Jakob Nielsen, web guru: «Enough complexity!»

The web guru Jakob Nielsen just published «Designing Web Usability, the Pratice of Simplicity».

Largeur.com: Why this book?

Jacob Nielsen: To reassert humanity’s control of our own destiny. It is not acceptable that the main foundation for the new society is so difficult to use that half of the population is shut out. And even the people who have suffered through misery and learned to use the Web are still facing grave difficulties every day: they get lost, they can’t perform the tasks they want to accomplish, and they waste endless time on badly designed websites. We humans will not take it any more. Computers have to adapt to our needs rather than forcing humans to jump through hoops. When you read the book, you may think that it’s goal is to help the readers make money by selling more on the Internet. That’s true as well, since business success will be the outcome of following the individual rules and guidelines I give. But luckily there is no real conflict between business needs and saving humanity: only those sites that follow the usability guidelines and make life easier for humans will do any business in the future.

Largeur.com: Your book became an instant best-seller. Is it due to clever marketing or does it prove that it addresses an urgent need?

Jacob Nielsen: Unfortunately I don’t think I can claim especially clever marketing techniques. The smartest thing I did was probably to send out an announcement to email list of people who subscribe to updates from my website, but that’s only 25% of the copies sold so far, even if every single one of them bought the book. So I think the real answer is that there is now a widely recognized need to make websites easier to use. And the people in charge of Web designs are getting a very urgent mandate from their management to fix the site NOW before all the customers leave for better sites. During the first several years of the Web it was easier to get away with « cool » sites that were quite hard to use because the websites were not considered a very important part of the business. So all the site really needed to do was to look good when the managing director wanted something to show off. For the last year or so, the Web has become much more mission-critical for business survival, so the need for a usable site is much more clear and urgent than it was before.

Largeur.com: You advocate fast, easy-to-use and simple designs instead of cool effects and graphics which is obviously the trend. How do you explain there is such a difference between your advices and the practice of web professionals?

Jacob Nielsen: The difference is due to the fact that the only thing you see when you are shown a demo of a website is its immediate graphic appearance. Usability only enters the picture if you are actually trying to use the site to accomplish something. Thus, usability is only a concern for outside customers. The people inside the company never use their own site. They only look at it and have it presented in boardroom demos. Therefore, most of the usability problems are not visible to the people inside the company – and they are the ones making the decisions about the site.

Largeur.com: On the Web, it seems as if we have gone back to the pre-Macintosh era of computing. What is needed to build and spread a standard vocabulary of user-interface techniques and practices on the Web?

Jacob Nielsen: We are exactly back to the pre-Mac era. In fact, we are back to the good old mainframe days. Except that mainframes were only good for a few specialized computer technicians. Nobody else could use them. We definitely need a standard interface vocabulary for the Web. One of the great advances of the Macintosh relative to earlier computers was the existence of a very strict set of design standards that specified, for example, what should be found under the «Edit» menu (and the fact that it should be called «Edit» and be the second item on the menu bar). This high degree of consistency made it much easier for users to learn new Macintosh programs than to learn new DOS programs. And on the Web users move much more frequently between sites than Macintosh users ever moved between applications. So standards are even more important on the Web.

There is a fast and a slow way to standards: the fast one would be for some important organization to determine the standards and publish a document with the recommended way of doing things. Preferably, this would be a job for the World Wide Web Consortium, but one could also imagine that Microsoft would do the job. The slow way is to wait for the standards to evolve naturally. This is the way human languages evolved. So, for example, there is a certain vocabulary for French, but it did take a long time to evolve. And there are benefits from having an official dictionary that states the way words are spelled and what they are supposed to mean. Some people do complain that a standard for Web design would reduce creativity, but I think the situation is a close analogy to that of a natural language. Despite the official dictionary, nobody would claim that the French language makes it impossible to be creative or write new literature. Similarly, a standard for Web design would only mean that users would now be capable of recognizing the design vocabulary of the site. There would still be room for substantial creativity in how this vocabulary was used to compose new solutions for the users.

Largeur.com: Do you think web designers are enough trained and informed about the importance of user-interface design and how to take into account the constraints of the medium (bandwidth, responsivity) to build a great user experience?

Jacob Nielsen: No. However, the situation is getting better every year. Back in 1994 and 1995, most Web designers cared very little about these fundamental constraints, but now the better designers are all aware of the issues. And many of them are working hard on living within the constraints. I just wish that all designers were among this group of «better designers». That may take a few more years: there are still too many designs that fight the medium rather than accept it.

Largeur.com: Are you confident that web usability will have a large impact and that we will get a better user-experience on the web in the immediate future?

Jacob Nielsen:Those are really two different questions. I do think that Web usability will have a large impact. I also think that we will get a better user experience on the Web. Unfortunately, I don’t think this will happen in the immediate future because of the size of the Web. For example, my most widely read article has been read about half a million times. Since there are about 11 million sites on the Web, this means that about 10 million have been designed without the benefits of the usability advice in that article. The same is true for my new book which will probably sell less than a million copies. Even if it sells extremely well, it will still never reach more than two million copies, leaving 9 million sites with bad design.

In the long term, sites that are too difficult to use will simply die as the users shun them and spend their time on sites with good usability. So my prediction is that some sites will get good usability very soon and that users will gravitate more and more to the easy sites. In a few years, only usable sites will have any kind of substantial presence on the Web.

Largeur.com: In Europe where mobile phones are wide spread, there is a lot of hype around WAP services? Any comment about surfing the net with a five line screen?

Jacob Nielsen: It is going to be bad. But mobile Internet is so compelling that people will still use WAP phones. I think the long-term solution is a new class of information appliances that will look somewhat like the Palm Pilot with a decent (if still small) screen. When supplemented with a Bluetooth-powered small headset, these information appliances will take over the role of the mobile telephone and thus do us the favor of eliminating all the awkward key combinations that are necessary to use current phones.

Largeur.com: What will be your next book about?

Jacob Nielsen: The next book will be about the methods for running your own user studies. The current book describes the findings from my own research and the Web user studies I have been running since 1994. So it’s all the best advice I can give without knowing the individual readers specific site. There will always be some additional issues that are specific to the individual site and which cannot be answered in a general book. The next book will tell readers how to find the answers to these additional questions.