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Web 2.0 Can Be Dangerous...
- webwright 19y ago"If you're a mainstream business site (including government and non-profit sites), your user experience needs are very different than those of the few hot sites that attract all the attention." This is a great point... If your audience is mainstream, you need to keep it simple. I worked at a job/employment site recently which was doing some cool-ass AJAX UI for the consumer part of the site. The entire product team LOVED it. Usability tests were a disaster. Users were confused and frustrated. The time saved with AJAX was lost when the user had to actually THINK about what to do on the page. "For website usability, the problem is not whether a specific operation takes 1 second or 10 seconds; people typically perform each operation only once or twice. The problem for websites is the 5-10 minutes users lose when they do something wrong because the site is too complicated. (After such an experience, they usually leave -- and you lose the business.) Simplicity is more important than efficiency for done-once actions." Of course, if your audience is geeky, go nuts! :-)
- dangrover 19y agoWhile he makes some good points, he also makes some hasty generalizations. You could just as easily have a complicated, poorly designed interface with or without AJAX being involved.
- brlewis 19y agoFrom the article: "Unlike some older technologies (notably, Flash and PDF), Web 2.0 ideas are not inherently bad for users. They can be highly effective; we sometimes see examples of usability-enhancing Web 2.0 designs in our studies."
- henning 19y agoI hate his excessive use of bold. It's like he's encouraging skimming and he doesn't even want people to read carefully. I always feel like a chump when my eyes wander.
- pchristensen 19y agoNo, he KNOWS people skim and he puts the bold in to acknowledge it. All of Jakob Nielsen's recommendations are based on testing and measuring those changes that increase client ROI. That's how he defines "useable". He'd rather you skim the bolded parts of the article than just hit the back button because it looked like too much reading.
- henning 19y agoYes I know people skim, but he makes it worse and actively deters from reading by doing it.
- pg 19y agoI was going to say that his site seems surprisingly badly designed for a usability expert. The jittery typography makes it exhausting to read. And yet maybe it does appeal to some people. Or rather, work on them. There may be a reason all those sites with PROVEN techniques for generating a six figure income all look so similar. http://www.leemarketinggroup.com/page/page/5189275.htm http://www.leemarketinggroup.com/page/page/5189275.htm
- henning 19y agoI find your online Internet webpage fascinating and would like to subscribe to your newsletter.
- electric 19y agoLOL .. Jakob's been around for a while. He actually was a consultant for Google in the early days.
- some 19y agoI love the design of useit.com. To me its one of the best designed websites out there. By far. I hate most websites. I also like Hacker News. So im surprised to see you disliking useit. Jittery typography? What would be better? One giant block of uniform text? How would you design useit?