

Usability Ain’t Everything – A Response to Jakob Nielsen’s iPad Usability Study - fun2have
http://johnnyholland.org/2010/05/26/usability-ain%E2%80%99t-everything-a-response-to-jakob-nielsen%E2%80%99s-ipad-usability-study/

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Nekojoe
I used to read a lot of Jakob Nielsen's writing, on his website and books. I
don't read his work so much now because I find what he says tends to be too
conservative. He tends to be too strict with guidelines. For years he insisted
that all unvisited hyperlinks should be blue and all visited ones should be
purple.

One of the tricks with usability I've found is knowing which rules to stick
to, which ones to bend and which ones to break.

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mstevens
I'm still in the "all unvisited hyperlinks should be blue and all visited ones
should be purple." camp. It's simple and everyone knows what to expect!

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imp
You've managed to use this website though, despite no blue or purple links.

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mstevens
It's true.

I've managed to use Lotus Notes, too, that doesn't mean I think it was a good
idea.

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MWinther
First, I dispute saying that just because it's touch based, the iPad doesn't
have a Graphical User Interface.

Second, another kind of device which got a no-holds-barred canvas to create
beautiful and stylized interaction-based content was the DVD. The DVD menus
for a LOT of titles are seriously crappy.

Even though Nielsen might err on the side of caution, he definitely has a
point. People without guidelines have been producing pretty-but-non-functional
GUIs before. Let's not keep the traditions alive.

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pedalpete
I've always thought the flaw in Jakob Nielsen's thinking was that he was
completely focused on standards and almost ignored design.

I much prefer Donald Norman's work.

As a contrast to 'design around standard so that people understand what to
do', Norman says 'make things beautiful and playful so people want to use
them'.

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ThomPete
All standards are learned. What Jakob nielsen misses is that the touch
interface is a new paradigme because it removes abstraction from the
interaction. You can't judge it on old metrics that themselves in so many ways
are wrong and clumbsy.

Jakob nielsen is wrong and have been for a long time. Usability isn't any
longer a field to be taken serious in itself. Only when paired with actual
design skills does it start to make sense. As a qualifier not as a discipline
in itself.

I've said it before. In five years from now usability is nothing more than
another tool in the designers box on the line of grid systems typography etc.

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butterfi
When you say "Neilsen is wrong", you really need to back that up. The
Neilsen/Norman group conducts empirical studies and has a fair amount of
transparency about their work. Most of the "professional" web designers I've
worked with tend to favor their design over the user's needs. I would agree
that Neilsen advice falls into the conservative design camp more then I
appreciate, but at the very least he has actual metrics and user testing to
draw his conclusions on. Having been in multiple user testing sessions and
seen many a fancy design go down in flames of user confusion, I'll believe
that "usability is nothing more then another tool in the designers toolbox"
when I see it applied more consistently.

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fun2have
I don't think anybody that knows about Usability Metrics takes "Neilsen" that
seriously. Neilson is more popular with the 5 user is enough camp while most
people dealing with Ux Metrics believe that you need to be testing with at
least 50 to 300 users.

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tokenadult
Jakob Nielsen (correct spelling) says that testing on five users is enough to
identify serious usability problems that need correction soon.

<http://www.useit.com/alertbox/20000319.html>

He does NOT say that you should stop testing as soon as you have testing with
five users, but rather that you should build usability testing into your
development process throughout all of its stages, but especially the early
stages.

<http://www.useit.com/alertbox/20030825.html>

<http://www.useit.com/alertbox/weekly-usability-tests.html>

<http://www.useit.com/alertbox/experienced-users.html>

<http://www.useit.com/alertbox/multiple-user-testing.html>

<http://www.useit.com/alertbox/user-testing-showbiz.html>

<http://www.useit.com/alertbox/quantitative_testing.html>

<http://www.useit.com/alertbox/20050815.html>

<http://www.useit.com/alertbox/20050214.html>

<http://www.useit.com/alertbox/20040719.html>

<http://www.useit.com/alertbox/20030120.html>

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fun2have
Ok Nielsen did this test with 7 users

We have moved along way since the simplistic rule of thumb that 5 users is
enough. A very good argument in why 10 is not enough is Woolrych and Cockton
2001. They point out an issue in Nielsen formula (1-(1-0.31)^5) in that he
does not take into account the visibility of an issue. They show using only 5
users can significantly under count even significant usability issues.

The number of users you need is dependent on how many issues there are, the
cultural variance of your user base, and the margin of error you are happy
with. Five users or even 10 is not enough on a modern well designed web site.

For example if we assume that designers of a web site have been using good
design principles and therefore an issue only effects 2.5% of users. Then 10
users in a test will only discover that issue 22% of the time. If your site
attracts a 1 million visitors a year the issue will mean that 25,000 people
will experience problems.

The easy way to think of a Usability Test is a treasure hunt. If the treasure
is very obvious then you will need fewer people, if less obvious then you will
need more people. If you increase the area of the hunt then you will need more
people. Most of the advocates of only testing 5 to 10 users, experience comes
from one country. Behaviour changes significantly country by country, even in
Western Europe. See my blog post here :

