Jakob Nielsen Interview on Web Site Redesigns

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

[Anonymous Coward]

His website, http://www.useit.com/ [useit.com], hasn't been redesigned and is still as useable and pretty as ever.

Redesign... useit.com!

[mikis]

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:K.I.S.S.

[veddermatic]

Well then all my ID professors, some of whom knew the theater guy who invented it were lying to me.

The version you present is the "PC" version, as back when it was invented, the word 'stupid' wasn't really something you taught.

favorite usability resource

[Nspace13]

the w3c tip index [w3.org] is my favorite usability resource. the word of mr nielsen is second. not quite everything nielsen says is right in every situation but everything the w3c suggests is a suggest worth the weight of my toshiba laptop (a hefty 7 pounds) in gold.

Microsoft.com

[aslate]

Although i use Windows, i have to say that Microsoft.com is the worst [professional] website to navigate i have ever tried to use. The site structure sucks, the search sucks and the layout sucks. It is almost impossible to find what you want and there are loads of pages that link back to each other, getting you going round and round in circles. I can never find information i may need or certain applications or tools i want, it's just a mess.

link to Tattered Cover instead, please

[ClarkEvans]

You can also buy this at the Tattered Cover [tatteredcover.com] -- the bookstore which did not turn over purchase records to the government when asked; and defended the right to privacy in
court.

(I'm not in any way associated with the cover, and this is not a referrer link)

Re:link to Tattered Cover instead, please

[Anonymous Coward]

http://www.google.com/search?q=tattered+cover+priv acy+court [google.com]

Re:favorite usability resource

[JimDabell]

not quite everything nielsen says is right in every situation but everything the w3c suggests is a suggest worth the weight of my toshiba laptop (a hefty 7 pounds) in gold.

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:

If using several choices in a font-family property (in order to let the system choose the best available font out of a list), you can use the font-size-adjust property to force a specific aspect value.

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.

Re:A remarkable 73 patents?

[Mad Alchemist]

Mostly what you'd expect. Lots of things like "Techniques for navigating layers of a user interface" and "Prospective view for web backtrack." A complete list [uspto.gov] can be found by searching the US Patent Office [uspto.gov].

Incidentally, that search function is pretty icky, and could use a little of Dr. Nielsen's help. Ugh.

Drop-Down Boxes

[Baricom]

I'm glad Nielsen brought up this problem, which has irritated me from time to time:

people who want to enter "California" will end up with "Alabama" because the menu kind of first goes to C, but then it goes back to A.

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:Select box peeve

[brank]

He addresses this, and says it doesn't work because typing a second letter selects something you don't want: ...people who want to enter "California" will end up with "Alabama" because the menu kind of first goes to C, but then it goes back to A.

Re:slashdot redisigned?

[Divlje Jagode]

Here: copy of the page [alistapart.com] and final example [alistapart.com]. The extended version [uwplatt.edu] has it too (towards the bottom of the page). The author thought it might be more convenient to zip the whole thing up, but it's available as links too.

Re:Thankfully

[critter_hunter]

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 images - that's not something you can rely on.

Many of the entries also make useability mistakes Nielsen warns against - sometimes things that appear in one of the many "top ten mistakes" lists. Granted, I think useit.com is far from perfect itself, and Nielsen doesn't *always* follow his own advice, but for the most part he does, and usually much better than any of the entries did. I had actually compounded a long review of the 10 best entries, pointing in each one every accessibility or useability mistake I came across, but I can't seem to find that right now :(.