
Jakob Nielsen's site has been redesigned - joshuacc
http://www.nngroup.com/articles/?redesign
======
Silhouette
I know it's 1 April, but I'm now quite convinced that Nielsen is just having a
glorious laugh at our expense, constructing possibly the most elaborate troll
in Internet history...

His early work was very interesting, drawing attention to the fact that
sometimes what "looks good" or "works well" according to someone's intuition
doesn't actually produce the best measured results. He was a pioneer, at least
in Web terms, of promoting the kind of data-based decision making that many
successful Internet businesses take for granted today. Anyone who designs web
sites but hasn't read early Nielsen is missing out, IMHO.

However, as time passed, his articles became increasingly self-referential and
self-promotional, and seemed to include less and less substantial, original
content. _By his own arguments_ his material was becoming worse.

His old site famously wasn't a shining beacon of graphic design, and he always
seemed rather proud of that -- ironically, really, with the body of research
we now have that shows how much influence a good visual design can have on
readability. With the redesign used since the move to the NN Group site, he
seems to have completely jumped the shark. Even famous Nielsen material on the
F-shaped reading pattern and the use of underlining for hyperlinks seems to
have been discarded. The text is set in a small size and with a font stack
that will render unpleasantly on a significant number of visitors' computers
(because Helvetica is often installed on Windows PCs, but only as a cheap and
nasty screen version of a printer font). And what happened to not making real
content look like an advert?!

It really is a shame, because every now and then he does still write a great
article. I wonder what the Nielsen of 15 years ago would make of his site
today.

~~~
blauwbilgorgel
From a casual glance:

\- Not all links have a title attribute

\- Large lists of links do not have a skip link.

\- Searchform is a javascript submit, with no fallback or warning (doesnt work
without javascript support)

\- Mailto: adresses have subject preset.

\- Links are not underlined.

\- Popular topics links are black instead of blue, and the hovercolor doesn't
register for the colorblind.

\- Larger images often lack an alt-attribute.

\- Inline CSS hampers custom user stylesheets.

\- Submenu is somewhat confusing, visually disjointed from the main menu.

\- The contact form is a table without a table summary, and doesn't work
without javascript enabled, without a warning.

\- Missing a breadcrumb

\- Low contrast for blue links on white background.

\- Trouble finding the contact form. Submenu is initially hidden and you have
to select "Contact information" from a list of links inside the "People" page.

\- After submitting form: <h1>&nbsp;</h1><h1><strong>Message
Sent</strong></h1><p>&nbsp;</p>

\- Font-stack of Helvetica renders ugly on Windows machines

\- Form labels are not bold, above the form input, or of reasonable font-size.

\- Content pages don't start with the content, but with a huge sidebar of
links, not conform reading pattern.

\- Both HTML and CSS are not valid.

\- <http://www.nngroup.com/articles/> is somewhat paralizing with
information/link overload.

I do like the design a lot, it being vanilla Foundation.

------
kmfrk
It looks like one of those websites that squat popular domains with ads and a
"fake" search engine.

------
slig
Also, their April 1st <http://www.nngroup.com/articles/mobile-usability-cats/>

------
tokenadult
Thanks for reminding people about this change. For the readers who are
wondering if this change happened on 1 April 2013, it actually happened
earlier. This has been previously announced on HN

<https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5019049>

(two months ago, no comments)

<https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5267093>

(one month ago, four comments)

and anyone who has followed any of the useit.com links in the last two months
would have discovered this change. EDIT: The second HN submission shown links
to the site's discussion

[http://www.nngroup.com/news/item/useitcom-moves-to-
nngroupco...](http://www.nngroup.com/news/item/useitcom-moves-to-nngroupcom/)

of this change in location of Alertbox columns.

I agree with the several questions posted here in comments that I'm puzzled by
the rationale for some of the changes, which are not always easily explained
by what's on the page

[http://www.nngroup.com/news/item/useitcom-moves-to-
nngroupco...](http://www.nngroup.com/news/item/useitcom-moves-to-nngroupcom/)

about the domain change, which has the paragraphs below about the new design:

"Legacy design is rarely a good rationale in the long run, but there was a
second reason to maintain useit.com for many years: while nngroup.com needs a
corporate look-and-feel to attract consulting clients, it was possible to
retain a more emotionally forceful design for useit.com. The site admittedly
didn't look very good, but it was a strong rallying point for rebellion
against the bloated design style that dominated during the dot-com bubble.

"Even after the dot-com bubble burst, there was a long period where the
barebones useit.com design stood out and elevated the site above many
latecomer UX websites. Cutting through the clutter is an important value on
the web, which has so much more information than anybody needs.

"However, eventually it makes less sense to rebel against the excesses of the
past. Also, with almost 500 Alertbox columns published, it became clear that
more navigational apparatus was needed. One solution could have been to
redesign useit.com to make it more like other sites. But why bother? If a big
change was needed anyway, it was better to use the opportunity to integrate
the articles with the company information and host all the material on the
same website with a single navigation structure and a single search. So that's
what we did: no more microsite for the Alertbox."

------
chris_wot
Underlining and links:

[http://www.nngroup.com/articles/guidelines-for-
visualizing-l...](http://www.nngroup.com/articles/guidelines-for-visualizing-
links/)

He has a massive get out of jail card - he says "Assuming the link text is
colored, it's not always absolutely necessary to underline it". But then he
says that for accessibility you must do so.

However, he says:

"There is no need to use special colors or other visualizations when the
cursor hovers over a link. Doing so only makes the page appear more cluttered
as the user moves the mouse across the screen."

How... awkward... for him.

I should note that he has entirely rewritten his guidelines from his old
"alertbox":

[http://web.archive.org/web/20040605085708/http://www.useit.c...](http://web.archive.org/web/20040605085708/http://www.useit.com/alertbox/20040510.html)

I see he has removed this nugget of advise:

\---

The color for unvisited links should be more vivid, bright, and saturated than
the color for visited links, which should look "used" (dull and washed out).

The two colors should be variants or shades of the same color, so that they're
clearly related. Using drastically different colors (say, orange and green)
makes it hard for users to understand the relationship between the two types
of links and to identify which color is the "used" version of the other.

* Shades of blue provide the strongest signal for links, but other colors work almost as well.

* As always, when using color to signal information, you should provide redundant cues for color-blind users. Making unvisited links brighter and more luminous than visited links will usually accomplish this goal.

\---

Let's see:

* Dull washed out colour for unvisited links - check!

* Different colour entirely for visited and unvisited links - check!

* "There is no need to use special colors or other visualizations when the cursor hovers over a link. Doing so only makes the page appear more cluttered as the user moves the mouse across the screen." - check!

* "Users typically understand a left-hand navigation rail with a list of links on a colored background, assuming it resembles the navigation areas on most other sites." - same background colour for left hand navigation rail... check!

Use common sense and the W3C for accessibility, for everything else there's
Nielsen.

------
nhebb
From a usability standpoint, I have trouble scanning blue text - especially
the light blue used on nngroup.com. I've read elsewhere that this is a common
problem, but i can't find a source.

------
petercooper
Before you say "April Fools", that's how that site appeared to look a few
months ago already:
[http://web.archive.org/web/20130116085341/http://www.nngroup...](http://web.archive.org/web/20130116085341/http://www.nngroup.com/articles/)
.. am I missing something?

------
lazyjones
So, where is the evidence-based decision to switch to colored, non-underlined
links explained? I'm very curious to see it, since I've been stubbornly
supporting underlined links all these years ...

------
lubujackson
My problem with Nielsen, despite his huge and valuable impact, is his approach
of more or less declaring the Commandments of web UI. UI is always a custom
solution to a specific problem, a way of responding to user intent through web
functionality. There may be expectations that people become accustomed to
(such as the way links appear), but the technology underlying the web is
constantly changing (see: HTML 5, touch interfaces, etc.) and so expectations
need to evolve as well.

Focusing so much on the UI elements rather than overall goal always seemed
like a lost opportunity to educate people, and ultimately feels like "oh, this
is much too hard to understand, just follow these rules and you'll be OK."
It's an easy solution for people to get behind, but not very effective for
improving UI on the web.

------
davidkatz
Yawn. That's a pretty non impressive redesign, especially for a company that
deals in user experience. Did they forget that aesthetic factors into
experience?

~~~
jaredmcateer
If you saw the site before you would agree that Jakob Nielsen is very much in
the camp that aesthetics get in the way usability.

~~~
davidkatz
aesthetics gets in the way of usability? that sounds too wrong for anyone to
believe. i mean, i'm the first to call out the current ridiculous 'design for
the sake of design' trend. abuse of "pretty" interfaces abound, but clearly
there can't be anything wrong with taking the same interaction design with
good typography, good use of whitespace, good use of color. done right,
aesthetics increases usability.

~~~
msellout
The argument is more about how to define "good".

------
benstein
It redirected me to a parked domain. Oh wait.

------
jack7890
For reference, the previous version:
[http://web.archive.org/web/20120920044246/http://www.nngroup...](http://web.archive.org/web/20120920044246/http://www.nngroup.com/)

~~~
Matti
The more memorable version that most of us probably remember as Nielsen's
site:
[http://web.archive.org/web/20120530170411/http://www.useit.c...](http://web.archive.org/web/20120530170411/http://www.useit.com/)
(The same design was used for ~13 years and often evoked strong responses from
web designers.)

~~~
gala8y
_(...) evoked strong responses from web designers._

Once there was a Wordpress theme available in official theme repository with a
footnote "Jakobian theme created by Ozan Onay, based on the prophetic work of
Jakob Nielsen." Based on tables - like _the real thing_.

Some things should never change.

------
atirip
Since what exactly Jakob Nielsen declared underlined links harmful to the user
experience?

------
jasoncartwright
Would have expected it to be responsive?

~~~
daigoba66
The site renders perfectly fine and looks quite nice on my phone. I don't know
that a site needs to be "responsive" if you first design it to look good on
mobile.

~~~
cseelus
Fonts in general and especially in the sidebar are to tiny for me to
comfortably read it on my phone.

~~~
neeee
zoom in

~~~
TylerE
If you have to zoom, your mobile site is broken.

~~~
benologist
If you have a "mobile site" you're doing it wrong.

------
muratmutlu
It's not very good, the text hierarchy is pretty bad, so much text and not
enough white space

------
yaix
I see they have given up on following many of their own UX findings. I can
hardly read the light-colored not-underlined links, but on mouseover, they
light up, yikes. I never thought I'd say this, but I liked the old useit
better.

------
config_yml
it looks like they used the foundation css framework.

~~~
joshuacc
That's correct. You can tell if you look around in their CSS files.

------
runemadsen
April Fool's?

------
ck2
My eyes/mind doesn't know where to focus on that page to start reading, it's a
very strange sensation.

~~~
habosa
That's how I feel, I couldn't put it into words before reading your comment.

------
hornbaker
Guess they really like Helvetica:

    
    
        font-family: "Helvetica", Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif;

------
Chirael
Oh god, it's awful. Please tell me this is an April Fools joke like the cat
usability test.

