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Comment by dimmuborgir | Hacker News Reader

You're confusing between unusability and unreadability.

No, you're confusing usability with being pretty.

No.

If one looks at useit.com homepage, what is "Alertbox" to the left supposed to mean? Are they blog posts or articles? If articles, how do they differ from "Reports" below? And in the News section to the right, both the news items and "as seen in the media" are mixed together.

Jakob has been writing Alertbox columns since 1995, clicking Alertbox takes you to an index of all the columns. Reports are long format studies of usability issues that are available for purchase. Click any report title to see a summary, TOC and purchasing options. There is a horizontal rule separating media mentions/interviews and the lastest on his events. I find nothing about this confusing, it's quite usable. It's not pretty though.

To be fair, what you're highlighting is that useit.com caters better for regular visitors than for newcomers who aren't familiar with its terminology, which is a genuine usability problem. Your visitors spend most of their time on other people's sites, remember? :-)

Is Alertbox really such a cryptic term? I doubt that very much.

It's misleading if you don't know what it refers to - it makes one think it pertains to something that they need to be aware of, perhaps even something dangerous... maybe a security issue or something like that.

I guess Nielsen is aware of this issue. “Alertbox” is the only headline on his start page (save for the actual title of the website) that has a subtitle: “Jakob's column on Web usability” – a quite succinct description of what the Alertbox actually is.

Calling it Alertbox is certainly more about branding than anything else. (People don’t read on the web; the subtitle is not going to help much, right?) Nielsen has been writing his column since 1995, renaming it “Jakob’s blog” or “Jakob’s column” or something like that at this point in time would be extremely stupid.

Everyone who was somewhat interested in usability during the last decade knows about the Alertbox (if only because they were annoyed by it). It’s a brand. All the noobs (who this website isn’t really targeting anyway) get the subtitle.

It was noted by Amy Schade during the 2008 NNG Usability Week conference that "Alertbox" would not be a wise choice if selected now but that the branding is too strong to support an easy change.

"Being pretty" is a must for great usability. I am not talking about decoration which is superficial, but the real prettiness which comes from having clear layout, visual hierarchy, well thought-out typography, etc. To borrow from Steve Jobs: design is how it works. There is not much to "work" on useit.com, but there definitely is a room for improvement (layout, typography, focus, etc), now it is just two columns with bunch of links. See for example http://alistapart.com/ — for me it is still has the best design for content-oriented site. It is very pretty and at the same time all that prettiness has a function.

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