E-visionaries: Jakob Nielsen is a world authority on Web usability
and the scourge of corporate "bloat" in site design. As he prepared
to hit the UK with his usability "world tour" he spoke to Paul
Mason about his vision for the Internet
Jakob Nielsen is best known as the guru of Webusability. Through
his consultancy, the Nielsen Norman Group, he has lectured,
hectored and vectored firms towards the goal of Web sites that
actually work for the user.
But Nielsen's views are controversial. To some, his insistence
on simplicity, straight lines and limited colours make him the
Internet's Mondrian - a minimalist genius and scourge of design
overload. But to many in the Web design fraternity he is just a
killjoy. What good is the Web, they ask, if you can't push the
boundaries set by standards bodies that necessarily work to the
lowest common denominator.
Nielsen flies in to London this month on a "world tour" of
lectures and seminars dedicated to spreading the word on usability
(see box p58). But just what is usability, and is it getting better
or worse as the Web becomes commercialised?
"Commercialisation made things worse, but e-commerce is actually
making things better," says Nielsen. "Many big companies produce
very bad Web sites. But many commerce Web sites - sites that
actually sell something - are reasonably good. Not all are up to my
complete standards, but pretty good.
"The difference between a big company Web site and a commerce
site that actually sells things is simple: on the e-commerce Web
site, they are accountable for the quality of the design. If it is
easy to use, it will sell; if it is difficult to use, people will
go away. So they have this very easy metric that they can see every
day.
"Contrast that to a big corporate Web site. In a big company
there is no accountability for the actual user experience because
the way they rate employees or give them promotions is not based on
whether the users can use the Web site.
The way they judge things in a big company is that you give a
presentation to the executive committee and, if they like it, you
are doing well. That's why there are so many big company Web sites
that actually look very good but are impossible to use. The
managers never had to use them."
Has Nielsen noticed any difference as Web front-ends become
integrated with back-end systems? Does this inevitably lead to
functionality being defined in IT terms rather than end-user
terms?
"I don't think it's getting better as fast as I would like, but
it is definitely getting better. There are fewer of the really
'loaded' Web sites, with huge splash pages, those Flash screens,
big photos everywhere. There is more focus on the things customers
want.
"The new emphasis on back-end connectivity may help here because
back-end engineers are not so obsessed with graphics. They are more
obsessed with making a solution and I think that is a better stage
to move from when you're trying to make something good.
"It just changes the question in terms of usability. In a
traditional Web site the question was how to provide things people
want to know. In the new scenario it's more: 'Let's make the
features work the way people think, make them more natural, make it
an easy task flow.' Those are the classic problems that we've been
dealing with for 20 years. They are not going to go away."
Horror stories
What are the horror stories on today's Web sites? Nielsen has a
famous vendetta against Flash, the graphics plug-in that allows Web
sites to run animated films.
"Flash is just as bad as the old 'splash page'. Before you get
in to use something - which was why you came to the Web site - you
have to sit and suffer through something. At least most of the
Flash intros have a little button that says 'skip the intro'.
"It is annoying that, after all the investment sunk into the
Internet in the past five years, we've got a new technology and a
new way of annoying users."
Apart from Flash his biggest gripe at present is site designers'
inability to provide logical search facilities. "A search engine is
a completely different thing than all other issues in Web design -
an add-on. It typically gets neglected in every process. And yet if
you look at what the user does when they arrive at the Web site,
they very often go directly to the search engine."
Nielsen believes there are two types of users: those who know
vaguely what they are looking for and those who know exactly what
they want to find.
"If you try that on almost all Web sites today, you will fail
miserably because the search engines are of random quality: they
just do full word, keyword matching."
Does Nielsen's hostility to Flash extend to all the proprietary
extensions to HTML that many Web purists fear will destroy it as an
open standard - for example .php, .asp?
"You have to distinguish between two different types of those
proprietary languages. There are ones that only live on the
back-end server, then they spit out standard HTML, like .php and
.asp. With this we can say Microsoft did something right. With
these products the only place where you have an incompatible
technology is on the server and it's purely up to a user company to
make sure that their own server works and that they hire staff who
know the programming language.
"The problem is when the stack of things transmitted across the
Internet arrive at your machine in a non-standard format. Flash is
right now the worst offender for that. I'm not saying never use it
but I'm just saying only use it when it really adds value. When you
use non-standard technologies, there's a lot of problems you run
into. Macromedia would say: 'But 90% of all Web users do have our
programme installed.' To which there are two answers: first, which
version? Second, it means you can lose 10% of your business just by
that decision."
Instant gratification
Nielsen thinks the Web's "killer app" is its ability to provide
instant gratification. "I get what I want, that's what the Internet
gives to me and it really is a very satisfying feeling that I
personally control my destiny. I am the emperor, the ruler of the
universe - a very small universe, admittedly, constructed on my
screen. I rule that little domain. And that's the feeling that the
Internet really emphasises. Anybody who messes with that, it's like
a rebellion against the emperor And that's what the people do when
they kind of freeze your screen with a Flash that takes forever to
download. Or they do other things that interfere with my ability to
do what I want."
What does Nielsen say to colleges that are training people in
Flash and various other multimedia plug-ins to the Web? "My main
worry is that they're telling people 'this is what you can do
tomorrow'. It should be: 'these are things you should consider for
five years from now'. I would say that it is more important to
teach interaction theory - which is to say the principles of human
behaviour; what is easy for people to use and what is difficult for
people to use, because those are constant principles."
Nielsen refutes the charge that his approach to Internet
usability has not changed much since HTML's early iterations.
"That's because I'm really focused on the human side of technology
and that's based on the human brain and other aspects of the human
perception: it's basically the brain and that's going to stay the
same.
"In contrast there's technology which is changing all the time.
So when you talk about the educational system, I would rather have
them not focus on the technology. Whatever people are going to do
to build good Web sites in five years it's almost certainly not
going to be Flash - but what is going to remain constant is how
many things the human brain can keep and sort in its memory at any
one time."
For Nielsen usability and the defence of global Internet
standards go hand in hand. "The first reason is that one of the
first criteria for usability is that it works. And that's where the
standards are really important: because it's just impossible to
develop or test their designs on all possible platforms."
"It is very dangerous to predict into the future from the
current scenario. Right now we have a temporary situation - call it
an aberration - where Microsoft Internet Explorer rules the Web and
there's a few people left that use Netscape, but not very many.
Internet Explorer has 85% of the market and Windows has an even
bigger market here. So I can understand people saying that's what
we're aiming at. But, actually this is exactly the same scenario we
had five years ago, it was just Netscape instead. You also had one
dominant browser that everyone used except for a few percent, who
used something else. But I think those two scenarios were
temporary. For example we had a big transition period from Netscape
to Internet Explorer - a four-year period where the two were almost
equally big.
"In the future devices and browser programs will be very
different. So for your Web site to work across all those different
environments, it's got to follow the standards. The second reason
that standards are important for usability comes back to human
behaviour. Even if we are left with Microsoft ruling the world, we
are still left with the fact that eyeballs, people, are human. When
someone moves around from one Web site to another, if they know
what to expect it is much easier for them to use it.
"Take a simple example: the 'back' button on a browser. Does the
back button work? Well if people follow the standard, then users
can navigate and they can move forward by clicking an underlined
link, or they can move backwards by clicking the back button. And
if they come across something they like, they can copy the URL and
stick it in an e-mail and send it to one of their friends, saying:
'You should look at this Web page.'
"If people do not follow the standards, then suddenly the back
button doesn't work. When you think you've been navigating, you've
really just been going the round inside of some Flash thing, for
example. Or they have done something weird in Javascript that makes
it not work.
"Every time we do studies of users we see the back button is,
like, magnetic. It's like the back button is the lifeline of the
user. Having the authority for me to say: 'This is the wrong path,
I want to go back.' That's one of the things that makes the very
strong feeling of empowerment and satisfaction on the side of the
user.
"Following the standards encourages that feeling of empowerment
of people knowing what to do. And the more they know what to do the
more they will dig into it and enjoy it."
Future browsing
Nielsen moves on to cascading style sheets - another add-on to
basic HTML that, in this case, has been accepted into the
World-Wide Web Consortium standard for Internet authoring.
"The only issue of concern that I have about style sheets is
that if they have been very poorly implemented in the browsers,
particularly the Version 4 browsers. Internet Explorer 5 actually
did a decent job, and there again, one can always criticise
Microsoft for making a few mistakes but they actually did a fairly
good job, so the critique is that they didn't do a perfect job. I
think we've just been through a temporary period where we have had
a good idea and a good specification but a bad implementation.
Style sheets have not taken off as well as they should have but I
must say I see them used more and more when I go to well designed
Web sites.
"Style sheets give designers more freedom, which is good, but it
also gives designers more opportunities to do things that actually
hurt you. For example, you can specify the text size, the font size
completely accurately which graphic designers love - but here's the
danger - how do you know that you're not showing your material to a
user who needs different text because they have poor eyesight. And
so if you freeze the font size and say 'this is going to be 11
point for ever after', that is going to be very unpleasant to a
user who needs 14 point to read."
Is it still possible to design a good looking Web front-end
using plain vanilla HTML?
"I think yes," says Nielsen. "You can spice it up a little bit
with some use of style sheets. But one of the interesting points if
you do this is what happens if the browser does not support them.
If it's done correctly it will have graceful degradation. Users
will not see that little extra effect that you designed into to
make it look good - but it will still look almost as good. That is
a really important point. Non-standard features need have graceful
degradation. As opposed to, I guess, miserable degradation."
What does Nielsen think the Internet will look like in five
years' time?
"We've added a small amount of multimedia. That's what the past
five years have given us. If you look at the next five years, many
of the changes will be of the same modest kind.
"Because there's now a really big installed base it becomes more
difficult to make radical change. Bandwidth is not going up very
fast. It is going up fast in the dreams of telephone companies, and
in the demos, and in the trade shows. But if you look at the actual
connection of the house of an actual person, the vast majority of
people in the UK still don't have broadband.
"In five years' time the majority of people would have
reasonably good connections, but there will still be a minority who
have just the same bad connections we have today.
"But if we look 10 years into the future, I think we start
assuming that everybody is well connected. Other technologies we
can look at are what kind of computers people will have.
"Here's a nice prediction, and this is one that I am 100% sure
on: what will be a low end computer in five years? It will be the
computer you just bought yesterday. Because that same physical
computer will most likely be in the world in five years. You won't
be using it, hopefully, but somebody will.
"Now if you look 10 years into the future, what will the low end
computer be? That will be something very fancy. And what will the
high end computer be in 10 years? That will be something fabulous.
But in five years, we're still going to have the clunky systems.
We're still going to have people using Windows 2000, just as today
we still have people using Win95. It's just going to be
misery."
Nielsen sees the fastest evolutionary change in the next five
years on the mobile Internet.
"Wap phones might as well not exist because Wap is just so
unpleasant that it's not going to have any impact on the mobile
Internet in the long term. Maybe in the year 2000, 2001 - but in
five years from now people aren't even going to remember Wap. It is
going to be sort of like discussing some esoteric feature of
Netscape 1.2. 'Well, yeah, I remember it, was there'.
"Devices like wireless personal digital assistants will make a
big revolution in how people use the Internet. They will make it
even more personal, will make it even more the instant
gratification medium - where I get what I want and now you can add
where and when I want it."
Nielsen believes the next big revolution in Internet usability
will be to abandon the "page metaphor".
"We will abandon the Web browser and really have something that
I call the Internet desktop which is your information control
panel, a new type of software that will integrate your view of all
information resources, whether they are e-mail, Web pages, stock
trading systems, everything like that."
No more hypertext?
There will be no connection between this interface and the
hypertext link, Nielsen believes. Coming from the guru of old
school Internet design that sounds like heresy.
"I'm a very big fan of hypertext and I've worked on it since
1983 - but hypertext is often quite jarring and should really serve
a smaller percentage of your interaction than it is now.
"Hypertext is like a time warp: it's like being beamed up in
Star Trek. You click on something and - boom! - your previous
existence vanishes in a puff of smoke and you materialise in some
random new place in the universe without any understanding of
what's going on."
"It has certainly been successful, but it wasn't the optimal way
of managing all your information needs. You would never make a
spreadsheet that, every time you changed a plus or minus, the
entire whole display goes away and another one appears.
"The question is, can we get rid of the browser in the next five
years? In the old days I would have said: 'Yes, because the new
ideas are so much better than the old ones.' But I am getting more
conservative. The problem is the big installed base."
Small businesses are today confronted with a "shrink-wrapped"
Web presence packages - often based on Front Page or some other
standard interface design - and they don't have time or money to
think about usability as a discipline. What would Nielsen's advice
be to a small firm starting out on the Web?
"I would say keep it simple. The fewer resources you have the
more you can waste them by trying to do something overly fancy
that's not actually going to work. I think it's very important to
focus on the content, on the information that customers actually
want as opposed to on the glitz which costs a lot of money to do
and is not going to be a differentiator."
"An SME by definition is a targeted company that does one thing,
hopefully, well. So if they can describe that, they can actually
stand out. Big companies always provide grand descriptions of what
they are doing because no one actually knows what they are doing. A
small company can be very specific: this is what we do. Provide a
clear and simple explanation of what you do and write the content
in a scaled-back manner; not too filled with slogans and bragging
but tell you exactly what you do. This is easy advice to give, but
it's quite hard to do.
"For example on the Nielsen Norman Group home page we once said:
'The philosophy of Nielsen Norman Group is simple.' There followed
eight paragraphs of really heavy-duty text. And when we did our
testing, people said: 'If your philosophy is so simple, why did it
take you eight paragraphs to explain it.'
"That was a classic mistake because we thought that one
paragraph was all really important information, but when users come
there they just want one or two simple facts to start with.
"If you sell products, use clean simple product photographs.
People actually do want to see what they're getting, so that's a
type of graphics that really help.
"Also add prices. For some reason a lot of people don't want to
say what things cost on the Web, but nobody's ever going to buy
anything without getting the price, so you might as well give
it.
"Often users in tests say: 'I don't understand what this is - is
this a £20 product, a £2,000, or a £2m thing?'
"So think about it from the customer's perspective: what pieces
of information do people really need to know and explain those in
no-nonsense, plain and simple language. That's the one thing a
small company can do; it doesn't require anything other than a
commitment to writing the simple truths."
Nielsen thinks it is a problem for small firms to put themselves
completely into the hands of "one-stop" Web presence firms. "You
need to maintain the chart of your own destiny on the Internet,
because that is really the future of business. So you have to
maintain control over your own Web site.
"Of course it's good to have a good graphic designer help you
with the layout - for that is the thing the average person does
very poorly. But the content is really what people are there for
and that has to be written by someone who knows the business."
www.useit.com
Jakob Nielsen: CV
>CEO, nielsen norman group
Jakob Nielsen, PhD in user interface design/computer science,
founded the "discount usability engineering" movement for fast and
cheap improvements of user interfaces. Nielsen has published nine
texts focused on usability, the latest being Designing Web
Usability: The Practice of Simplicity (2000), which examines Web
site design from the perspective of the users' needs. For more
information visit: www.useit.com
His User Experience World Tour is in London 28-30 November. The
main event is 30 November, Royal Drury Lane Theatre, London, tel:
+44(0)20-7494 5399, www.stoll-moss.com. The tutorials are on 28 and
29 November at the Paragon Hotel, 47 Lillie Road, London , tel:
+44(0)020-7385 1255 www.paragonhotel.co.uk.
Nielsen on the bottom-line benefits of Web usability
For Nielsen, usability is not just an added extra but crucial to
the bottom-line benefits of trading on the Internet. "When Web
sites improve their usability, they really specifically get
dramatically increased sales or increased usage, whatever way you
want to measure success."
Nielsen claims he can improve "measured usability" on any Web
site by "50% -100% if I do really well". By measured usability, he
means speed, ability of users to remember what they saw etc.
However, he claims that a 100% usability hike can deliver four
times that benefit in increased sales.
"If you make it twice as easy to find things, people don't just
buy twice as much, but they buy four times as much because now they
feel this is a Web sites that they can trust, that is welcoming
them, and they'll be able to find it in the future.
"Maybe this is a temporary situation that only works because so
many other Web sites are so bad so that people feel really thrilled
when they come across a good one - but right now it is really true
that the impact of usability on the bottom line of an Internet
company is dramatically bigger than anything else. I think
companies now are wasting endless resources on advertising. This
drives people to the home page - but then, if it's unusable, they
go away.
"On lots of Web sites 90% of the people who look at the home
page, look at no other page. And what usability does is it takes
the other half of the equation which is of the people who look at
your home page, how many of them become your customers? This is
known as the conversion rate, and on most Web sites the conversion
rate is about 1%.
"So you have two problems you could attack. You could either
make the number of people who look at your home page bigger or you
could make the percentage of people who look at you home page who
will then convert into customers bigger.
"Usability attacks the second problem and in a sense that is
where the vast issues lie. That's where most companies are losing
almost all their business."
Nielsen's top 10 mistakes on the Web
Since 1996 Jakob Nielsen has kept a list of the top 10 mistakes
in Web design. He says this is mostly still valid, but in 1999 he
added a further 10 mistakes resulting from new technology and
applications. For the full explanation visit www.useit.com/
alertbox/990530.html.
- Breaking or slowing down the 'back' button
- Opening new browser windows
- Non-standard use of GUI widgets
- Headlines that make no sense out of context
- Jumping at the latest Internet buzzword
- Slow server response times
- Anything that looks like advertising