mediajunk

It's nice, for a change, to hear Jakob Nielsen sounding positive.

In an interview with CNN today, the man who made the word usability famous explains how the design of websites is improving, due a Darwinian effect he calls "survival of the easiest":

An easy Web site gets more clicks, people return to it, a complicated Web site people look at it once and maybe say, "Oh, it looks cool," and leave, so it gets no business, it goes away and it's not going to be here next year. So, ever so gradually, the easy Web sites get bigger, they remain here and the difficult Web sites die and they go away, and so over time, it's going to get better and better, and so that's the good news.

I don't always agree with Mr. Nielsen (who, incidentally, is a member of Google's Technical Advisory Council), as I think he is sometimes too focused on usability, sometimes at the expense of design aesthetics -- though he tackles that particular question well in this interview. I do, however, wholeheartedly agree with him on the following:

Web designers still ultimately believe that if they think it's good, it is good, and you just cannot judge your own design. You're not designing for yourself, you're not designing to get a design award, you're designing for the average person to come to the Web site and click and find what they want -- and you just cannot judge that yourself.

You've got to use usability techniques with things like user testing, see what normal people actually do when they are on a Web site. And even though some sites now are doing user testing, most do not.

Most Web managers have no clue what their customers do on their Web site, and if they ever saw, they would tear their hair out because their customers are leaving them in droves.

Shameless self-promotion: Learn about my own usability services.

Update 25 Nov 04: I removed various weblog links from this entry due to link rot.

Wired News reports on the phenomenon of guerrilla web makeovers:

Web users frustrated by poorly designed sites are increasingly applying that logic to the Net.

Many who are fed up with high-profile design mess-ups are taking it upon themselves to publicly correct conspicuous corporate faux pas, right under embarrassed proprietors' noses.

Those who take it upon themselves to redesign corporate or other large sites, and host them on their own servers, may be threatened with legal action, however. Some already have.

But Wired points out (and I agree) that, rather than trying to sue, companies that get guerrilla-redesigned should ask themselves why. In fact, if a company's site is unusable or inaccessible to certain groups of users, it could end up in court:

With the United Kingdom's anti-discrimination Disability Rights Commission saying it is "only a matter of time" before companies are sued for having inaccessible websites, usability is gaining a higher profile.

Judy Brewer, director of the W3C's Web Accessibility Initiative, said the consortium's standards ensure a good experience for both disabled and other users -- if designers play by the rules.

The National Information and Library Service (NILS), Australia, have created a wonderful little toolbar that checks various aspects of a web page’s usability and accessibility. The toolbar is small (451kb) and free to download. Note: The accessibility toolbar is primarily intended for web page designers and developers – it may not interest "everyday" web users. Some of the features I like on the toolbar are single-click ways to:

• Resize your browser to each of the standard monitor sizes (600x800, etc.) on a single click.
• View what a web page looks like without CSS.
• View a web page in greyscale (gives some idea of how a colour-blind user might see it)
• Highlight various structural elements (headings, etc.)
• Provide a colour palette of all the html colours used on the page, along with corresponding hexadecimal code -- useful if you want to, uh, “borrow” a colour scheme from someone else’s site ;)
• Validate the HTML in the page in various ways, against a range of standards.
• View the page weight (in kb) and download speed (different speeds listed for different internet connection types).

... and, as they say, much, much more. Of course, you won’t want to use the toolbar during regular surfing -- but you can simply turn it off (in IE, go to view > toolbars). All in all, an impressive, feature-rich toolbar. Well done NILS! ***** Speaking of useful downloads, something else I came across this week was ieSpell, a spell-checker for Internet Explorer. This wee -- but enormously useful -- plugin for IE lets you check the spelling of anything you type into an input box. Like comments, for example ;) If only I’d discovered ieSpell earlier -- I used to type a lot of the entries to this blog directly into Movable Type until, after consistently poor spelling and typos, I took to typing them in MS Word, then cutting and pasting. Now I can go back to direct MT input! It’s the little things that make such a big difference, sigh…