Comments on Got Usability? Talking with Jakob Nielsen

search engine blog | peter — Fri, 26 Jan 2007 14:49:48 GMT

“B&A: Who do you think does a good job dealing with content online?

Nielsen: Very few actually. I can’t come up with any great examples — it’s still so print-oriented. My own articles aren’t that great either, actually. I’m very verbose in my writing style. It needs to be very punchy and very short, and it’s very hard to write that way”

Agreed.

I think content often falls in love with it’s own sense of importance, whereas the reader has no sense of that – at least not initially. They scan before they establish importance – like they do a newspaper.

In short, get straight to the point :)

Glenn Madden — Fri, 26 Jan 2007 14:49:48 GMT

Usability is great in its place. The thing to remember, the internet is entertainment, hobbies, buisiness…
That means the term usbility needs to have a broad definition in respect to the internet designs. I own a small company http://web-design-companies.com a TradUR.com site and my goal is to make the customer happy. Sometimes it means I have to bite my tongue to give the customer what they want. I can offer subtle suggestions but “The Customer is Always Right.”

Glenn Madden — Fri, 26 Jan 2007 14:49:47 GMT

Usability is great in its place. The thing to remeber the internet is entertainment, hobbies, buisiness…
That means the term usbility needs to have a broad definition in respect to the internet designs. I own a small company http://web-design-companies.com a TradUR.com site and my goal is to make the customer happy. Sometimes it means I have to bite my tongue to give the customer what they want. I can offer subtle suggestions but “The Customer is Always Right.”

sherlock_yoda — Fri, 26 Jan 2007 14:49:47 GMT

I may not fully agree with heuristic evaluation, but I like the sentiment behind it – i.e. we desparately need to find ‘discount’ methods of usability that can be done quickly and give useful results within an industrial setting. This is one area of research that I wish was being pursued – discovering quick usability tools, that have an acceptable degree of validity and provide results that businesses find useful.

Until interaction design gets more widely accepted, and built into the whole project life cycle, we need these ‘halfway house’ measures.

I have the same problem in the field I work in: e-learning. There are all sorts of good practices that don’t actually get practiced because they are seen to take too long and not provide enough business value. The practices are actually very similar to usability practices: observation of users in work context, continual dialogue and feedback from learners during development, contextual analysis, observation, etc.

Pragmatic tools and techniques that are quick, cheap and show value never take long to be endorsed by industry.

Sherlock

usability guru — Fri, 26 Jan 2007 14:49:47 GMT

I agree about some of the points, but along the few random valid results we are getting from heuristic evaluation we are getting a mass of completely wrong judgements which will very severely compromise our professionality as usability evaluators if we present them to the developers. Even the wording of the heuristics encourage very naive remarks about the subject under assessment which totally ignore user’s problem solving ability and willingness to learn.

I appreciate very much Jakob Nielsen’s work as a pioneer (there is a few honest remarks about HE in his articles to be found and also many of his articles meander around the important topics in HCI and usability engineering/evaluation), but I also conflictingly object to perpetuating the usability evaluation’s greatest lie – which is heuristic evaluation.

George Schneiderman — Fri, 26 Jan 2007 14:49:47 GMT

usability guru wrote:
> Yeah, JN has earlier fooled a lot of academic
> usability practitioners to think that heuristic
> evaluation can be used to evaluate interfaces.

I really don’t think this is an accurate or fair assesment of Nielsen’s involvement with heuristic evaluation. I don’t believe that he has ever argued that it should or could replace usability testing.

But usability heuristics are a great starting point, both for evaluation and design. Do you really want to run expensive usability tests to identify obvious problems? I find the 10-30% number perfectly plausible, but assuming it is accurate I think it would be well worth applying a heuristic evaluation to remove the problems it identifies—particularly since it seems quite likely that these will be amongst the most serious problems, the sort that make it difficulty to garner any data from your test other than to identify those problems.

Furthermore, if these heuristics are used by the designers, then you will end up with a better starting point from which to conduct usability tests.

Beyond that, surely an iterative process of running usability tests and then refining the heuristic guidelines (taking into account the various variables) will ultimately lead to better heuristic guidlines that can identify more problems. Surely it is better to prevent problems from occuring than to find and fix them after the fact!

Also, at this point most web sites (although probably not most web pages) are privately maintained by individuals who are most unlikely to run usability tests. Surely these people can benefit from usability heuristics . . .

usability guru — Fri, 26 Jan 2007 14:49:47 GMT

Yeah, JN has earlier fooled a lot of academic usability practitioners to think that heuristic evaluation can be used to evaluate interfaces. Unfortunately the heuristics have very little use in the real world (they have never been connected to the definition of usability) and they predict about 10-30 precent of real user problems – they are just shots in the dark by the evaluator using himself (herself usually as the usability seems to be a very soft and feminine subject) as a usability test guinea pig. The evaluator never goes beyond his/her own knowledge by the help of the heuristics into the finer workings of the interface.

I think his web guidelines stem from the same family of usability babble (not my term but a web developer’s).

Mary Deaton — Fri, 26 Jan 2007 14:49:47 GMT

Nielsen, for those of you who don’t know, has never professed to being a Web designer. There is an entire article on the UseIt site that speaks to why the site looks the way it does.

And if you read his work regularly, you know that he does not believe ease-of-use is the only goal of any Web site. He is an extremely practical man in his approach to the role of usability in the overall process of Web design.

He is, however, a usability engineer. That is what he brings to the table to share with the rest of us who may not have that training and experience in our backgrounds. I have always admired his willingness to bend the twig and make provocative statements that get the rest of us engaged in discussion.

Rather than expect one man to have all of the answers or exemplify perfection, we practitioners need to figure out what is known about usability and how we apply it to design.

Can we use UI patterns or Web patterns in the same way developers use patterns for database design or functional design? How would we define those patterns? How would we educate people about them and distribute them?

martin smith — Fri, 26 Jan 2007 14:49:47 GMT

I couldn’t find his email address either – and his search engine sucks big time. But as for saying he doesn’t know what he’s talking about…

If anyone out there creates websites and hasn’t done user testing, then your site doesn’t work properly.

Trust me on this, you will not believe some of the things I have seen people do. Example – 1 in 10 users WILL NOT click on an arrow shaped button, or on a > sign – they’ll click to the side where it points. Or about 1 in 20 increases the font size straight away – unless you’ve stopped them…

Every time I have done any kind of testing, something shows up – usually something you wouldn’t expect…

I agree that he goes a bit too far in many cases – but the only way to find out is to test with the right people, getting them to do real things they would really do – thats what he’s getting at, the guidelines etc are just the results of all his testing, for those who can’t be bothered (or can’t convince the client to pay)!

Suzanne — Fri, 26 Jan 2007 14:49:47 GMT

Oddly, I had to search to find it, then guess at the url to get the actual page because the search engine didn’t return the page url, just a recap of the page. Anyway, http://www.useit.com/about/whynomailto.html there is the answer—it’s his way of filtering spam. Apparently he needs some help integrating his search engine, too.

I don’t care if JN can design or not, some of the things that he brings up are valuable if for no other reason than they provoke discussion and make people think about the purpose of their sites and focusing their efforts.

Joe Chapuis — Fri, 26 Jan 2007 14:49:47 GMT

Crusader against bad web design?

Just wondering:

Did anyone actually visit his site useit.com before deciding to interview him?

Those who can, do.
Those who can’t, teach.
Those who can’t teach, teach gym
(or something like that, according to Woody Allen.)

If Woody had said that recently, he might have referred to web design instead of phys-ed. And Jakob Nielsen just might be the gym teacher of web design.

A visit to Jakob’s Site is like a study in art theory run amuck. How many 7-year-olds did it take to put that one together?

“Hey Bobby, let’s do the top in bright-lemon-yellow, the kind that makes you squint like when you stare at the sun!” says Suzy.

“Yeah,” says Bobby, “and let’s do half the page in funny blue-green, the kind that makes you want to throw up, and the other half in some ugly light-tanish color!”

If you wonder why he chose those colors and annoying layout, just send Jakob an email and ask him.

All you have to do is:

- scroll to the bottom of his page,
- highlight his email address “nielsen@nngroup.com”,
- right click,
- click on “copy”,
- open your email program,
- paste his address into your email message,
- and fire away!

A usability expert that doesn’t even bother to make his email address a link? (No, it’s not because of email harvesters, they’ll find it anyway even without the link.)

I’m sure Jakob’s a bright guy, and he definitely has some valid points.

But an expert on usability and web design?
I don’t think so.

He may have fooled some corporate big-wigs with deep pockets, but he doesn’t fool me.

Eric Scheid — Fri, 26 Jan 2007 14:49:47 GMT

I have yet to see JN comment on Patterns : a way of writing guidelines that express the circumstances of use, recognises the forces involved, and describes the resulting context.

While he does say “Experience says that usually [guidelines] work — usually, but not always. Usability guidelines always need to be applied with a certain amount of understanding as to when they apply and when they don’t apply”, he doesn’t seem to be advocating documenting when to break the rules. He simply refers to experience and reason.

Has he discussed Patterns somewhere? What’s his take on the patterns movement?

Tim Lapetino — Fri, 26 Jan 2007 14:49:47 GMT

Jakob said: ”...if the project doesn’t have a goal, then maybe it’s appropriate—design for design’s sake. But if you do design to actually accomplish something, then I’d argue that it has to be easy to use, so I don’t think that it’s appropriate to reject the goal of usability if your project has to accomplish something.”

But what Mr. Nielsen fails to acknowledge is that designs (whether on Web or somewhere else) *all* have goals—and often, that “art for art’s sake” *can* be the goal!

It is a gross assumption that a generic, task-oriented, “ease-of-use” is always the end goal! Things like branding, marketing, building consumer awareness, emotional identification with a product/service, creating or sustaining an emotional response—those are ALL goals of design! They are in the realm of design!

And unfortunately, Nielsen’s usability principles don’t even *touch* these areas. He explains in his book that he isn’t an expert in these disciplines, but I believe a wiser approach would be *acknowledging* those weaknesses, and pointing to experts who *do* draw on the vast knowledge that print design and advertising have created.

Sure, the Web is *not* print, but we still have much to learn from our dead tree predecessors.

And those things *do* fall under the category of usability and design—designers are *paid* to create emotional interaction, brand recognition, awareness—and few of these are easily quantifiable! These esoteric things are critical, but not as easy to measure with stats and bulleted top-10 lists, which is why I believe they don’t show up on useit.com.

These are areas of usability and e-commerce design that *cannot* be ignored. And unfortunately for many companies and others who take Jakob’s advice as gospel, it *will* come back to haunt them.

KB~ — Fri, 26 Jan 2007 14:49:47 GMT

“Content” in web development typically refers to the text content of a web page, which is how Mr. Nielsen responded. The visual design/presentation of that content is a separate thing.

I think it’s entirely possible that no one is doing a good job of content creation or visual design, but I do not agree it is that way now. I believe this was very true about 5-7 years ago before there was an Internet boom; back when web pages were typically developed as a side task by DBA’s, MIS people and software engineers.

Now that teams of writers, editors and designers (the appropriate people IMHO!) are being brought into web development, I think that both content creation and visual design/presentation have improved a great deal.

“Good design” is directly related to the creator’s intent. You have to be able to measure the creator’s intent in order to measure if the design is “good”. And yes, I believe there can be examples of good jobs in this online world, provided the result is properly compared to the intent in order to adequately illustrate what makes it good.

Benjamin Bennett — Fri, 26 Jan 2007 14:49:47 GMT

I was at the same time interested and disappointed by Jakob’s response to the question of “who do you think does a good job…”

Although I interpreted the question as referring to “good design” it seems that perhaps Jakob was thinking about “good writing”? In any case I was pleased to hear that he doesn’t think that is own work is all “that great either, actually.”

However it raises the concern that if no one is going a good job at something, then perhaps the way of measuring that something is faulty? I know that I’m not pleased with much of my own work (my personal site especially), however I am able to point to others that I feel are going a good job.

Does anyone else feel that there should be examples of “good jobs” in this online world or ours?