Jakob Nielsen probably doesn't like your Web site one bit. Nielsen doesn't like most sites. For years, the former Sun engineer has been crusading against bad Web design, using his biweekly "Alertbox" column to lambaste indulgent, graphics-bloated sites. His most recent book, Designing Web Usability, has a quarter of a million copies in print. We had a chance to catch up with the controversial Dane at his home in Mountain View, Calif., as he took a brief respite from his 12-city usability world tour. Excerpts:
What are some of the most egregious things you've seen in Web design recently?
Jakob Nielsen: There's an annoying use of pop-up windows. Pop-ups are multiplying, and they're polluting my screen. People basically just kill them before they've even rendered, because they've seen them used so much in advertising.
Do you think Web sites should be 100 percent utilitarian, even at the expense of fashion?
JN: Fashion should be there in terms of the content, not the design. If you follow fashion too much, you will change all the time, and you will continuously antagonize your users.
Interactive design is interactive - people do things there. That's why big changes feel so uncomfortable to users. Whereas in a magazine, for example, people don't have to do anything, they just have to read. Therefore you can actually make dramatic changes in the layout of a magazine and people will immediately know how to use it.
But if every site looked like Yahoo, wouldn't the Web be a dull place?
JN: They wouldn't all be like Yahoo unless they happened to be directory sites. If each service is trying to achieve different things, that lends itself to different designs. But you'd still see the same underlying principles, which are simplicity and not too much superficial stuff.
Do you think of Web design as something that's always evolving, or are there some core principles?
JN: Probably both. I believe that what constitutes a good site relates to the core basis of human nature and not to the technology, not to fashion. So in that sense, it would be pretty close to constant. It's sort of like a good book 50 years ago is a good book today. The downside is that we have not yet discovered enough of the principles of interactive design, because it's still a fairly new field. Book design is like 500 years old. They discovered principles like page numbers and the idea of a table of contents. But when it comes to interactive design, I don't think we have as much of that list as we have for books.
Will broadband improve Web site design, or will it lead to the sort of excess that we saw with CD-ROM design?
JN: CD-ROMs are a good example that just removing the bandwidth barrier does not mean that we now have great multimedia that works well and that everybody can use. I think that opening up for high bandwidth and opening up for multimedia in some ways just gives you more rope to hang yourself with.
There's a backlash right now against WAP. Is it theoretically possible to design something good on a 3-inch screen?
JN: If you ask me about WAP phones, I would say forget about it. They are so impoverished an environment that I don't think you can ever make a really good [Web] service. But what you can do is make a service for a pocket-size screen. And I think that's going to be very common maybe three years from now.
