8 ms·

This article put Nielsen in the corner of "technically correct", but the influence he had on me at least was a strong focus on "empirically correct". i.e. doing

This article put Nielsen in the corner of "technically correct", but the influence he had on me at least was a strong focus on "empirically correct". i.e. doing actual tests (with humans) on what kind of things work to convey information. He did this to the detriment of "looking good", which is why his stuff ended up looking "hopelessly outdated", but I think he was on the right side of the fight.

paxcoder 1y ago
[dead]
dcminter 1y ago
He did a book ("Designing Web Usability" I think) with an unconventional layout and it clearly hadn't been user-tested as it had a flaw (text too close to the binding) that made it ironically hard to use. I think he was on point with a lot of stuff, but I've been a bit jaded ever since!
- jmisavage 1y ago
  I thought the same thing of his website when he first hit the scene. Great info, but the design was so bad it made it difficult to read. It was quick though, and today’s reader view would have fixed that issue. Being usable doesn’t mean zero design; everything needs to work together.
  - karohalik 1y ago
    It’s kind of ironic that Nielsen’s site and even his book layouts were often frustrating to use. But maybe that proves his own points.
    - deleted 1y ago
      [deleted]
ChrisMarshallNY 1y ago
I took a number of courses from the NNG Group, over the years, including from Nielsen and Tog (I don’t think Don Norman ever gave classes). It taught me great respect for usability. Designers hated Nielsen.
- kristianc 1y ago
  Yes, to be fair, Nielsen essentially has had the last laugh. Simple navigation, consistency, fast loading times, and ruthless minimalism, and the full Flash intro page is a relic.
  - thesuitonym 1y ago
    The full flash intro page is only a relic because Apple dropped support for Flash. Now, so many designers have a full page video that play, and prevent text from loading until every bit of bloated JavaScript finishing downloading and executing. It's a different package, but it's the same junk.
    - ChrisMarshallNY 1y ago
      I despise the full-background, 4K video pages. Makes connecting from bad cells a royal pain. But some of the dependency libraries can be almost as bad. I don't like 1MB pages, so a button can be animated.
    - bandoti 1y ago
      My biggest pet peeve these days is a Nav Bar that takes up too much vertical space and follows when I scroll. Usually these are mobile-first designs, but especially on phone when I rotate to view more horizontal content using iPhone 13 I’ve got like two text lines visible!
  - krupan 1y ago
    "Simple navigation, consistency, fast loading times, and ruthless minimalism" Modern websites have none of those. It's all pop ups asking you to subscribe and/or give feedback before you have even had a chance to read anything, content that jumps around as images (ads) load, and huge blobs of JavaScript. I feel like the web has regressed massively in the last few years
matsemann 1y ago
Same. A pretty button is useless if it's not where you expect to find it. You can always make it "less dated" later by changing colors and stuff, but the usability is the most important part. The Flash 2 screenshot in the article looks dated. But the experience of using it wouldn't change a bit even if it got less 90-sy buttons and looked "modern".
ale 1y ago
Nielsen was mostly concerned with labeling himself a “guru” to boost his consultancy firm. The idea of user-driven design goes all the way back to the late 60s with the rise of Participatory Design.
kome 1y ago
Fully agree. And we all know beautiful but totally broken UIs and UX, and "ugly" but extremely functional UIs and UXs, that actually make them beautiful
- scoot 1y ago
  And UIs that are neither beautiful nor function (looking at you Salesforce, Oracle, SAP, and many other "Enterprise" applications). If any of these were functional, most users wouldn't care about the visual appeal. NN were correct, but apparently their message didn't reach that particular sphere of web application developers.
  - Avicebron 1y ago
    If an 'Enterprise' applications website were functional people would be able to navigate to assistance when using the app. Therefore costing money in competent support techs or improving the product itself, neither of which are as easy as just being anti-competitive and monopolistic
    - scoot 1y ago
      I was referring to the web applications themselves, rather than the marketing, documentation, or support websites. In large vendors, those tend to come from a different part of the organisation, so are often superior to the products themselves. The productivity drain of a poor UI is largely felt by the customers' employees, while the vendor benefits from sales of professional services and premium support contracts.
JimDabell 1y ago
Back then, it felt like he was one of the rare few people who was actually focused on serving the needs of the user. Those were the days when too many sites thought it was a good idea to show a Flash splash screen before entering a site, and designers seemed to have a grudge against text that was big enough for a normal person to read.
- jszymborski 1y ago
  Teenage me thought there was NOTHING cooler than a flashy splash page and those micro bitmap fonts a la "silkscreen". Who am I kidding I still think it's awesome.
  - ftio 1y ago
    8pt Tahoma is the GOAT and I miss it desperately. I remember vividly when Windows (XP I think?) introduced a new kind of font smoothing that messed with the look of those fonts. In hindsight, I feel like that moment was part of the catalyst toward Web 2.0-style designs. Screens started to get bigger, sites became higher resolution as bandwidth increased, and the tiny pixel font started to be both less relevant (you could fit more, larger text onscreen) and less beautiful (it rendered differently with font smoothing). IIRC this shift also coincided with the shift toward Wordpress, including a more homogeneous set of pre-packaged "themes", and away from custom CMSes (or no CMS at all), the OG blogging "scripts" like Greymatter and b2.
    - anthk 1y ago
      Search for Artwiz under Unix. Same feelings.
    - pavlov 1y ago
      8pt Tahoma, lowercase, and using colons for decoration, like this: :: news :: contact :: last updated 2000-07-31 ::
      - 508LoopDetected 1y ago
Mistletoe 1y ago
When I imagine what he would think of the current internet it’s really mind-boggling.
throw0101b 1y ago
> i.e. doing actual tests (with humans) on what kind of things work to convey information. E.g., "Why You Only Need to Test with 5 Users": * https://www.nngroup.com/articles/why-you-only-need-to-test-with-5-users/ https://www.nngroup.com/articles/why-you-only-need-to-test-w...
peblos 1y ago
I realise I’m judging the book (and possibly the authors) by the cover but Nielsen’s book cover is objectively more readable. It’s also probably the only one that would still look new, or current, if it was released today
- karohalik 1y ago
  It seems like one is stuck in the past for good (well, the author and the book I suppose).
shidoshi 1y ago
Yeah, strong agree here. Nielsen brought a certain weight of rigor to the debate back in those days which made sense to the way I wanted to think about web design as an engineer. I don't really think there's a "winner" or "most right" person amongst the trio, but Nielsen's ethos appealed to me more than the others mentioned.
dasil003 1y ago
I always had more respect for Nielsen’s lineage of human-computer interaction than I did for Nielsen himself. At the time I remember thinking how neither designers nor classic HCI people (or programmers) really got the web. Nielsen was at least focused on the web, but the problem is that he was fixated on user expectations for a brand new medium without recognizing that it was early days and would inevitably evolve. He would say stuff like “hyperlinks should always be blue and underlined” because that’s what users expect, without realizing that at that point in time we were still so early in the adoption of the web that it made no sense to apply such rigid rules.
- DonHopkins 1y ago
  Ben Shneiderman's the "hyperlinks should always be blue" guy. ;) https://blog.mozilla.org/en/internet-culture/why-are-hyperlinks-blue-revisited/ https://blog.mozilla.org/en/internet-culture/why-are-hyperli... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29897811 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29897811 Seriously, while he was the first to use blue for links in HyperTIES, there was a historical context (like the IBM PC's color palette), and he never meant it in a "640k ought to be enough for anybody" way. His reasons for recommending blue are based on empirical studies, measuring visibility, comprehension, retention, etc. Blue is good not just because users recognize it (they didn't in 1983), but for how it stands out, because of how the human visual system works. He was originally a fan of cyan aka "light blue". Ben Shneiderman wrote: >"Red highlighting made the links more visible, but reduced the user’s capacity to read and retain the content of the text… blue was visible, on both white and black backgrounds and didn’t interfere with retention," >"We conducted approximately 20 empirical studies of many design variables which were reported at the Hypertext 1987 conference and in array of journals and books. Issues such as the use of light blue highlighting as the default color for links, the inclusion of a history stack, easy access to a BACK button, article length, and global string search were all studied empirically.” >"My students conducted more than a dozen experiments (unpublished) on different ways of highlighting and selection using current screens, e.g. green screens only permitted, bold, underscore, blinking, and I think italic(???). When we had a color screen we tried different color highlighted links. While red made the links easier to spot, user comprehension and recollection of the content declined. We chose the light blue, which Tim adopted." HyperTIES Discussions from Hacker News: https://donhopkins.medium.com/hyperties-discussions-from-hacker-news-937d156f0330 https://donhopkins.medium.com/hyperties-discussions-from-hac...
mvkel 1y ago
It depends on how you define the "fight." In the Nielsen days, two things were happening: 1. People were creating quirky, whimsical, odd corners of the internet for nobody but themselves. Art. 2. Entrepreneurs were starting to build sophisticated web applications for other people, i.e. customers. Nielsen's dogma was excellent for the latter, and disastrous for the former. History has been kind to Nielsen in the way that the modern web has lost most/all of its charm for the sake of answering the question "but how does it make money?"
calmbonsai 1y ago
I didn't believe that Discount Usability Engineering was useful until we tried it. I was absolutely blown away by the results and have continued the practice for every design and re-design. Thank you Mr. Nielsen. The old UseIt.com https://web.archive.org/web/19990125092506/http://useit.com/ https://web.archive.org/web/19990125092506/http://useit.com/ will forever live rent-free in my brain.
dfxm12 1y ago
On the web, the user is rarely a monolith. For a lot of websites (as compared to, say, business software or automobiles), the user could be everyone and anyone. They may all have different mental models, expectations, abilities, etc. This is important to keep in mind when focusing on user centered design for a general purpose website. You need a testing pool representative of your users (or who you want your user to be), you need to figure out what to do if there are conflicts among users, during testing, etc. It might be obvious, and you can probably still fit in into a framework, but what I'm getting at is that it is less empirical than it might seem at first pass. There is still an art to user centered design, and if you have this in mind, your designs don't have to look hopelessly outdated.
- munificent 1y ago
  > On the web, the user is rarely a monolith. Usability folks have understood this for decades. Alan Cooper was writing about defining multiple separate personas [1] to represent different cohorts of your userbase in the 90s. > what I'm getting at is that it is less empirical than it might seem at first pass. I would argue that it is still exactly as empirical. You just have to be careful how you aggregate your data and don't try to reduce things to too few clusters. Otherwise you end up making the classic mistake of offering a single T-shirt size at your conference that mostly only fits men because they are the majority of attendees. > There is still an art to user centered design, Agreed. No amount of analysis will do your synthesis for you. You still have to make. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Persona_(user_experience) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Persona_(user_experience)

paxcoder 1y ago

[dead]

dcminter 1y ago

He did a book ("Designing Web Usability" I think) with an unconventional layout and it clearly hadn't been user-tested as it had a flaw (text too close to the binding) that made it ironically hard to use. I think he was on point with a lot of stuff, but I've been a bit jaded ever since!

jmisavage 1y ago
I thought the same thing of his website when he first hit the scene. Great info, but the design was so bad it made it difficult to read. It was quick though, and today’s reader view would have fixed that issue. Being usable doesn’t mean zero design; everything needs to work together.
- karohalik 1y ago
  It’s kind of ironic that Nielsen’s site and even his book layouts were often frustrating to use. But maybe that proves his own points.
  - deleted 1y ago
    [deleted]

ChrisMarshallNY 1y ago

I took a number of courses from the NNG Group, over the years, including from Nielsen and Tog (I don’t think Don Norman ever gave classes). It taught me great respect for usability. Designers hated Nielsen.

kristianc 1y ago
Yes, to be fair, Nielsen essentially has had the last laugh. Simple navigation, consistency, fast loading times, and ruthless minimalism, and the full Flash intro page is a relic.
- thesuitonym 1y ago
  The full flash intro page is only a relic because Apple dropped support for Flash. Now, so many designers have a full page video that play, and prevent text from loading until every bit of bloated JavaScript finishing downloading and executing. It's a different package, but it's the same junk.
  - ChrisMarshallNY 1y ago
    I despise the full-background, 4K video pages. Makes connecting from bad cells a royal pain. But some of the dependency libraries can be almost as bad. I don't like 1MB pages, so a button can be animated.
  - bandoti 1y ago
    My biggest pet peeve these days is a Nav Bar that takes up too much vertical space and follows when I scroll. Usually these are mobile-first designs, but especially on phone when I rotate to view more horizontal content using iPhone 13 I’ve got like two text lines visible!
- krupan 1y ago
  "Simple navigation, consistency, fast loading times, and ruthless minimalism" Modern websites have none of those. It's all pop ups asking you to subscribe and/or give feedback before you have even had a chance to read anything, content that jumps around as images (ads) load, and huge blobs of JavaScript. I feel like the web has regressed massively in the last few years

matsemann 1y ago

Same. A pretty button is useless if it's not where you expect to find it. You can always make it "less dated" later by changing colors and stuff, but the usability is the most important part. The Flash 2 screenshot in the article looks dated. But the experience of using it wouldn't change a bit even if it got less 90-sy buttons and looked "modern".

ale 1y ago

Nielsen was mostly concerned with labeling himself a “guru” to boost his consultancy firm. The idea of user-driven design goes all the way back to the late 60s with the rise of Participatory Design.

kome 1y ago

Fully agree. And we all know beautiful but totally broken UIs and UX, and "ugly" but extremely functional UIs and UXs, that actually make them beautiful

scoot 1y ago
And UIs that are neither beautiful nor function (looking at you Salesforce, Oracle, SAP, and many other "Enterprise" applications). If any of these were functional, most users wouldn't care about the visual appeal. NN were correct, but apparently their message didn't reach that particular sphere of web application developers.
- Avicebron 1y ago
  If an 'Enterprise' applications website were functional people would be able to navigate to assistance when using the app. Therefore costing money in competent support techs or improving the product itself, neither of which are as easy as just being anti-competitive and monopolistic
  - scoot 1y ago
    I was referring to the web applications themselves, rather than the marketing, documentation, or support websites. In large vendors, those tend to come from a different part of the organisation, so are often superior to the products themselves. The productivity drain of a poor UI is largely felt by the customers' employees, while the vendor benefits from sales of professional services and premium support contracts.

JimDabell 1y ago

Back then, it felt like he was one of the rare few people who was actually focused on serving the needs of the user. Those were the days when too many sites thought it was a good idea to show a Flash splash screen before entering a site, and designers seemed to have a grudge against text that was big enough for a normal person to read.

jszymborski 1y ago
Teenage me thought there was NOTHING cooler than a flashy splash page and those micro bitmap fonts a la "silkscreen". Who am I kidding I still think it's awesome.
- ftio 1y ago
  8pt Tahoma is the GOAT and I miss it desperately. I remember vividly when Windows (XP I think?) introduced a new kind of font smoothing that messed with the look of those fonts. In hindsight, I feel like that moment was part of the catalyst toward Web 2.0-style designs. Screens started to get bigger, sites became higher resolution as bandwidth increased, and the tiny pixel font started to be both less relevant (you could fit more, larger text onscreen) and less beautiful (it rendered differently with font smoothing). IIRC this shift also coincided with the shift toward Wordpress, including a more homogeneous set of pre-packaged "themes", and away from custom CMSes (or no CMS at all), the OG blogging "scripts" like Greymatter and b2.
  - anthk 1y ago
    Search for Artwiz under Unix. Same feelings.
  - pavlov 1y ago
    8pt Tahoma, lowercase, and using colons for decoration, like this: :: news :: contact :: last updated 2000-07-31 ::
    - 508LoopDetected 1y ago

Mistletoe 1y ago

When I imagine what he would think of the current internet it’s really mind-boggling.

throw0101b 1y ago

> i.e. doing actual tests (with humans) on what kind of things work to convey information. E.g., "Why You Only Need to Test with 5 Users": * https://www.nngroup.com/articles/why-you-only-need-to-test-with-5-users/ https://www.nngroup.com/articles/why-you-only-need-to-test-w...

peblos 1y ago

I realise I’m judging the book (and possibly the authors) by the cover but Nielsen’s book cover is objectively more readable. It’s also probably the only one that would still look new, or current, if it was released today

karohalik 1y ago
It seems like one is stuck in the past for good (well, the author and the book I suppose).

shidoshi 1y ago

Yeah, strong agree here. Nielsen brought a certain weight of rigor to the debate back in those days which made sense to the way I wanted to think about web design as an engineer. I don't really think there's a "winner" or "most right" person amongst the trio, but Nielsen's ethos appealed to me more than the others mentioned.

dasil003 1y ago

I always had more respect for Nielsen’s lineage of human-computer interaction than I did for Nielsen himself. At the time I remember thinking how neither designers nor classic HCI people (or programmers) really got the web. Nielsen was at least focused on the web, but the problem is that he was fixated on user expectations for a brand new medium without recognizing that it was early days and would inevitably evolve. He would say stuff like “hyperlinks should always be blue and underlined” because that’s what users expect, without realizing that at that point in time we were still so early in the adoption of the web that it made no sense to apply such rigid rules.

DonHopkins 1y ago
Ben Shneiderman's the "hyperlinks should always be blue" guy. ;) https://blog.mozilla.org/en/internet-culture/why-are-hyperlinks-blue-revisited/ https://blog.mozilla.org/en/internet-culture/why-are-hyperli... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29897811 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29897811 Seriously, while he was the first to use blue for links in HyperTIES, there was a historical context (like the IBM PC's color palette), and he never meant it in a "640k ought to be enough for anybody" way. His reasons for recommending blue are based on empirical studies, measuring visibility, comprehension, retention, etc. Blue is good not just because users recognize it (they didn't in 1983), but for how it stands out, because of how the human visual system works. He was originally a fan of cyan aka "light blue". Ben Shneiderman wrote: >"Red highlighting made the links more visible, but reduced the user’s capacity to read and retain the content of the text… blue was visible, on both white and black backgrounds and didn’t interfere with retention," >"We conducted approximately 20 empirical studies of many design variables which were reported at the Hypertext 1987 conference and in array of journals and books. Issues such as the use of light blue highlighting as the default color for links, the inclusion of a history stack, easy access to a BACK button, article length, and global string search were all studied empirically.” >"My students conducted more than a dozen experiments (unpublished) on different ways of highlighting and selection using current screens, e.g. green screens only permitted, bold, underscore, blinking, and I think italic(???). When we had a color screen we tried different color highlighted links. While red made the links easier to spot, user comprehension and recollection of the content declined. We chose the light blue, which Tim adopted." HyperTIES Discussions from Hacker News: https://donhopkins.medium.com/hyperties-discussions-from-hacker-news-937d156f0330 https://donhopkins.medium.com/hyperties-discussions-from-hac...

mvkel 1y ago

It depends on how you define the "fight." In the Nielsen days, two things were happening: 1. People were creating quirky, whimsical, odd corners of the internet for nobody but themselves. Art. 2. Entrepreneurs were starting to build sophisticated web applications for other people, i.e. customers. Nielsen's dogma was excellent for the latter, and disastrous for the former. History has been kind to Nielsen in the way that the modern web has lost most/all of its charm for the sake of answering the question "but how does it make money?"

calmbonsai 1y ago

I didn't believe that Discount Usability Engineering was useful until we tried it. I was absolutely blown away by the results and have continued the practice for every design and re-design. Thank you Mr. Nielsen. The old UseIt.com https://web.archive.org/web/19990125092506/http://useit.com/ https://web.archive.org/web/19990125092506/http://useit.com/ will forever live rent-free in my brain.

dfxm12 1y ago

On the web, the user is rarely a monolith. For a lot of websites (as compared to, say, business software or automobiles), the user could be everyone and anyone. They may all have different mental models, expectations, abilities, etc. This is important to keep in mind when focusing on user centered design for a general purpose website. You need a testing pool representative of your users (or who you want your user to be), you need to figure out what to do if there are conflicts among users, during testing, etc. It might be obvious, and you can probably still fit in into a framework, but what I'm getting at is that it is less empirical than it might seem at first pass. There is still an art to user centered design, and if you have this in mind, your designs don't have to look hopelessly outdated.

munificent 1y ago
> On the web, the user is rarely a monolith. Usability folks have understood this for decades. Alan Cooper was writing about defining multiple separate personas [1] to represent different cohorts of your userbase in the 90s. > what I'm getting at is that it is less empirical than it might seem at first pass. I would argue that it is still exactly as empirical. You just have to be careful how you aggregate your data and don't try to reduce things to too few clusters. Otherwise you end up making the classic mistake of offering a single T-shirt size at your conference that mostly only fits men because they are the majority of attendees. > There is still an art to user centered design, Agreed. No amount of analysis will do your synthesis for you. You still have to make. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Persona_(user_experience) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Persona_(user_experience)