

UI Guru Jakob Nielson's Site Is Unreadable - whalliburton
http://whydoeseverythingsuck.com/2008/08/ui-guru-jakob-nielsens-site-is.html

======
tel
Nielsen was relevant and aesthetically conventional something like 6 years
ago. This was before web designers got the technological capacity to make the
sites we enjoy today. Worse, the designers were often infatuated with the kind
of aesthetics that was almost completely unreadable (tiny pixelgrid text; low
contrast designs; very little "information ink").

In that context, useit was a bastion of sanity.

Jump back to today's internet and you realize useit hasn't changed at all.
Sensible considering his message has only changed evolutionarily instead of at
the rapid pace of design sentimentality.

Useit is a design achromatism today, but its message is still just as relevant
as before.

------
dcminter
This is something of an ad hominem. Jakob's site having poor usability does
not automatically invalidate his usability arguments.

See this article for his own view on the matter:
[http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2007/aug/09/guardianwee...](http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2007/aug/09/guardianweeklytechnologysection.interviews)

And then even if we assume that the quality of the site proves anything about
Jakob's advice and that the site was intended to be "usable", the observation
that the site is unusable for Hank still doesn't prove anything useful.

The whole point of most of Jakob's writing is that empirical evidence from
watching typical users in your target market actually use your site is what
matters. Hank's opinion doesn't matter unless he's (a) one of the users that
Jakob is targeting and (b) representative of them. For which we have no data.

I am not a fan of Hank's writing.

~~~
scott_s
I'm not willing to call it an ad hominem, because I've always assumed that
implied in his articles is "my site is how you should do it." Which I don't
agree with.

His techniques for bolding text and frequently making lists means I know what
information the author thinks is important, and I am more likely to remember
it when scanning a page. But I don't think you should optimize a page for
scanning when you're really presenting an essay. Essays shouldn't scream at
you; they should be memorable because the ideas as written struck a chord.

When some of the text is screaming at me, it's had to focus on the rest.

~~~
dcminter
"I've always assumed that implied in his articles is "my site is how you
should do it.""

But why? He doesn't say that anywhere. He doesn't even lay down rules about
how you should build _any_ site. He's all about carrying out user testing. He
suggests techniques that he thinks are likely to work, but he always qualifies
these opinions.

What I find particularly irritating about Hank's blog post is that he seems to
me to be saying "useit is ugly" rather more than he is saying "useit is
unusable" - the latter if provable is relevant, but Jakob's articles are not
about beauty - only usability.

~~~
scott_s
Because he has a site on usability, and the presentation is unlike other sites
I've seen. I assume these are his ideas in action.

~~~
loumf
Agreed. There is no other way to possibly interpret his site's look as a
statement on how he thinks you should present content sites that aim to have
free content lead to paid content sales.

His audience is probably older, and therefore his text is large. He could use
a little line-height, but I find the site to be readable and the text size is
controllable with browser settings, so I don't see the problem.

When I go back to an article that I have already read, I find that the bolded
parts help me find the section I was looking for.

------
pchristensen
Just remember, Nielsen focuses on usability _investments_ with positive (often
large) ROI. Since NNG charges $40,000-$1,000,000+ for a consultation, you'd
rather make MONEY off his recommendations than win beauty pageants.

~~~
radley
It's very possible that he's paid a lot of money simply as a "valued" measure
to refute the real costs of quality UI design (which can cost more than 40k to
1M).

------
adrianwaj
To me, the article in reference is both unreadable and unscannable, making it
basically unusable.

\- Its default font size is much larger than what my browser is set to. This
removes focus on the text's meaning and forces me to recalibrate my mind to
its presentation and adjust to that, for better or worse (in this case worse.)

\- The obsessively large headings make scanning 'stuttery.' (or is my own
browser misrepresentative of the bulk of users?) These headings are scarily
large when hitting them at reading speed.

\- All the bold text is in such large quantities thus negating impact.

\- There is no Table of Contents at top like a Wikipedia article with their
jump-to links.

\- I think one thing his site lacks is a decent menu and space between lines
in bulleted lists.

He implements many of his own rules on his site and makes a caricature of them
in the process. Sometimes you need to step back and say, "It might not be
perfect from a rule-abiding sense, but does it work? If not, can we change
things ever so slightly so as to create proportionally much larger
improvements in usability?"

------
iamdave
I'm with Hank here. It's always been quixotically humorous that Jakob preaches
on UI, but has a site that really has nothing remarkable or memorable about
it.

Doesn't though, mean I disagree with his messages.

~~~
michael_dorfman
But is Jakob aiming for "remarkable or memorable", or for highly functional?

Put another way-- is there anything in Jakob's (admittedly Spartan) design
that gets in the way of the content?

~~~
asdflkj
Wide columns make it hard to read, and too many highlighted words and bullet
lists make it feel like an infomercial. He seems to assume that his reader is
an ADHD-addled Digg user incapable of reading normal text. As someone who is
capable, I find it distracting, and also slightly condescending.

~~~
iamdave
_As someone who is capable_

Makes it sound as if you make that same assumption, and for both parties, it's
a highly unfounded assumption to make.

------
dougp
I just hate his use of bold with the lack of space between the lines it makes
my eyes jump to the bold and then lose their place.

------
ajross
This whole critique is based on a fallacy: aesthetics and usability are _not_
the same thing!

I don't see anything non-functional on the linked site at all. It just uses
fonts and colors that aren't currently en vogue among the elite web 2.0
cadres. There aren't any background gradients. The text is white on black
(horrors!) and somewhat larger than is fashionable these days (though why that
should be a usability problem I don't know). It doesn't artificially restrict
the text column to half (or less) of the browser width.

The worst thing is that there isn't even a shred of usability evidence
anywhere in the post. When the author says that Jakob's site is "unreadable",
what he's really saying is that he doesn't want to read it because it doesn't
conform to his norms of aesthetics. It's like Picasso refusing to study Da
Vinci because clearly he didn't grok cubism.

~~~
pdubroy
No, they are not the same thing, but that doesn't mean they aren't related. If
you have a very negative aesthetic reaction to a web site, it will affect your
use of the site.

Don Norman talks about this in his book Emotional Design. Everything we use
elicits some kind of emotional response in us, and that affects our experience
with the thing. Something is not "usable" if it's so repulsive that no one
will use it. In this case, the goal of Jakob's site, for him and for us, is
for us to read the articles. If we don't want to look at the page for more
than 30 seconds, it's difficult to accomplish that goal.

~~~
ajross
But that's not "usability", it's style. Is style impotant? Yes. But it's
entirely possible to have eminently usable software that is ugly to a bunch of
people. Don't fall into the trap of thinking that your ideas about "ugly" are
the same as other peoples'.

The implied irony was that a usability expert produce a site with poor
usability, and it's just plain wrong. Visit the link. It's not even that ugly,
frankly. It is spare, clean, and very well-organized. It just happens to look
a lot like default HTML rendering. Shrug.

~~~
pdubroy
> But that's not "usability", it's style.

I guess it depends on your definition of usability. Jakob Neilsen himself
believes that user satisfaction is a part of usability:

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

I agree that it's possible to have eminently usable software that is ugly to a
bunch of people. But it entirely depends on how that software is being used.

In the case of a web site, Jakob says it well (from the same article I linked
above):

 _On the Web, usability is a necessary condition for survival. If a website is
difficult to use, people leave. If the homepage fails to clearly state what a
company offers and what users can do on the site, people leave. If users get
lost on a website, they leave. If a website's information is hard to read or
doesn't answer users' key questions, they leave._

I would add: if the site is ugly, people leave.

Your web site might be "eminently usable", but if people don't read it, it's a
failure.

------
globalrev
I reacted the same way the first time I saw the site and found it a bit
amusing but as I read on what he said made says so I kept reading.

However it is fine from a technical standpoint, it is just not visually
appealing.

\------------

"13 comments:

Anonymous said...

    
    
        Remember, Dr. Phil has a best selling DIET book.
        August 12, 2008 7:27 AM"

------
brlewis
He uses the term usability to isolate his principles from aesthetics, since
historically there have been a lot of flashy, bad web sites. His sparse design
helps hammer that point home.

For UX as a whole I wouldn't advise anyone to read useit exclusively.

------
makimaki
Unreadable? Far from it. The content is displayed clearly and obviously given
priority. But it can get a little difficult to dig into his archives.

I wouldn't however, call it the worst site I've ever seen.

------
litewulf
Thought: If Nielson made any attempt to make it pretty, people would be
complaining how everything violates this or that for the next couple of years.
By making things deliberately ugly, everyone is left only with "but its ugly!"

A clever man that Jakob.

~~~
unalone
That's like the idea behind the dregs of postmodern literature: that by
deliberately being bad, you're denying people the right to call you bad. That
is not the case: if you're bad, then you're bad, the end. And Nielson does
things poorly in his site design.

------
edw519
_It is as if, while he is handing out the Oscars, he is wearing a plaid
polyester suit._

lol, nice visual

I have actually turned down vendors selling CRM software because they didn't
follow up with me properly. Kinda ironic, huh?

The same thing applies here. The old adage is, "If you don't do the easy stuff
well, why should I even listen to you when it comes to the hard stuff?"

~~~
eru
'lol' has arrived?

~~~
eru
There are still almost no emoticons on hacker news.

~~~
DanielBMarkham
emoticons, when used correctly, can convey non-verbal cues that are not
obvious just by reading.

When used poorly the site degrades into a swampland.

In general, however, I like the idea of passing along my body language as I
type, so a good (chuckle) (grin) or :) used sparingly is a good thing.

