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Ideas from Jakob Nielsen

Jason Whitney

From A field report: Studio 2000, March 28, 2000

A field report: Studio 2000

90% of all web sites are nearly impossible to use.
Coolweb sites used to be the "in thing." Now people just want to get in and accomplish a task and get out.
Using a splash page is taking the misery approach; I am more important than you so wait.
What is the change that has happened to make the web look more profoundly at design than computers ever have? Computer software has always focused on features, I blame customers for accepting the bad software. Usability has been the second focus and early on was not a focus at all.
Help desk calls are expensive! This is what helps to justify the cost of usability testing.
The reason usability testing has not arrived in software is because first you buy then you get the user experience. On the web you get the user experience first, then you buy.
Users do not use manuals! They may however browse or look something up.
On the web, nobody will be willing to click the help button, they will just click the back button.
People will skip over even two lines of text to get to the function. They don't read!
On the web, people ignore banner ads and logos and focus on what they want to accomplish.

On the Web

Experience comes first, money comes second.
Experience matters so much more than messages.

Multiply

How many visitors X conversion rate (% that will become loyal user or buyer) = Success of Web Site.
To increase web-site success:
- You can increase # of visitors (which would take very costly advertising).
- You can increase conversion rate.
  - Google is a good example of this approach. Much better search engine, spread by word of mouth.
Google and E-pinions
- Promote themselves by users experience.
- Mastery of the web. They find the web sites that have the best quality rating, not the ones that have paid for position.
The sites with the most traffic tend to have the fewest usability errors.
Home page should take under 10 seconds to load. The most popular take about eight, the less popular (large company) sites take about 18 seconds.
In a game the experience is its own goal. This is impossible on-line today. Perhaps in the future this will be different.
Users say "I want it now!" Response times rule the web!
- Broadband is coming, but it is not here yet, and it is coming very slowly.
- In approximately 3-4 years, high end users will have higher bandwidth. Low end users won't have it for about 10 years.

Usability

In the old days the feeling was "a good user is a dead user!" and "users are losers!"
Remember, when you design something of course you know it!
Focus groups may like the flash intro. They will tell you what they think is appropriate to say or what they think they remember. Self reported behavior is worthless!
Usability testing:
- You really only need about 5 users.
- You are not designing a cereal box, it is much more difficult than that. We are looking at huge improvements, not little adjustments.

About Jakob Nielsen

Jakob Nielsen has been called:

number 6 of The Web's 10 Most Influential People (Anchor Desk)
"the guru of Web page usability" (The New York Times)
"the next best thing to a true time machine" (USA Today)
"the smartest person on the Web" (Ziff-Davis Network)
"knows more about what makes Web sites work than anyone else on the planet" (Chicago Tribune)
"a real guru" (CNET The Computer Network)
"the Web's usability czar" (WebReference.com)
"among the Web's most recognized human-interface experts" (Web Week)
"the reigning guru of Web usability" (FORTUNE)
"not yet as famous as Elvis" (CONTENTIOUS Magazine)

Jakob Nielsen, Ph.D., is a User Advocate and principal of the Nielsen Norman Group which he co-founded with Donald A. Norman (former VP of research at Apple Computer). Until 1998 he was a Sun Microsystems Distinguished Engineer and the company's Web usability guru.

Dr. Nielsen coined the term "discount usability engineering" and has invented several usability techniques for fast and cheap improvements of user interfaces, including heuristic evaluation. He holds 46 United States patents, mainly on ways of making the Internet easier to use.

Columns

Bi-weekly Alertbox column on Web usability (readership: 5 million page views per year; all of useit.com is at 7 Mpv/y)
Users First! column on Ziff-Davis Network
Deconstructing famous websites in Internet World

Books

Designing Web Usability: The Practice of Simplicity, 2000 (actually published December 20, 1999) - the working title for this book was "Designing Excellent Websites: Secrets of an Information Architect", but we decided on a simpler title. Also, the cover design works better with the new title.
Usability Engineering, 1994: textbook on the methods needed to make interfaces easier to use
Multimedia and Hypertext: The Internet and Beyond, 1995: second edition of textbook on linked online information
Usability Inspection Methods, 1994 (co-editor with Robert L. Mack): with chapters by each of the inventors of these methods
International User Interfaces, 1996 (co-editor with Elisa del Galdo)
Advances in Human-Computer Interaction Vol. 5, 1995 (editor)
Hypertext and Hypermedia, 1990: the first edition of classic textbook (no longer in print)
Designing User Interfaces for International Use, 1990 (editor)
Coordinating User Interfaces for Consistency, 1989 (editor): still the best book on how to get a standard look-and-feel

Professional Background

Dr. Nielsen was usability lead for several design and redesign rounds of Sun's website and intranet (SunWeb), including the original SunWeb design in 1994.

His earlier affiliations include Bellcore (Bell Communications Research), the Technical University of Denmark, and the IBM User Interface Institute at the T.J. Watson Research Center.

Nielsen is on the editorial board of the Morgan Kaufmann book series in Interactive Technologies; contact him if you are planning an advanced book on user interfaces (no GUI Design for Dummies, even though it's apparently a good book).
Professional journal editorial board memberships: ACM interactions magazine, ACM netWorker magazine, Behaviour & Information Technology, Interacting with Computers, International Journal of Human-Computer Interaction, The New Review of Hypermedia and Multimedia, Personal Technologies, World Wide Web. For each journal, contact the editor-in-chief to submit a manuscript.

Jakob Nielsen
2704 Fairbrook Dr.
Mountain View, CA 94040
Email: jakob@useit.com

Website: www.useit.com

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