site.
When I go to his site the first thing I notice is the colors are horrific, unmatching and purposeless. Now you may think I am a crackpot and that color is subjective but it has been scientifically proven that certain colors elicit certain emotions. The next thing I notice is that the text seems unorganized and basically in a big blob. Things most people would look for as navigation links (such as about this site) are at the bottom left of the site mixed in with articles and are generally indistinct. News on the left has the news organization bolded while articles on the left have authors and dates. His use of bullet points is wrong, he doesn't indent the second line of the bullet which is automatically done in html with lists. Anyways I could go on and on.
My point really is this -- we need to open up our minds and stop thinking about things from our own perspective. JN is VERY good at this but, like us all, he blocks out portions of the picture and sometimes those portions are big.
Re:Thankfully (Score:2)
Re:Thankfully (Score:2, Insightful)
Right. So much better for you make something pretty and distinctive and quite often irritating to your customer's customers. So much better to have fancy gizmos that show off your customer's broadband and annoy your customer's customers on flaky dialup. You much better to use scripts and effects to wow your customer while making the site un
Re:Thankfully (Score:2)
Oh I like graphics, I even like Rococco, but I don't like stuff that comes off as the stereotype of the wardrobe of a used car salesman. It's nothing new. The French Revolution had Les Incroyables, bad enough for a complaint from a Havana newspaper in 1791 that "the dresses and ornaments meant to distinguish conditions now serve to confuse them."
Re:Thankfully (Score:2)
Nielson's beef isn't so much that the proposed designs suck, it's that he's not a designer and can't be bothered with keeping it from borking when he decides to add something...
Check it out here: Re-UseIt [builtforthefuture.com]
Re:Thankfully (Score:3, Informative)
All the top-rated entries have very strong accessibility scores, even though many (including the winning entry) make important mistakes. For instance, turn off image loading in a CSS2 capable browser and look at 8 or so of the top 10 entries, it's glaringly obvious: all the titles are missing. What they're doing is replacing header text with a CSS background image, meaning a CSS enabled browser gets an image and a text browser gets text. This is "accessible" on the assumption that CSS browsers always load i
I like this guy 50% of the time... (Score:5, Insightful)
And his site, as another poster mentionned, is a sight for sore eyes...
A point he mentions in this article that peeves me is drop downs:
The reason I think that drop-downs are so common is that the programmers want to avoid having to validate the input, but it's not really that difficult to write a little routine that checks that you have one of the authorized abbreviations.
I've had this exact problem arise on one of the systems I'm working on. It's entering a country for your practice location. We started out by leaving it as a text input field, but soon found out that our mapquest links were working only part of the time. Investigation revealed that the country variable in the Mapquest URL can only be US. United States, USA, United States of America, America, U.S. all don't work.
So, do I write an algorithm that goes and heuristically guesses what the country of the user is, or do I friggin use a drop down? - I use a drop down.
So I'm peeved that he feels all proud and manly by stating that programmers are being lazy about validation. Sometimes, a drop down is what is needed. After all, the countries of this planet aren't in a constant flux. There is a domain of acceptable values, so using a drop down is legit.
Re:I like this guy 50% of the time... (Score:2, Insightful)
He doesn't like drop-down lists because you're required to use the mouse for them. You're in the middle of filling out a form, typing things up and pressing Tab to move to the next field. When you get to the country field, you need to reach for the mouse to choose your country.
The alternative is typing "US" and selecting "Ukraine", then "Saudi Arabia", which doesn't give you what you want (but which is the way Internet Explorer does it), or hitting the down
Re:I like this guy 50% of the time... (Score:2)
If you have so many that you have more than 5 or so per letter, then you should start investigating alternative methods. But up until that point, he is wrong..
But you prove his point (Score:4, Insightful)
Less work for me to type in NL or nl or Nl or nL or holland or holand or netherlands or neetherlands or the netherlands. (and if you can't limit a text field to accept only 2 letters and in upper case you shouldn't be building websites)
Now it is up to you to program your site in a way that it can work with this. Isn't too hard. In fact is pretty easy. Mysql and PHP already come with tools for this. they can check for similarity between words.
You can argue if dropdowns or text input are better but saying that you are to lazy as a programmer just proves his point.
Re:But you prove his point (Score:2)
I don't know how you read my post, but my point is that I'm not going to write error prone code that does _guess work_ instead of using a widget that is designed to do just what I need: restrict the answers to a certain domain.
Why do drop downs exist if I'm not supposed to use them in this the only application they have? If they are difficult to use because they jump stupidly, then the widgets have an issue. But from a UI perspective, a drop down is *exactly* what is n
Re:I like this guy 50% of the time... (Score:4, Interesting)
Consider a region imagemap followed by a detail imagemap? Textbox for 2-digit codes (hint: they're standard) with a list of common ones? List of 5 countries with "Other" which displays the full list below?
Look at ISO 3166. Measure how long it takes someone to type "US" compared to how long it takes them to locate "US" at the bottom of a 239-item checkbox (only to find that you put it at the top)
Dropdowns may seem legit until you waste 5 minutes wondering whether you need to look in U for UK or B for britain or E for england or G for great britain or whether they've put US and UK at the top (or bottom) completely out out of alphabetical order. Why, thankyou for the tour of the world within your 1x1-inch scrollbox, but either get something usable, or detect the country my IP is in and suggest something, it's not that difficult. Can a student of information theory tell us why it should be easier to specify Afghanistan than the USA in your application. When did you last get a visitor from there?
Why should we listen to Jakob Nielsen? (Score:5, Insightful)
WHY??
His site violates tons of usability ideas, and while I support his in general KISS (Keep It Simple Stupid) ideas which have been in practice in Industrial Design for decades, he is very much a Luddite.
Grow up Jakob, you make a lot of money ranting against everything, but for the love of god, give it a rest and let the market decide what works and what doesn't.
Re:Why should we listen to Jakob Nielsen? (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Why should we listen to Jakob Nielsen? (Score:2)
But it seems fine to me. Sure, it isn't pretty, but he explains why there aren't any graphics (size, and he isn't a designer). And I can find information on the site. Don't really see a problem here.
What exactly do you find painful?
Actually... (Score:2)
* It loads quickly. There are no annoying animated, graphical buttons, intrusive pop-up/pop-under/pop-in ads, or flash animations on the page.
* It does not break at different window sizes right down to 640 * 480. Sure, nobody uses a PC at 640 * 480 anymore, but I hate having to maximize my browser and cover up other stuff on my desktop so that a page w
No; I agree (Score:2)
Look down a bit more, and what do we see.
Re:Why should we listen to Jakob Nielsen? (Score:2)
Such as?
Please list ten of the usability ideas that his site violates. If you're not trolling, you shouldn't have any problem listing ten items out of 'a ton'.
Re:K.I.S.S. (Score:3, Informative)
The version you present is the "PC" version, as back when it was invented, the word 'stupid' wasn't really something you taught.
Re:Why should we listen to Jakob Nielsen? (Score:2, Interesting)
Slashdot's (lack of) search capabilities (Score:5, Insightful)
Now, when I need to search Slashdot now I just go to Google and do "site:slashdot.org (query)" and pray that something relevant comes up.
Come on Slashdot, upgrade that search function already!
Re:Slashdot's (lack of) search capabilities (Score:2, Interesting)
Come on (Score:2)
Poor Search (Score:2, Funny)
I'm doing my part to help rectify this problem by steadfastly refusing to use or post messages on websites that have crappy search functions...
Personal pet gripe... (Score:3, Interesting)
In a word, clutter.
I'm guessing that the people who design pages that look this way are the same people that, while still in school, simply COULD NOT take notes or work problems without attempting to crab EVERYTHING on to a single sheet of paper.
It's a weird tendency and I've yet to hear a sensible explanation from anybody who does this. THEY are fully aware that it's worse than useless to crab too much stuff into a limited amount of room (especially in light of the fact that additional room comes pretty cheap), and yet somehow they're simply COMPELLED to do so.
Good topic for a Psych Major to do a thesis on, but that's about it.
Knock off the clutter!
Re:Personal pet gripe... (Score:5, Insightful)
Seriously, turn on your Chinese Fonts and take a mozy over to check some of these out:
-- http://tw.yahoo.come x.cfm
(Just to see what a typical newspaper looks like...)
-- http://pchome.com.tw
-- http://www.appledaily.com.tw/template/twapple/ind
This is TYPICAL of the type of design happening in Chinese-speaking contries -- FILL IN EVERY SPACE AVAILABLE WITH TEXT OR IMAGE TO THE POINT THAT NOTHING SEEMS TO HAVE ANY PRIORITY. Blink tags often save the day, believe it or not... A typical TV news channel is a CNN-scrolling-banner-induced NIGHTMARE... To say this happens in ALL Asian countries is a generalization and incorrect, but there is a definite preference and inclination toward simplicity and minimalism in Japan (and Korea to some extent...)
That isn't to say that sophisticated design is not happening in these places -- far from it. It's just that the cultural expectations placed upon design, especially one that is information-based (any media) is different in different cultures.
To me, clutter is confusing and makes the user experience difficult, at best. To others, it is expected and doesn't slow anything down.
So really, who's to say what's usable?
I've once attended a weekend seminar with Mr. Neilsen and other web-usability gurus (Tog comes to mind) and was impressed with what they had to say regarding testing and testing and testing again, so ultimately you could have a cluttered, to-my-own-eyes unorganized mess that could test positive for usability in the right market.
Go figure..
Redesign... useit.com! (Score:5, Informative)
With all due respect to Mr. Nielsen, he could have started by redesigning his own site, useit.com. It may be "usable", but it is... less than beautiful, to say so. He could take clue from this guys:
Design Eye for the Usability Guy [designbyfire.com] and
Reuseit: useit.com redesign competition [builtforthefuture.com]
Re:Redesign... useit.com! (Score:2)
Re:Redesign... useit.com! (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Redesign... useit.com! (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Redesign... useit.com! (Score:2)
They loaded fast for me, but I gotta agree with you.
There might have been something worthwhile on one of them, but too much junk on them to wade through to make it worth the effort.
Re:Redesign... useit.com! (Score:2)
Well, I suppose we can't blame them for a slashdotting, really. But even taking that into account, the page and graphics on it are still 575k in total... or over a minute of downloading for a 56k modem user.
Not very usable.
Re:Redesign... useit.com! (Score:2, Insightful)
It's funny you say that because designbyfire.com looks horrible to me. It doesn't fit my current window size and the actual content scrolls to more than 120 pages...
Unless of course that's the kind of thing you like
Re:Redesign... useit.com! (Score:2, Insightful)
Good God, the first thing one notices when going to those sites is ... fixed width design. Half my browser window suddenly has no content. Tiny fonts. One had a nice logo, but that's about it.
It's tragic that designers just can't seem to help themselves. The greatest pain in my oc
Re:Redesign... useit.com! (Score:2)
Ever google for an online store and reject the first couple of results because you didn't like the wa
Re:Redesign... useit.com! (Score:2, Insightful)
Listen, a document that focuses too much on form and thus takes away from its function is just as poorly designed as a document that focuses too much on function and ignores form.
That's utter rubbish. If something is pretty but doesn't work, then it doesn't work. If something is ugly but works, it works.
It's a balancing act.
Yes it is, and Jakob Neilsen says this quite a bit. He talks about when things actively work against the user, and backs it up with user studies and numbers showing reductio
is god (Score:2, Interesting)
link to Tattered Cover instead, please (Score:4, Informative)
court.
(I'm not in any way associated with the cover, and this is not a referrer link)
A remarkable 73 patents? (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:A remarkable 73 patents? (Score:3, Informative)
Incidentally, that search function is pretty icky, and could use a little of Dr. Nielsen's help. Ugh.
favorite usability resource (Score:5, Informative)
Re:favorite usability resource (Score:4, Informative)
Nobody is right all the time, not Mr Neilsen, not the W3C, not anybody. For instance, one of the "perfect" suggestions from the W3C that you refer us to:
Firstly, you cannot force anything with CSS. CSS provides suggestions, nothing more. But more importantly, no browser has ever implemented font-size-adjust! The W3C have even taken it out of CSS 2.1 because no browser vendor bothered with it. That statement will never be correct.
Fras (Score:2)
Re:Fras (Score:5, Interesting)
1) You can't bookmark an individual page. In that scenario, you can only bookmark the page that holds the frameset.
2) Similarly, you can't link to an individual page. If you do, they'll get that _just_ that page, no table of contents.
3) If you hit the refresh button, it refreshes the frameset page, which puts you back at the "default" page, not the one you were looking at.
4) Doesn't work with the "History" that browsers keep.
Re:Fras (Score:2)
Re:Fras (Score:2)
I'd guess that 90% of the time when you see frames on a page, the designer just wants to put up a sidebar that stays in the same spot on screen while the page scrolls. I'm surprised explorer is up to version 6 and it's still so complictated to put up a fixed sidebar.
Re:Fras (Score:2)
Frames Weren't Practical (Score:5, Insightful)
After years of many site authors putting links up on their pages labeled "Stuck in a frame? Break out of it" (which was just a target="_top" self link) and after many authorites just like Dr. Nielsen warning to not use frames [useit.com], the popular web pages finally stopped using them and moved on to other annoying practices like triple-columned portal sites and static table-based layouts. Once the popular web pages left frames beaten and crying in the corner, most of the amateur designers followed suit and also abused the table-based layouts.
Now, it seems like we've been waiting an eternity for CSS to enjoy the huge popularity that table-based design has been basking in for way too long. Many sites have gone a long way to further that cause. Namely:
No, it is not more efficient (Score:2)
The point regarding image size also doesn't go away with a frameset, especially if the images are advertisements. I would also, as a site owner, NOT want to have ads persistent, as the chances of a person finding an ad they like might be higher the more different ones they see.
PDFs (Score:4, Insightful)
Well, the problem is that PDF documents are just not very suitable for online access because they are optimized for print, and they're big linear documents, and, therefore, they're not very good for search.
Thank you! I've been saying this for YEARS!
Web development should be about developing relevance and usability, not about putting every document you have on an HTTP server. PDF files are fine for e-mail, FTP, etc. where you pull them down and view them locally, but they just shouldn't be on the web. HTML was invented for a reason! Use it!
Re:PDFs (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:PDFs (Score:2)
You can hide stuff when it is printed out using print stylesheets. No need to resort to PDFs. Just use the media="print" attribute when linking to a stylesheet, and it will be applied when documents are printed out.
Re:PDFs (Score:5, Insightful)
I think PDFs are essential for datasheets and manuals. For a datasheet which has hundreds of pages of text and images, having a reasonable expectation that it will look consistent no matter the display medium is important. HTML doesn't even seem to have a consistent page break, footnote or header mechanism for each page. Also, for fill-in forms, you get WYSIWYG text entry, which is especially nice for government forms.
Searching in a PDF is easy enough, Google does it by default. Acrobat reader's Find utility finds it reasonably quickly enough.
Which isn't to say that web sites should rely on PDFs.
Re:PDFs (Score:2)
If PDF plugins were more seemless (like Flash - not that I'm any huge fan of Flash), then I wouldn't avoid them so much.
OT, I hate that magnifying glass that doesn't map zoom-in to left
Re: PDFs (Score:2)
HTML and PDF serve different purposes. One is designed (or at least, was originally designed) to describe the text, and leave the user's machine to decide how best to present it. In other words, the user has control over how they wish to view it -- what window size and shape, font size, colour, &c. You can view HTML across a massive 30" monitor, or on a PDA screen, and it should reformat as needed to be readable in each case.
PDF, on the other hand, is d
Microsoft.com (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Microsoft.com (Score:2)
not the point (Score:2, Funny)
liquid? (Score:4, Insightful)
I'm not sure I've ever heard it called liquid, but I'd like to agree with this particular pet peeve.
There's absolutely no excuse (ever) for forcing the user to view your web page at $arbitrary_page_width. Designers that think they need to force the width to a certian number -- for roundness, right hand menus, or whatever dumbass excuse -- are WRONG. Dead wrong. There is never a good reason to use a fixed width.
It shows complete ignorance of the subject they claim to master by calling themselves site designers.
Re:liquid? (Score:5, Insightful)
Never is a strong word... the biggest argument I have against this is that my eyes hate to read a line of text which spans across my monitor. This is just my preference, but I have a feeling many people share this pet peeve -- if I find a site which is too wide for my eyes, I have to resize my browser window, which is not something a user should have to do to view a site.
Most designs rely on fixed widths because the page can be controlled; otherwise the widths are unknown and all sorts of things start looking like crap -- images, for instance. Lets say you have a 400 pixel wide image, and your fluid page is *usually* big enough (on my monitor) so that whatever design element it sits in is large enough to contain it. Now let's say someone looks at it in 640x480 -- the image probably overflows the design.
When you just have text data, and it looks like crap (Nielsen's site [useit.com] being the prime example), then yes, fluid designs are preferable. But when you start trying to make a site look good, be more usable, be more accessible, and work well while providing useful content in a very eye-pleasing form, then you need some measure of control of the look, and fixed designs can provide some of that. Now of course there are fixed pages which are absoulutely horrible -- just like any design, using fixed width requires thought, and some designers don't have that capability, and I'm sorry if you come accross one; but fixed widths can be useful in making a web site look better, which in my opinion improves the user experience as much as any of Nielsen's tips.
Make a user stylesheet (Score:3, Interesting)
I also don't like reading overly-wide text. However, rather than expect every site author in the world to cater to my tastes, I just wrote a user stylesheet.
My user stylesheet allows me to click the document/user style toggle in Opera (I believe Mozilla/Firefox have similar functionality) and get the page under my terms, so long as the designer used sensible, semantic markup. In my case, I used max-width to stop the content getting too wide and set sensible font sizes, colors and so on.
I'm reading Slashdo
you have a point, here's why. (Score:5, Insightful)
Nielsen, much to his chagrin, is not the voice of god, and he is often flatly wrong if not disrespectful. while it would be nice, as i believe is his goal, to allow the reader to resize their browser to the column width they are comfortable with, the prospect of asking a reader to change their browser window's width for every other page they visit is simply laughable in its utter disregard for the viewer's time and patience.
perhaps if monitors were longer than they are wide, this wouldn't be as much of an issue, but then you run into usability on the desktop where a wider desktop is more conductive to productivity, lessens strain on the neck, and a host of other factors.
mr Nielsen sees things too often in black and white and appears to form many of his opinions in a vaccuum, imho.
Re:liquid? (Score:2)
Sometimes using fixed width columns is the only way to achieve correct layout. For instance, most browsers will happily word-break this line in the middle of the hyphenated compound adjective near the start of it, if you choose the correct display width. Doing so is, in fact, typographically incorrect (as it leaves no way of distinguish the fact that it is a compound adjective from a single word that has been broken over the line break). There is no sta
Re:liquid? (Score:2)
TeX uses wide margins for a reason, and, as usual, TeX is right. (One more reason why word processors suck - they give users 1 inch margins by default and the users don't change them, so A4/letter sheets have loooooong, tiring, hard to read lines. It's a ra
slashdot redisigned? (Score:5, Interesting)
This is the most interesting claim:
The article has even been discussed in slashcode [slashcode.com]. Gathered from the discussion, there appears to be at least one engine [gugod.org] (elixss) which uses CSS templates.Re:slashdot redisigned? (Score:2)
Re:slashdot redisigned? (Score:2, Informative)
I'll never forgive him! (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:I'll never forgive him! (Score:2)
Unfortunately, by that time all of the content providers realised that by splitting the article over multiple pages they could show several different ads to the user as they read the article rather than just the one or two which got randomly picked when the first page loaded.
For sites I read often, I generally have my proxy server rewrite the URL magically to the print-friendly version for the sake of my sanity.
Talking of which: the print-friendly version of the original article is terrible. They've made
What *I* like about Jakob Nielson (Score:2)
If *I* looked like that, I'm not sure I'd plaster my face all over the Internet!
Re:What *I* like about Jakob Nielson (Score:2)
More "friendly" I think. Reminds me of my aunt who not incidentally is friendly.
What is funny is that your post illustrates that given the pseudo-anonymous experience of the internet, we take someone's words at their face value (pun intended) without regard for the person's appearance (because we don't know it), whereas in Real Life human nature dictates that we judge the value of a person's words based on that person's appearance. The unfortunate downside is that comments m
overdesign (Score:5, Insightful)
Why are sites overdesigned? Why don't site designers trust the user more? (Overdesigned sites tend to crowd all of their content on to every page via hyperlinks, as if the user can't be trusted to figure out the "back" button.)
To a point, it is about ego: a designer wants to brand every single page in a unique fashion, and that usually means marking up the content and squeezing it down. But there are plenty of ways a designer can satisfy her own ego, and present the content well, with minimalistic designs. The wikipedia is an excellent example of how a lot of features can be made unobtrusive and helpful, letting the content shine through.
In the end, it is really more about company psychology. For the same reason that a bank wants to have a gigantic storefront to assure customers that their money is safe, a company wants its web pages to look expensive and permanent, and the quickest route ends up being a cluttered visual experience as the company shows off the various clever "features" it is rich enough to pay for. A "bare" page bereft of logos and menus and news from other pages seems like an admission of poverty.
But this ends up making the user experience frenetic and disjointed. Oftentimes you can get around this problem by going to the "printer friendly" page where the article or information is presented in a traditional and human-readable fashion.
Re:overdesign (Score:3, Insightful)
Remember when everyone/company/pet/etc. had to be online just because? While that craze went on, advertising boomed and still lingers today. Google
Pet Peeves (Score:5, Interesting)
1) Site inconsistency - having totally different designs between pages at the same site. This is often a navigation change, but could include color schemes, font choices, and text/graphic alignment.
2) Links off the page you are on - often missing are links to the main site page, as well as links to pages within the section of the site you are currently visiting.
3) Inconsistent content - one time a link is html, the next a text file, and the third a PDF. That is worse than every link being a PDF.
4) Lack of a link to send the site maintainer an email.
5) Lack of links to send anyone in the company an email. See this quite frequently.
6) Overall lack of anything but marketting buzz on a website, not a usability issue per se but makes the site worthless.
7) Inconsistent link behavoir - some links open a seperate browser, some don't.
8) Failure to warn about popups! Personal opinion here, but a site should warn you to expect a popup and what your expected action should be if it is at all going to be unclear.
9) Webforms for submitting a contact request that are just plain broken or don't point to a valid address.
Also I've got to put in my vote for getting rid of long long long pages, experience has shown, most users won't scroll or as he said, won't retain if they do scroll.
I'll second that motion on search being broken, heck, my company's internal and external websites are worthless in that respect.
I've ranted enough, be well.
Tojosan
PowerPoint? He's kidding, right? (Score:3, Interesting)
I prefer slides in HTML, for all of the reasons that he lists in his PDF rant. And if you need tighter control over format and appearance, then use PDF. At least it's portable.
And for God's sake, provide a link, not a button, to all downloadable materials. I don't look at PDF documents in my browser, I use a separate viewer. The same goes for video clips. No demands for plugins, please. Not having a plugin is not the same as not having a viewer.
Some material I want to see now. A browser works well for that, and can use, but should not require, Javascript and similar frills. If I can't navigate a site without Javascript, then I look elsewhere.
Other material I want to save as reference material. Don't make me view it now. I'll save those PDFs for future reference. If it isn't reference material, then it shouldn't be in PDF format.
The immediate use material shouldn't use plugins. Neither should the reference material. Plugins should only be required for material that you don't want anyone to see.
Powerpoint? (Score:3, Insightful)
Favorite Search Problem (Score:3, Funny)
Home Page Link (Score:2)
Oh, yeah that always pisses me off; when I can't go to the home page from the home page. Damn, that would definatly cost a company major bucks.
Take a look at -his- website (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Take a look at -his- website (Score:2)
Plain, yes.
Ugly, I just don't see it.
Look, aesthetics are subjective. I think we have just proved this
I believe his fundamental point is that web sites that
Drop-Down Boxes (Score:3, Informative)
I'm glad Nielsen brought up this problem, which has irritated me from time to time:
Obviously, he doesn't use Firefox. The ability to type multiple letters to skip through a list got added to some nightly and I was simply ecstatic, because it's much more usable from a keyboarder's standpoint.
Re:Drop-Down Boxes (Score:2)
Ad usability (Score:3, Insightful)
I always close those down.
Annoying me prior to letting me see the content isn't a good way to make me choose your product.
Word to internet advertisers, if your advertisement takes up the whole window
Select box peeve (Score:3, Insightful)
Of course, it is a common flaw in web browsers that they don't make this functionality obvious.
Re:Select box peeve (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Select box peeve (Score:2, Interesting)
Mozilla, as well as any Netscape releases built on it, have multiple-letter typing selection. I would guess that most Mozilla derivatives do as well.
They accomplish this by skipping to the next letter after you type a particular letter for the first one, and so on, but with a timeout of maybe a second or two.
Interesting views, but terrible at prediction (Score:3, Insightful)
I know that Slashdot readers don't want to hear this, but the very first question is whether it is even possible to create a truly good user experience on top of Linux. Many other companies have tried to make Unix easy to use and many very talented designers have worked hard on these projects for several years without very good results.
The only data points we have say that it can't be done.
Well, Mac OS X has basically proved him wrong.
Re:Interesting views, but terrible at prediction (Score:3, Insightful)
Especially in this case, when he's basically saying that it's impossible to make a good user experience on top of any operating system...
Re:Interesting views, but terrible at prediction (Score:2)
"The only data points we have say that it can't be done."
That is a little bit different than saying it won't be done or even is impossible, only that the current data implies that it is not possible.
Why (Score:2)
Ok back on topic, if any webdevs are reading this, if it ain't broke then for the love of the swe
Good ideas.... (Score:3, Insightful)
In my experience however, there is a crucial step that is missing. In most of the places where I have worked the "webmaster" is more the artsy type and is not interested in the technical side of the design at all. Where I'm working now, if I showed this article to our primary web designer, he would basically ignore it and continue doing things the same old way because he isn't interested in what he considers to be the technical aspects of web design (OT, once he even told me "I don't care about all that HTML stuff"). I'm sure this is different in large organizations where there are teams of people dedicated to the maintenance of the web site, but in smaller organizations where there are only one or two web designers it is important that the web designer understands *why* he must care about this information (and I'm not talking about nebulous mentions of "you'll save this much $"). Most of the designers I've worked with are not interested in perusing articles/books of what they consider to be "technical" information in an effort to improve the usability and effectivess of the web site they are maintaining.
That is why this seems like only half the story. IMO, it would be very useful to have a good preface on why it is so important to apply these techniques, and only then begin to explain exactly what these techniques are and how to implement them. This would make this kind of information useful to both the artsy, visual web designer and the more code oriented, professional webmaster.
Re:IS there anything else than "common sense" (Score:4, Insightful)
I own it too, and I agree. However, I still think that it's a worthwhile read.
The trouble is, when people learn how to design websites, they inevitably copy everyone else. Including everyone else's mistakes. Not only that, but they make a few of their own.
The ones that go on to be professionals inevitably get caught up in doing the actual work and don't think about how to improve their practices enough. So the mistakes get ingrained and replicated across hundreds of designs.
Nielsen's book is good because he has a knack for showing people their designs from a user's perspective. It challenges those ingrained bad habits and gives you ideas on how to approach the field from a better angle.
If you read the book expecting some revolutionary new techniques for web design, then you will be disappointed. But if you read the book expecting a refreshing new perspective and a starting point for improving your work, then it's a damn good read.
Re:IS there anything else than "common sense" (Score:3, Insightful)
Just wanted to say that I absolutely agree with you on this one. A good desiner's eye would make any site more usable. Fonts, colors, font spacing, paragraph spacing, paragraph width, etc etc all affect how usable the page is -- a nice looking page just makes the whole experience more pleasing. Heck, it's why people put art in their homes. It's why we have "interior decorators" and "landscape artists" -- yes, our home would be more functional if inst
Re:Another 10 worst list? (Score:2)
And that's the core problem. See, your client is only the person who puts the web page up. He's not the end user.
By all means, do exactly what he wants and get paid for it. But don't justify the lousy interface you just created because it is "good art." You did it for the money.
Wrong (Score:3, Insightful)
From my experience the ones thinking like that are graphics artists (a noble profession otherwise) which some PHB promoted directly to web designers. Not saying they couldn't learn to be proper web designers, I'm just saying: it's a different job. You have to _learn_ to do it.
So they think they're making art. They produce pages with:
- a megabyte of funky graphics. Bonus points if it's Flash. Or flashing.
- t
Re:LOL, and the interview had a popup!! (Score:2)