Ask Jakob Nielsen Almost Anything

Let's put it this way: when it comes to software, hardware, and Web usability issues, Jakob Nielsen be da man! There's been lots of talk about Linux usability since before kernel 1.0, and there has been so much discussion about Web site usability vs. technological cuteness, not only here on Slashdot but everywhere such things are discussed, that heads spin every time the subject comes up. So let's bypass all the people who have usability opinions just because they have opinions, and go straight to The World's Leading Expert. Read his Web site first to keep from asking questions he's answered over and over, then start typing (or moderating). Answers are scheduled to appear Friday.

Fonts on the web

There has been a lot of usability research concerning text printed on paper that indicates that serif fonts improve readibility, because the hooks at the ends of the fonts make words and sentences easier to follow. Has anything similar been done on the web? It seems to me that sans-serif fonts are easier to read on web sites because the low resolution of monitors (compared to paper, at any rate) make serif fonts harder to look at...

Linux and the Desktop

It is well known that Linux is, in usability terms, an unusable piece of trash, where the interface is changing widely from machine to machine, depending on what window manager is installed and exactly how the user set it up. For those who are trying to move Linux to everybody's desktop, there's a long row to hoe before it even comes close to ideal usability. So, in light of that, do you have any recommendations for standardizing the linux desktop that would provide "maximum bang for the buck"? In other words, what's the most importent thing to add as soon as possible in terms of usability?

/. usability rating?

Would you care to comment on the usability of slashdot? Good? Bad? Ugly? Be sure to read the apache section before answering that last one.

Experiment vs experience?

How much of your advice is based on experimental research, and how much on your personal experience and intuition? (And how much personal surfing experience do you get each day?)

A question

One of the areas I looked into for my MPhil thesis was allowing the user to customise the format of information on-the-fly, both in terms of page layout/format (eg: frames, tables, PDF, Postscript or straight page), and in terms of content presentation (eg: book-style paragraphs vs block paragraphs).

How practical/useful would it be if computer interfaces, in general, went in this sort of direction, allowing the user to enforce the format they want, rather than relying on the programmer or web-page designer to produce something usable?

Amazon Affiliation?

Have you considered the Amazon patent issues and your Amazon Affiliate usage?

Can you think of a usability feature ...

... that is very obvious and necessary in your opinion, but is hardly ever or has never been implemented, or is implemented poorly?

And what's the biggest sin you see in most applications?

Short vs long pages

In most of your writings and interviews, you seem to be recommending short pages as always better than long ones. Sometimes you qualify this as applying only to 'navigation pages'-- but you never define that term. Aren't there more complex rules about when it's okay to have a long page? Don't you yourself find it frustrating when you have to load multiple pages, when one longer page could easily have held all the info?

Browsers compensating for bad sites

To what extent will people start using their browser's features to compensate for bad web sites? For example, your browser might automatically convert frames to tables, or precis long chunks of text, or concatenate lots of bitty pages into one easily-readable page. Since there will always be badly designed sites out there, do you think this is a useful sticking-plaster?

worst you've ever seen

What's the worst Web site you've ever seen, and why?

KDE, Gnome. What's wrong and what's right ?

The question just about everyone wants to know about.

Now the KDE and Gnome are usable and at least one claims to be mature. What are they doing right ? What are they doing wrong and what do the need to address in the near term ( I.e. obvious usability bugs ) and the long term ( pushing the envelope and making things better ).

How much stuff is needed at the lower levels of the system to make these projects more usable than they are now ?

What do you think is the most glaring gap among Linux applications. My favorite is a clone of "edit.com" from Windows/dos. What's yours' ?

Patent culture vs Open Source culture

You are the holder (or co-holder) of quite a number of patents [xent.com]. Can Open Source software builders who construct, for example, something that "prints a hyperspacial document" or "updates visual bookmarks" expect to be hearing from your attorneys?

Design from the Users eyes or the users mind ?

Do you think that a good user interface can be designed without an understanding of the process behind it ?

HTML v... HTML ?

Any advice on how to do things like even column width on tables in a standard fashion or other more complex stuff?

We all would like to make standards-compliant websites, but the truth is that MSIE v. Netscape basically killed the idea of using HTML4... anything past 3's extensions and you start getting wierd rendering - is there a solution?

Revolutionary UNIX GUIs

In a Wired article on Eazel [wired.com] posted to Slashdot the other day, you said:

"They need to rethink the entire approach... They're saying let's implement a Mac-like interface so that we can have a nicer Unix. That's a nice thing, I guess, but it's not really revolutionary."

Can you describe some specific ideas and UI elements you would consider if you were designing the "revolutionary" Linux GUI?

Standards Compliance

What are your views on standards compliance for, baseline, HTML 4.01 and CSS-1? Are we fighting towards a goal which is universally unattainable (due to the embbeded nature of some browsers like WebTV and *cough* IE on Windows), or are we nearing a new age for web developers?

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Conservatism and straight-jacketing

You are regularly accused of being excessively conservative. Absolve yourself: Would you agree that it is often better to design a great site for 90% of your customers, than to dumb it down for the sake of the other web-handicapped 10%?

Palm and Handhelds

What do you think of Palm's new color devices? Do you think that color is the way to go on a portable device, or do you believe that greyscale displays provide all of the funcitonality needed for a PDA.

On a related note, how do you see Palm/Handheld devices evolving in the next few years?

http://fortes.com/ [fortes.com]

MacOS X vs. Gnome...

I'm currently a user of both an older version of the MacOS and Linux, where Linux is running (on both boxes I have) a combination of Sawmill and Gnome. I've been reading a lot about Aqua, both how much more advanced the rendering library is than anything we have on Linux, and about what a decline in usability it is compared to the MacOS of old. For one critique, check the recent article on arstechnica.com; it goes into more detail than I can.

I haven't used Aqua myself yet, but I'm beginning to think that in some ways its "dock" is inferior from a human interface point of view to the panel in Gnome, depending on how it's configured. If I've set up the pager to hold minimized applications, they're not in danger of being mistaken for application launchers or links to documents or directories. Applets are dissimilar to either; although the default tiles, IMHO, need to be a little better, all of the above seem to be differentiated much better than in MacOS.

I'm not thinking in terms of a "we must have a standard and make everyone use it" schtick that a lot of people get on when they talk about improving Linux's user interfaces; it doesn't seem to have helped Windows and MacOS all that much, IMHO. But how would you change the defaults in gnome (or KDE) to improve usability? Might their relative customability be useful in usability experiments?

I guess a good question would be, even though I like it a lot, is the panel trying to do too much?

Non-GUI apps and usability

Much attention is given to usability in GUIs and websites, (such as in your column Novice vs. Expert Users [useit.com]) but what about textmode and primarily keyboard applications such as text editors? Personally, i believe that Emacs has the best user interface of any text editor i've ever used (vi's a close second, calm down people :), but it's geared towards experts. What do you see for the future with regard to synthesizing novice usability and expert usability? the "smart menus" as seen in MS Office 2000 seem to head in that direction, only showing basic options unless an expansion button is pressed at the bottom of the menu. The best touch is that it "remembers" what you last used from the full menu and puts it on the basic menu. How can we smooth the curve?

Microsoft's Mars Project

Microsoft is developing a new online service called Mars [activewin.com]. What do you think about this (and AOL's) concept of hiding all of the nasty parts of the Internet from the user? Do you think that it breeds ignorance in users (i.e. not understanding the difference between a URL and an AOL keyword).

Filipe Fortes http://fortes.com [fortes.com]

Would you volunteer...

...an hour a week of your time and expertise to help the Linux community design a UI that does the right things right?

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Education

What type of education did you (and others )have to receive to become a useability expert? Basically whats the best route to get a career in human-computer factors?

Aqua

It has been said that Apple is throwing out years of usability research in favor of glitz and coolness in designing Aqua. Do you agree with this assesment? How does one effectively compromise between coolness and ease of use?

(You 'da man!)

The web is no excuse for bad design

The art of interface design and usability seem to have both taken great hits as applications move from the desktop to the web.

It seems that all the good practices we've learned in the last ten years of GUI design are simply thrown out the window, just because an app is on the web.

Zero keyboard navigability, garish visuals, bad fonts, and unintelligible buttons seem to be the norm instead of the exception nowadays. If a company released the same interface on the desktop, they'd be laughed out of existence.

What can be done to encourage web developers to follow solid, trusted, UI design guidelines?

Why won't people "read" web pages?

Dear Sir,
You say that people don't "read" web pages but instead "scan" them through quickly.

Do you think that the reason why people don't read web pages is because of some psychological phenomena, or due to the fact that it used to cost a lot to hang around on-line and read stuff, or why exactly is that? Why should web pages be different from books? Or is the reason overtly small fonts used in almost every other page to cram as much information as possible into each page?

As a side note, an idea: I think all browsers should be able to display the hierarchical structure of the web page, and provide effective means to search data from that hierarchy. I find "search" boxes which always say "no hits" most annoying.

Usability and aesthetics

How are usability and aesthetics related, if at all?

user unfriendly?

How would you respond to your criticts who say that rather than being a usability "expert" you're simply someone who points out the obvious? What of the people who say your views are actually limiting the evolution of the web rather than making it better place? And what about the notion that it's sorta hard to trust usability opinions from a website that is hard to find your way around?

(I don't mean for these questions to sound argumentative, I'm just reiterating things I've heard many times from various people on the web)

What's Next?

What is the next "big thing" in interfaces?

Surely "windowing" can't be the end-all-be-all of interfaces. Is there some paradigm shift around the corner which we can't conceive of right now? Perhaps the same "leap" which occurred going from command line/text to windows.

kuro5hin.org [kuro5hin.org]

Opinions on the "Internet Desktop"

In the article The Internet Desktop [useit.com], Nielsen states:

"Fundamentally, it is pretty silly to have a special browser for certain information objects simply because they happen to come from a specific storage location. There is no reason to treat information differently because it comes from the Internet instead of coming from your harddisk."

I've always been curious about this mindset. Generally, information on the internet is in the form of HTML or text files, and any other files need to be copied to a local location before being usable (Causing a long wait time, breaking any illusions of transparency). Internet files are also generally organized by someone who has an eye towards both navigation and graphical prettiness. The majority of the information is contained in the connections between various files, allowing for quick movements to different spots (in well-designed sites, of course)

Local files, on the other hand, are created using many different types of programs, and require a seperate application to view more often than web information does. Local information is being created by a single user for specialized use, with little view towards the overall structure of the filesystem. Information is usually contained within single files, with little relation to other files other than basic categories in directories.

Why, then, is there this idea that the same tool should be used for both types of information? I typically use a web browser for viewing HTML files: it lets me click the links that someone else has set up to ease my movement, applies the format the web author created, and gives me an interface for the time-consuming file download. Why should this be integrated with the program I use to navigate a directory tree of files that do not have links, lack an html format, and do not need to be downloaded from an incredibly slow resource to be used? And, what kind of justification is there for NOT splitting up access of a resource with millisecond responses from one with responses that can range all the way to hours?

Usability, Innovation, The failure of HTML

Do you think, in the long term, increased focus on usability and simplifying the web experience for users will result in a loss of technical innovation? By dumbing down the web, do you think technology will be dumbed down in the process?

Secondly, how do you feel regarding the failures of HTML as an interface delivery mechanism? The notion that the web has gone from pure information (93 and before) to presenting specific chunks of information in a taped-together layout that is built outside of the best use functionality of HTML. Do you agree that trying to put together an application interface with Microsoft Word is a ridiculous idea, so why are we trying to put together functional GUIs with a markup specific to text formatting?

Can you envision another non document-centric mechanism for bringing the web interface back in line with application UIs?

UI Hall of Shame

What are some of the biggest user interface blunders you've come across? I'm thinking of things like:

1. Adobe Acrobat using page-up/page-down for scrolling and up-arrow/down-arrow for paging.
2. Windows requiring the user to click "Start" in order to shut down.

Older, better user interfaces like Grail and NLS

I've been really impressed by some of the user interfaces that came before the Macintosh. I'd like to know what you think of them and whether you think that any of them have a chance of succeeding in some modern form.

I think that the original Macintosh team deserves a lot of credit for what they did, but they had to make a lot of compromises that probably don't make sense anymore

In this Alan Kay video tape [uvc.com], he demonstrates a great gestural user interface called Grail. In this environment, users interacted with the system by using a tablet. For example the user could delete objects by scratching them out, instead of selecting them and activating a menu.

The other system that really impressed me was Doug Engelbart's [bootstrap.org] NLS and AUGMENT systems. His system allowed the user to enter commands using a chord keyboard while operating the mouse. This seems somewhat harder to learn but much more efficient than the Mac and Mac clone system that are in common use today.

Disturbing anecdotes

Jakob,

Your work is chock full of terrifying statistics about what happens when we create slow, hard-to-navigate sites. When I (an information architect) try to convince my project teams to heed those statistics, though, nobody seems to listen. People continue to clamor for images, frames, JavaScript, etc.

If Ronald Reagan's speeches proved one thing to us, it's this: a well-chosen anecdote can drown out innumerable (and true) statistics. I was wondering whether you might have any good terrifying anecdotes that might scare people who are about to make an unusable web site into doing the right thing.

How can Open Source projects incorporate usability

Do you see any way of incorporating usability engineering into the Open Source development cycle, or is it too idealistic to get volunteer usability engineers working along with volunteer software engineers? See www.luigui.org [luigui.org] for one attempt to bring ui and usability to the OSS world.

thanks.

Re:MacOS X and Aqua interface

I'm interested in hearing Jakob's general thoughts about Mac OS X and the Aqua interface. I agree with Tog that there is a decline in usability from the current Mac OS interface and am worried the Aqua will alienate users old and new.

Jakob mentions that sometimes things are implemented the wrong way. (Web navigation should be on the right near the scroll bar to minimize cursor movement) but because it has been done that way for so long, switching to the proper way decreases usability. (Right side web navigation is a little awkward because we've all been trained to look to the left.) Do you think that some of the radical changes in Aqua will cause a usability decline even if the change is to do something in the "scientifically" correct way?

Also, with browsers refusing to implement standards properly do you endorse the use of tables to create page layout even though the specs say we should use CSS-P? I want to create pages to spec, but because of lousy browsers I'm forced to use tables if I want the output to be predictable across many browsers. (I don't want to have to write multiple versions and use browser detection.)

_________________________________________

interfaces for tiny devices

Any thoughts on cell phone and other tiny device interfaces? As neat as these things are, is there a utility to those microscopic screens?

User interface query

After perusing your website, I have only one question. What do you see as the next generation of user input outside of mice and keyboards?

Personally I would prefer touch screens and voice recognition ala star trek, but even these would seem to be similar to the windowing systems we currently use.

A alternative solution (to me at least) would be a 3D holographic display that would let you truly navigate the web or hard drive by just pointing/touching in the general area you are interested in and having the display change accordingly. But all this goes back to my original question, what interface (or combination of interfaces) would be the most intuitive in your opinion?

slashdot usability rating? - sm61144450146994

'...useit.com [useit.com] is an informative site - it features the forgotten side of software development, usability...'

Hi Jakob,

• Q1. How well in your opinion does slashdot rate as a study of usability and site design?
  Q2. What are the areas that need attention?
  
  I ask this because the code for the slashdot site, (slashcode) [slashcode.com] is open sourced and many (new) developers use slashdot as a guide for developing their own sites.

Color-coded links

I remember using some of the latest Mosaic versions. It had a feature that I liked but I have not found elsewhere.

The links used one color for visited links (say blue) and another for not visited (say red), as usual now. But the color was continous. If I have visited the URL, one day ago it was a bit redder than the one just visited. And so on. A link visited one month ago would be as red as one never visited.

Do you think this feature added in usability?
I find it better than the current discrete model.
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Novice and Expert Users

Currently, most software seems to be aimed either at novice users or at expert users. A good example is Microsoft Publisher vs. Quark XPress. Publisher is almost impossible for an expert to use; Quark XPress is almost impossible for a novice to use.

Do you think there is any way, in the same interface, to accomodate the needs of both expert and novice users?

Adobe Photoshop gives the user three different interfaces for a similar task: the brightness/contrast dialog, the levels dialog, and the curves dialog. All three make global changes to the amount of detail in an image, with the curves dialog being the most powerful and the least intuitive, and the brightness/contrast being the least powerful and the most intuitive.

Microsoft Office 2000 hides menu items that it thinks you don't need, and hides toolbars until you tell the program to display them or until you start on a task that uses one of those toolbars.

Do you think either approach makes sense? Do you think that the needs of novice and expert users are so fundamentally different that it's best that the two groups use different pieces of software?