UI Guru Jakob Nielson's Site Is Unreadable | Hacker News Reader

UI Guru Jakob Nielson's Site Is Unreadable

whydoeseverythingsuck.com

41 pointswhalliburton36 comments

Nielsen was relevant and aesthetically conventional something like 6 years ago. This was before web designers got the technological capacity to make the sites we enjoy today. Worse, the designers were often infatuated with the kind of aesthetics that was almost completely unreadable (tiny pixelgrid text; low contrast designs; very little "information ink").

In that context, useit was a bastion of sanity.

Jump back to today's internet and you realize useit hasn't changed at all. Sensible considering his message has only changed evolutionarily instead of at the rapid pace of design sentimentality.

Useit is a design achromatism today, but its message is still just as relevant as before.

This is something of an ad hominem. Jakob's site having poor usability does not automatically invalidate his usability arguments.

See this article for his own view on the matter: http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2007/aug/09/guardianwee...

And then even if we assume that the quality of the site proves anything about Jakob's advice and that the site was intended to be "usable", the observation that the site is unusable for Hank still doesn't prove anything useful.

The whole point of most of Jakob's writing is that empirical evidence from watching typical users in your target market actually use your site is what matters. Hank's opinion doesn't matter unless he's (a) one of the users that Jakob is targeting and (b) representative of them. For which we have no data.

I am not a fan of Hank's writing.

I'm not willing to call it an ad hominem, because I've always assumed that implied in his articles is "my site is how you should do it." Which I don't agree with.

His techniques for bolding text and frequently making lists means I know what information the author thinks is important, and I am more likely to remember it when scanning a page. But I don't think you should optimize a page for scanning when you're really presenting an essay. Essays shouldn't scream at you; they should be memorable because the ideas as written struck a chord.

When some of the text is screaming at me, it's had to focus on the rest.

"I've always assumed that implied in his articles is "my site is how you should do it.""

But why? He doesn't say that anywhere. He doesn't even lay down rules about how you should build any site. He's all about carrying out user testing. He suggests techniques that he thinks are likely to work, but he always qualifies these opinions.

What I find particularly irritating about Hank's blog post is that he seems to me to be saying "useit is ugly" rather more than he is saying "useit is unusable" - the latter if provable is relevant, but Jakob's articles are not about beauty - only usability.

Because he has a site on usability, and the presentation is unlike other sites I've seen. I assume these are his ideas in action.

Agreed. There is no other way to possibly interpret his site's look as a statement on how he thinks you should present content sites that aim to have free content lead to paid content sales.

His audience is probably older, and therefore his text is large. He could use a little line-height, but I find the site to be readable and the text size is controllable with browser settings, so I don't see the problem.

When I go back to an article that I have already read, I find that the bolded parts help me find the section I was looking for.

I believe that Hanks post is stating the you cannot separate aesthetics from usability. If the site is unreadable to Hank it has failed to be usable for at least him.

But Hank's not making an attack on the usability but on the readability. .

He's merely critiquing the aesthetics. The whole 'unreadable' jazz is histrionics.

Now for a pukka critique of Jakob's site take a look at DESIGN EYE for the Usability Guy http://www.designbyfire.com/000094.html

Just remember, Nielsen focuses on usability investments with positive (often large) ROI. Since NNG charges $40,000-$1,000,000+ for a consultation, you'd rather make MONEY off his recommendations than win beauty pageants.

It's very possible that he's paid a lot of money simply as a "valued" measure to refute the real costs of quality UI design (which can cost more than 40k to 1M).

To me, the article in reference is both unreadable and unscannable, making it basically unusable.

- Its default font size is much larger than what my browser is set to. This removes focus on the text's meaning and forces me to recalibrate my mind to its presentation and adjust to that, for better or worse (in this case worse.)

- The obsessively large headings make scanning 'stuttery.' (or is my own browser misrepresentative of the bulk of users?) These headings are scarily large when hitting them at reading speed.

- All the bold text is in such large quantities thus negating impact.

- There is no Table of Contents at top like a Wikipedia article with their jump-to links.

- I think one thing his site lacks is a decent menu and space between lines in bulleted lists.

He implements many of his own rules on his site and makes a caricature of them in the process. Sometimes you need to step back and say, "It might not be perfect from a rule-abiding sense, but does it work? If not, can we change things ever so slightly so as to create proportionally much larger improvements in usability?"

I'm with Hank here. It's always been quixotically humorous that Jakob preaches on UI, but has a site that really has nothing remarkable or memorable about it.

Doesn't though, mean I disagree with his messages.

But is Jakob aiming for "remarkable or memorable", or for highly functional?

Put another way-- is there anything in Jakob's (admittedly Spartan) design that gets in the way of the content?

Agreed. Beautiful is not the same as Usable. That being said, try to find a specific article on this page:

http://www.useit.com/alertbox/

A little bit of line height would go a long way. The dense, bright-blue links are nearly impossible to scan.

I've really struggled to find articles on this page in the past when I couldn't remember a word from the title. (So I could Ctrl+f)

Yes there is. His layout doesn't follow the grid at all, which creates additional cognitive load/eye strain when reading. Also aesthetics affects usability. In studies, it has been shown that people find things which are more aesthetically pleasing to them actually more _usable_ than equally structured but non-'beautiful' things.

Wide columns make it hard to read, and too many highlighted words and bullet lists make it feel like an infomercial. He seems to assume that his reader is an ADHD-addled Digg user incapable of reading normal text. As someone who is capable, I find it distracting, and also slightly condescending.

As someone who is capable

Makes it sound as if you make that same assumption, and for both parties, it's a highly unfounded assumption to make.

- The text practically overlaps

- He wrote a top-ten list of UIs - but there's no actual links to listed items

- I couldn't read the article. I scanned through to see if I could find the links, but couldn't

- I'm a UI designer and I don't remember a single entry

The page is designed to sell the full version of the article, not get you to play with Wufoo. This page is meant to funnel you to his paid content (or other articles which will funnel you to other paid content).

I just hate his use of bold with the lack of space between the lines it makes my eyes jump to the bold and then lose their place.

This whole critique is based on a fallacy: aesthetics and usability are not the same thing!

I don't see anything non-functional on the linked site at all. It just uses fonts and colors that aren't currently en vogue among the elite web 2.0 cadres. There aren't any background gradients. The text is white on black (horrors!) and somewhat larger than is fashionable these days (though why that should be a usability problem I don't know). It doesn't artificially restrict the text column to half (or less) of the browser width.

The worst thing is that there isn't even a shred of usability evidence anywhere in the post. When the author says that Jakob's site is "unreadable", what he's really saying is that he doesn't want to read it because it doesn't conform to his norms of aesthetics. It's like Picasso refusing to study Da Vinci because clearly he didn't grok cubism.

No, they are not the same thing, but that doesn't mean they aren't related. If you have a very negative aesthetic reaction to a web site, it will affect your use of the site.

Don Norman talks about this in his book Emotional Design. Everything we use elicits some kind of emotional response in us, and that affects our experience with the thing. Something is not "usable" if it's so repulsive that no one will use it. In this case, the goal of Jakob's site, for him and for us, is for us to read the articles. If we don't want to look at the page for more than 30 seconds, it's difficult to accomplish that goal.

But that's not "usability", it's style. Is style impotant? Yes. But it's entirely possible to have eminently usable software that is ugly to a bunch of people. Don't fall into the trap of thinking that your ideas about "ugly" are the same as other peoples'.

The implied irony was that a usability expert produce a site with poor usability, and it's just plain wrong. Visit the link. It's not even that ugly, frankly. It is spare, clean, and very well-organized. It just happens to look a lot like default HTML rendering. Shrug.

> But that's not "usability", it's style.

I guess it depends on your definition of usability. Jakob Neilsen himself believes that user satisfaction is a part of usability:

http://www.useit.com/alertbox/20030825.html

I agree that it's possible to have eminently usable software that is ugly to a bunch of people. But it entirely depends on how that software is being used.

In the case of a web site, Jakob says it well (from the same article I linked above):

On the Web, usability is a necessary condition for survival. If a website is difficult to use, people leave. If the homepage fails to clearly state what a company offers and what users can do on the site, people leave. If users get lost on a website, they leave. If a website's information is hard to read or doesn't answer users' key questions, they leave.

I would add: if the site is ugly, people leave.

Your web site might be "eminently usable", but if people don't read it, it's a failure.

No, style and aesthetics are intrinsically tied to usability and studies have shown this again and again. Check out Malcom Gladwell's Blink for a few colloquial examples. For more formal research studies, email me.

OMG. You're comparing Nielsen to cubism?

At best he's paint-by-numbers, using only 0 and 1.

I'll give him props for that aesthetic. Bit-minimalism.

I reacted the same way the first time I saw the site and found it a bit amusing but as I read on what he said made says so I kept reading.

However it is fine from a technical standpoint, it is just not visually appealing.

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"13 comments:

Anonymous said...

    Remember, Dr. Phil has a best selling DIET book.
    August 12, 2008 7:27 AM"

He uses the term usability to isolate his principles from aesthetics, since historically there have been a lot of flashy, bad web sites. His sparse design helps hammer that point home.

For UX as a whole I wouldn't advise anyone to read useit exclusively.

Unreadable? Far from it. The content is displayed clearly and obviously given priority. But it can get a little difficult to dig into his archives.

I wouldn't however, call it the worst site I've ever seen.

Thought: If Nielson made any attempt to make it pretty, people would be complaining how everything violates this or that for the next couple of years. By making things deliberately ugly, everyone is left only with "but its ugly!"

A clever man that Jakob.

That's like the idea behind the dregs of postmodern literature: that by deliberately being bad, you're denying people the right to call you bad. That is not the case: if you're bad, then you're bad, the end. And Nielson does things poorly in his site design.

It is as if, while he is handing out the Oscars, he is wearing a plaid polyester suit.

lol, nice visual

I have actually turned down vendors selling CRM software because they didn't follow up with me properly. Kinda ironic, huh?

The same thing applies here. The old adage is, "If you don't do the easy stuff well, why should I even listen to you when it comes to the hard stuff?"

'lol' has arrived?

There are still almost no emoticons on hacker news.

emoticons, when used correctly, can convey non-verbal cues that are not obvious just by reading.

When used poorly the site degrades into a swampland.

In general, however, I like the idea of passing along my body language as I type, so a good (chuckle) (grin) or :) used sparingly is a good thing.

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