

Web 2.0 Can Be Dangerous... - bostonbiz
http://www.useit.com/alertbox/web-2.html

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henning
I hate his excessive use of bold. It's like he's encouraging skimming and he
doesn't even want people to read carefully. I always feel like a chump when my
eyes wander.

~~~
pg
I was going to say that his site seems surprisingly badly designed for a
usability expert. The jittery typography makes it exhausting to read. And yet
maybe it does appeal to some people. Or rather, work on them. There may be a
reason all those sites with PROVEN techniques for generating a _six figure
income_ all look so similar.

<http://www.leemarketinggroup.com/page/page/5189275.htm>

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some
I love the design of useit.com. To me its one of the best designed websites
out there. By far. I hate most websites. I also like Hacker News. So im
surprised to see you disliking useit. Jittery typography? What would be
better? One giant block of uniform text?

How would you design useit?

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rms
See the way essays are presented on paulgraham.com. The limited line width
makes it very readable -- if useit.com was reformatted this way, the enormous
amount of text would be overwhelming. The main problem with useit is that the
way it is presented encourages you to not actually read it. To me, this
indicates that there is something wrong with the information, or at least it
should be a lot shorter.

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pchristensen
He's writing to two audiences at the same time but favoring one over the
other. The bold, etc makes it hard for _readers_ to read, but since they are
_readers_ , they'll read anyway. If they can't read it, at least they'll skim.

He's writing for the _skimmers_ , which happen to be some very large
percentage of web users. But these articles are mainly just loss leaders for
his books, full reports, and conferences, which are all media where people
give full attention by design.

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webwright
"If you're a mainstream business site (including government and non-profit
sites), your user experience needs are very different than those of the few
hot sites that attract all the attention."

This is a great point... If your audience is mainstream, you need to keep it
simple. I worked at a job/employment site recently which was doing some cool-
ass AJAX UI for the consumer part of the site. The entire product team LOVED
it. Usability tests were a disaster. Users were confused and frustrated. The
time saved with AJAX was lost when the user had to actually THINK about what
to do on the page.

"For website usability, the problem is not whether a specific operation takes
1 second or 10 seconds; people typically perform each operation only once or
twice. The problem for websites is the 5-10 minutes users lose when they do
something wrong because the site is too complicated. (After such an
experience, they usually leave -- and you lose the business.) Simplicity is
more important than efficiency for done-once actions."

Of course, if your audience is geeky, go nuts! :-)

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dangrover
While he makes some good points, he also makes some hasty generalizations. You
could just as easily have a complicated, poorly designed interface with or
without AJAX being involved.

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brlewis
From the article: "Unlike some older technologies (notably, Flash and PDF),
Web 2.0 ideas are not _inherently_ bad for users. They _can_ be highly
effective; we sometimes see examples of usability-enhancing Web 2.0 designs in
our studies."

