If anyone's name has come to mean usability, it's Jakob Nielsen's. The New York Times called him "a guru of Web usability;" USA Today called him a "true time machine" for predicting Web trends; and the Chicago Tribune says he "knows more about what makes Web sites work than anyone else on the planet." His 1994 book, Usability Engineering was the pioneering work on creating interfaces that people can understand and operate, and his current book, Designing Web Usability: The Practice of Simplicity, takes those principles and applies them to the Web.
In August 1998, Nielsen cofounded Nielsen Norman Group with Don Norman, former vice president of Apple's research division. From 1994 until then, he had been a Sun Microsystems Distinguished Engineer in the SunSoft Science Office in Menlo Park, CA. From 1990 to 1994 he was the principal investigator for usability engineering research in Bellcore's Applied Research Area in Morristown, NJ.
Nielsen spoke with Web Techniques' senior editor Yvonne Lee before his company's User Experience World Tour, a 12-city series of conferences designed to gather usability experts and to spread the gospel of simpler, more navigable Web sites.
WT: What is usability?
JN: Well, it's really defined as supporting the user's task, that is, making it easy for people to do what they want to do.
There are five components. The first is ease of learning. When you don't know how to do something, how easy is it to gain that knowledge? On the Web, you constantly hit new pages, and you have very little motivation to start a learning process. Ease of learning is paramount on the Web, but less so for intranets and internal applications. Even there, you would still say if it's possible to learn something in two hours, that's still better than learning it in a week.
The next issue is efficiency of use. Once you've learned something; what is your transaction throughput? This is very important in traditional computer access, where you're doing the same thing multiple times. On the Web, an example of something that supports transaction throughput is one-click shopping on Amazon.
The third item is memorability. When you return to something after an absence, do you have to relearn it? There are things that can be quite complicated to learn, but once you learn them, they stay with you.
Back in '84 when we performed the first usability studies on the Macintosh, one of the most difficult things for people to comprehend was the Apple Menu. Nobody ever thought the logo was a menu. Everything else on screen that you could click on looked very different. But when someone had a question about how to do something and an experienced user told the person to go to the Apple Menu, if the person asked, "Apple Menu?'', this information stuck.
Issue four is user errors. How often do you do the right thing, and how often do you do the wrong thing? For example, on a Web storefront, it may not be at all obvious that there are three variants of a product. Only when you receive the product do you discover that you've selected the wrong item. What you really want to avoid are errors that have high recovery costs. Military applications would be the highest.
Issue five is "How pleasant is it?" In work-oriented environments, you can force people to use a difficult interface. This may be some of the reason that intranet applications are so bad. Companies may refuse to spend resources on a usable interface.
In traditional commerce, first you buy a microwave, or a VCR, or an Excel spreadsheet. By the time you've discovered that a product is too difficult to use, the manufacturer is laughing all the way to the bank. On the Web, if a site or product is too difficult, the user's reaction is to leave. The Web reverses the user experience and transaction process. On the Internet, ease of use comes first and transfer of money comes second. Revenues on the Web are determined almost completely by usability.
WT: What is the User Experience World Tour and why are you doing it?
JN: It's a conference that the Nielsen Norman Group is taking to 12 cities around the world beginning in New York in November 2000 and ending in Seattle on April 8, 2001. It includes London, Stockholm, Munich, Tokyo, Hong Kong, Singapore, and Sydney. Here in the U.S., it's in Austin, Chicago, and San Francisco, as well as New York.
We're doing it because the world has changed in the last few years. We are the founders of this field. There used to be just a handful of us, but now there are tens of thousands of Web designers worldwide pursuing user experience. There are enough of them that take it seriously-20,000 to 30,000 all over the world. Most of them have entered the field in the last year. We want to support our colleagues and put usability on the agenda for the new economy. Make executives aware that if they don't do this, they are doomed.
WT: Earlier, you said that one of the characteristics of usability was memorability. Does that mean that you shouldn't redesign Web sites?
JN: Users have only one reaction to a redesign: "I don't like change." The best sites are those such as Yahoo and Amazon, where the interface is fairly straightforward. There are changes as far as expectations go. Even they should not stay the same. The challenge is balancing memorability. On the other hand, you can attract new users who won't just visit and leave but visit and stay.
I advocate a conservative approach to redesign: once a year is currently the best frequency. Back in 1994 and '95, I advised redesigning every two months. The rate of change is not as high as it once was.
It used to be that when a new browser came out, within a few months everyone had downloaded it because it was so obviously superior. Now when a new version of Internet Explorer comes out, people yawn.
The Internet user base is changing. It used to be, particularly in '93 when Mosaic was the dominant browser, that people were on the Internet for the sake of being on the Internet. Nowadays, people go online to get something done. That means that we should focus less on technology, and more on getting things done.
In 1995, we recommended updating sites quarterly, in 1998 it was about every half year, in 2000 to 2001, about once a year.
I'm not saying to keep your Web site static. You would constantly tweak it, put updated news on the home page, and put up new products. If you change your page layout, that's when users would have to learn something new.
WT: On your site, you recently talked about how there's a problem when people other than Web designers begin creating Web sites. I've particularly noticed a proliferation of bad writing on the Web. How do you rectify that?
JN: I think it's the beauty of the Web, it's a more democratic publishing medium, but we also have to start to worry about the quality of the sites.
One of the things that traditional publications would have done is to have an editor review material to be published. On the Web, even major companies let a marketing person post without editorial review. They don't treat it seriously as a publishing medium to this day.
WT: Your site talks about keeping pictures to a minimum. What do you think of Flash?
JN: I think that 98 percent of all Flash on the Web should be pulled. Companies are spending lots of money on flashy intros when visitors almost always push the skip button. Flash is being abused for irrelevant information. That's not a fault of the technology. It could be used for useful, interesting technology.
The other thing I have against Flash is that it's a nonstandard plug-in based technology. You can't search it, you can't bookmark Flash pages, and the controls to operate the information space are not standard.
Every Flash designer is compelled to design his own scroll bar. It's not a simple thing to build a scroll bar (properly). It took Apple a year to design its scrollbar. You're not going to get it right in Flash in a few weeks. To do that well is not a simple matter. It takes people who are dedicated to information design.
When Flash is in a page, it's no longer integrated with the browser. If you press the back button, you're not going to go back in the Flash sequence.
It's also not accessible to people with disabilities. You can't change the fonts, and you can't increase text size, which is necessary to make an item legible for almost every person over 50.
WT: People are now saying WAP is dead...
JN: Yes, and I take credit for saying that over a year ago.
WT: I saw that! So, do you think it's possible to design the same site for a desktop and a handheld device?
JN: I'm starting to think that it's not. The original idea of a cross-platform Web was very powerful because it would work on all different types of Unix, the Mac-which was more popular than it is now-and various versions of Windows. Now, almost everyone is using Windows '98 with a few people on '95. Desktops are becoming more alike. The Macintosh is now copying Unix-the operating systems are all copying each other.
What Web originators didn't imagine was the variety of displays. You have palm-size displays and watch-size displays, as well as the full-size wall panels that are yet to come. You can't say "let's do a single screen and tell people that it will work on both a full-size workstation monitor and the Palm Pilot." I think we'll have to create multiple interfaces. We now have a new design challenge: how to create a skill transfer between different platforms.
One of the good ideas in Yahoo's new voice interface is to preserve the MyYahoo settings. If you're looking for weather reports, you get them from your favorite (chosen) cities. Yahoo is one of the few well thought-out sites. You would only want the important features while you're mobile, or have them in an expert mode.
WT: Why do you believe usability is so important for business?
JN: Usability is the one area we want to focus on because we want to alleviate human suffering, and because it's good for business. It's not like ecology where you can either save endangered animals, or cut down logs and make a lot of money.
You can spend incredible amounts of money developing a site, but if the site is not usable, it won't improve your business. Usability is just so cheap in terms of how it affects outcomes. Whether you talk about the beneficial aspect or the business aspect, they're the same. They're usually a conflict. In usability, there's no business conflict-do it. I don't think anybody benefits from having a site that's hard to use.
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