Sep 14 2006 at 3:42pm
Bizarre-o stuff from Nielsen
I’ve just come across some rather strange ramblings from good ole usability “guru”, Jacob Nielsen that I thought I’d share. The first comes from a July 2006 article on screen resolutions. The first part of the article is sensible enough – design flexible width layouts. I would add that some people have browser elements (such as side panels) that take up more space on the screen. You can’t use screen resolution alone to decide how big someone’s browser is. He does have some good points about people with large screens not using maximized windows.
The bizarre-o stuff comes further down when he starts rambling about how in the future all professionals will have gigantic monitors and that web designs will have to cater to that.
Yeah, sure, that sounds good but has he ever heard of laptops? Small laptops that are light and easy to carry? People trying to browse the web while traveling? My sister loves her super-small Dell laptop that can be carried around to coffee shops where she prefers to work. People often ask her where she got it. And what about the web on alternate devices? Like, say, nintendo.
I do find the ideas about a different design paradigm to be intriguing. Perhaps there will be different stylesheets available for people to choose if they want a larger display area. In Opera you can see available alternate stylesheets in the display menu (try it with Pandora music player. As a side note, this is an interesting example of using whole page design for advertising).
However, it’s clear to me that in the future screen resolutions will become smaller as well as bigger. We won’t be able to cater to one most common screen size because people will be using a huge range of them. Someone might have a huge desktop monitor at work, a web-enabled nintendo at home, and a tiny laptop or other small device for business travel.
After flipping through Nielsen’s most recent book, Prioritizing Web Usability, it is pretty clear that he doesn’t have a concept of the non-desktop web. In the book he recommends building completely separate sites for mobile devices. Um, mobile stylesheets anyone?
Speaking of the book, that’s where my next bit of Nielsen bizarreness comes in. He’s got a couple of full pages about using text link advertising for site promotion which he describes as “the” best way to promote a site. !?$?#@?!@? This is entirely based on the idea that you can advertise to people who are looking for exactly what you’re selling. Great, that’s good, but that doesn’t make it the best way to get traffic to your site. Really, Nielsen is a usability expert, he’s got no business telling people how to promote their sites. I’m no expert in marketing but I know that no one marketing method is “the best” – it all depends on your site, your audience, and what your goals are.
In this section he implies that you can choose where your site appears in the SE rankings. Oookaayyy – has he done any search engine optimization at all? This book has some good points (which I may post about later) but these idiodic rants are really ruining it for me. Not that I’m surprised…
