Usability and interactivity: Common sense (...and Web 2.0)

Jacob Nielsen annoys me. I just had to get that out of the way, in the remote possibility that this fact was not clear from the rest of this post (to say nothing of the last one). Nielsen's points are not bad or wrong, but I think what bothers me is his self-righteousness about it. Also, his perspective is grounded in a capitalist's view of internet usability. In that context, his (almost) moralistic self-righteousness is intolerable. He values utility over aesthetics. The bottom line is making things easier for the customer, so you (as the seller of things or services online) can make more money.

All the same, the actual content of his site, www.useit.com is really quite unobjectionable. The worst you you could say about it (apart from its presentation) is that it is mostly just common sense. Here are some valuable points he makes which are not simply common sense (except perhaps for those who live and breath on the internet):

• Make your page title something meaningful and direct that search engines will find (what he calls "search engine visibility")
• Organize text for online reading with the following, rather than a "wall of text" or something "non-scannable" (by search engines), like PDF files :

subheads

bulleted lists

highlighted keywords

short paragraphs

the inverted pyramid

a simple writing style, and

de-fluffed language devoid of marketese.

• Avoiding fixed font sizes so people can make it larger if they need to (usability for the visually impaired)*
  

* Try hitting CTRL "+" (plus sign) and CTRL "-" (minus sign) and your browser will change the font size, if the website allows -- hence Nielsen's point)

I'm not sure about his points on the three stages of the Digital Divide. It's certainly true that the economic divide is shrinking as computers become cheaper, but his suggestion that we dumb down websites for the 40% of our population who are "low-literacy users" to a 6th grade reading level on the home page is a bit offensive from a broader societal perspective. He's basically saying that we should market our sites to the lowest common denominator. Shouldn't we simply educate people better, or use the incredible power of the internet to improve education, including information literacy? His bottom line is economic rather than educational, and it makes his self-righteousness intolerable or extremely annoying at best. (To say nothing of that self-satisfied smirk on his face -- 70+ high resolution photos of himself on his usability site! Count 'em.)

Last of all (for the time being) I think he's a little behind the times in terms of "that old saw," web 2.0. Web 2.0 is all about interactivity and usability. Jenny Levine spoke at her NYLA talk about the ease with which one can maintain a website, blog, or RSS aggregator these days, with the "type in the box" model of content creation, such as blogging -- the quintessential example of this. Just type in the box and click "publish." Instant update to your website. She of course was talking about using blogging in library web sites. I think Nielsen's approach to usability has a deep resonance with the theme of "marketing your library" which is an idea which has been around for a while. Having your corporate info in one place on your site (another good point by Nielsen), for instance, is just good PR. And especially for a public library, this kind of transparency is a good idea -- giving easy access to information about staff and the board and the mission statement all in one general space on the library's website. This is the "common sense" of marketing and PR.

But web usability is in a sense one of the driving forces behind web 2.0, and Nielsen seems not be aware of it.

To balance this negative perspective on Jacon Nielsen a little, I was more impressed with Nielsen's colleague Bruce Tognazzini, the Nielsen Norman Group's "software design guru." His site Ask Tog had some really interesting stuff, in particular the idea of Fitt's Law
which is that "The time to acquire a target is a function of the distance to and size of the target" -- Discussed in relation to icons on the computer screen, the usefulness of toolbars and taskbars and such. He worked for Apple and Sun Microsystems at different times, if I remember correctly.

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Another topic. I found it hard to come up with usability questions for my questionnaire for this week's assignment, in part because our assignments in the class have always had an aesthetic component which was central to each, whereas this usability survey is focused on the utility of a website rather than on the aesthetic experience of it. So I decided to make half of my survey on people's experience of the aesthetic content of my portfolio (more interesting to all concerned, I presume) as well as on their experience of the interactive web (web 2.0 and the like -- shopping or social networks, etc.) I'm not done with it yet, but that's been my thinking so far.

Since this is supposed to be a photo blog, here is the photo I used as the background to my usability survey. Fall ivy that's fallen off the vine and left colored stems. [altered...]