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."

Future usability?

[Anonymous Coward]

Has anyone determined what effect things like SVG will have on web site design?

Personal pet gripe...

[DoraLives]

Too much stuff on each page.

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!

is god

[Nspace13]

i am a web developer and nielsen is a god around my office. his book, Designing Web Usability [amazon.com] (amazon link with no developer token), is something i refer to so often to convince my boss of things.

A remarkable 73 patents?

[paynter]

Anyone know what sort of things Dr Neilson has patented?

Re:PDFs

[FyreFiend]

For the most part I agree with you. There are times when a "download this as a pdf" option would be nice though. The one example I ran into the other day was a netbook for the Rifts RPG. This guy had some great ideas spanning a bunch of pages. Saving each one to html, then removing the clutter (headers for the rest of his site, etc) was a pain.

Re:Fras

[Violet Null]

Basically, because it breaks how people navigate pages.

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:Thankfully

[c0ldfusi0n]

Pretty? Please, his site is ugly. I'm a webdesigner and i can tell you that if i'd deliver such a product to pretty much any customer, they'd slap me back to my office. I think all those pro-WAI [contentquality.com] critics need a reality check. True, a website such as his will probably never have any compatiblity issues with any current, past or future browsers. But it's just plain ugly. They need to realize that you can make a pretty websites (even with a thing they call images!) AND still be compatible for all computer browsers and platforms, you don't need to lower the eye pleasure to raise respect. How often have you heard "Oh, that site is pretty damn nice" compared to "Oh, that site is sooo compatible with Lynx!"?

slashdot redisigned?

[Divlje Jagode]

Website a list apart [alistapart.com] did the exercise of redesigning slashdot using CSS. The article was called Retooling Slashdot with Web Standards [alistapart.com]. A more detailed version is available here: Slashdot Web Standards Example [uwplatt.edu].

This is the most interesting claim:

Most Slashdot visitors would have the CSS file cached, so we could ballpark the daily savings at ~10 GB bandwidth. A high volume of bandwidth from an ISP could be anywhere from $1 - $5 cost per GB of transfer, but let's calculate it at $1 per GB for an entire year. For this example, the total savings for Slashdot would be: $3650! All of that for just a couple of KB.

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's (lack of) search capabilities

[DNS-and-BIND]

What, and work on boring old slashdot? You gotta be kidding...slashdot is crummy and old, and cmdrtaco likes it that way. Remember the attitude, this is his site, and if you don't like it start your own.

I'll never forgive him!

[autopr0n]

for comming up with the "split long documents into seperate pages, because users don't understand how the scrollbar works, and would much rather wait a minute or two while their slow-ass modem loads up the next page" advice. Which ungodly numbers of people followed.

Pet Peeves

[Tojosan]

He mentioned a couple of my favorite pet peeves including PDFs. But I've got a few others:
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?

[Anonymous Coward]

I never look at PowerPoint slides on web sites. It suffers from all of the limitations that he points out regarding PDF, and is less portable.

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.

Take a look at -his- website

[Max_Abernethy]

Very usable, perhaps, but it's ugly. It's easy to -talk- about how aesthetics are unimportant, but some of us have clients to please. Certainly I don't think websites should be made in Flash or giant image tables are a good idea, but realistically we need to strike a balance between what looks good and what works well. If it were up to him, design would be all function and no form.

Re:liquid?

[Anonymous Coward]

Screw that.

You go ahead and develop your perfectly resizable any width website. For your mostly text blog-wanking, or fringe discussion group, I am sure thats more than sufficient.

Much of the content I work with is graphics, company image, and look. It has a design, and a composition. We choose how to present the media, and the information to best reflect our purposes.

The web should be searchable and bookmarkable, and my site is. The web should also be presentable, and my site is also that.

I agree with all the complaining about flash, and pdf, but I won't put up with this crap.

Purists like you are always complaining that the information should be perfectly separated from the delivery, but proper presentation is half of what makes the information useful.

My website displays at two fixed sizes, and I make no apology for it. If you don't like the way my information is presented, don't visit my site.

Perfectly resizable pages IS not a mantra of proper webdesign, its just a nice addition if it fits your particular design. Grow up.

Re:Why should we listen to Jakob Nielsen?

[occamboy]

I know I'll get modded to Hades for this, but I can't help but asking: Am I the only person who finds Mr. Nielson's site [useit.com] to be painful to use?

Make a user stylesheet

[Nurgled]

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 Slashdot that way right now, in conjunction with the more "light" template available in the user options. I find more and more sites I use work with it these days, so it's a lot more worthwhile to do this now than it was a few years ago.

Re:Why should we listen to Jakob Nielsen?

[afd8856]

what about, for example, leaving some "white" space, as all designers and usability experts know that it improves reading... What about clearly dividing, inside the two main areas, the little areas, like: Reports, Books, etc... as every usability expert knows that dividing content into areas, well spaced-out, makes them easier to spot. Right now, you really have to concentrate on the page to find those. What about listening to his own advice and clearly state what the website is about, also leaving the marketing bullshit out, cause right now is: "useit.com: usable information technology", which can mean a lot and anything. What about providing with a zoom-out and zoom-in (alternate style sheets), cause on my 21", 1024x768, that text is big... Clearly, he is not a usability expert that practices what he preaches

Re:Select box peeve

[reverius]

It only does that (a really annoying behavior, imho) in Internet Explorer, as far as I know.

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.

Re:I like this guy 50% of the time...

[gnu-generation-one]

"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."

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?