Jakob Nielsen

Surely the first place to start is Jakob Nielsen's http://www.useit.com Ignore the ugliness and you'll find practical advice in the reports and Alertbox articles although his opinions are sometimes controversial and shouldn't necessarily be followed to the letter. Nevertheless they'll undoubtedly increase your awareness of the variety of user types out there and encourage you to think from their perspective, which is ultimately what good UI design is all about.

A couple of usability sites, which are a big part of design: - http://www.useit.com/ (Jakob Nielsen) - http://asktog.com/ (Bruce Tognazzini) Bruce publishes rarely and seems to be more interesting. Jakob has some great posts, but also a lot that feel more like "please buy my book" than "this is helpful".

Maybe my reaction was too brief for some, allow me re-phrase: Web design is a fast-moving field and the topic of credibility and communication of web sites remains key. In this context, I question the 8 year old research as being the best valuable we can get. A lot of work is done in this area and our collective attention is better directed to state of the art. It would be great to have a more up-to-date version of this research. Unfortunately it isn't on http://www.webcredibility.org/ -- the site referred in the paper. http://www.useit.com/ is a good resource and they are others.

In regards to books, I would recommend at least checking out Steve Krug's Don't Make Me Think, possibly some other design orientated books and then read up upon usability in general. For example, take a look at: http://www.usabilitypost.com/ or http://www.uxbooth.com/ and http://useit.com/ You may wish to find a usability consultant too, or look for someone who hasn't used your app before with experience in this area to give you a few pointers.

Yeah, I know he is controversial, but even if you don't agree with everything he writes, you should consider what Jakob Nielsen's site http://www.useit.com/ says about improving user experiences. I think becoming thoroughly familiar with Nielsen's writings may not be sufficient for becoming great in the realm of user experience, but it is necessary to properly understand the current literature on the subject.

Part A - I am on the side of completing as much UX up front as possible. Bad visual design is something that no one can ignore. I think that ideally before you even have done the "black-text-on-white-background" prototype you start with UX. Part B - Steve Krug has a couple of simple concrete usability books. Other than links I have seen mentioned. http://ilovetypography.com/ learning good type will help a ton with design http://www.useit.com/ Jakob Nielsen is kind of the godfather of usability, some people love him, some hate him, either way you will learn something from this guy. Also, going through tons of websites and critiquing them by yourself or with peers, writing down everything that works well and doesn't work well, that you would change. Do little usability tests on your sites, even on sites that aren't yours with family or peers. Part C - I don't know as much about startups. I do know that having a designer on hand is much nicer to work with than outsourced. Ultimately I think it would be like dealing with anyone else outsourced in terms of reliability. Part D - I actually started as a designer, and IE 6 crushed my soul. I am still very interested in UX though. I think starting as a programmer, I would just try to recreate designs you think are appealing. I would also try to learn the grid system. Use CSS frameworks as training wheels that have a solid grid, and decent typography (eg. Blueprint). I started constraining myself to HTML and CSS, and I think you…

Web design is a really broad field. You need to understand HTML and CSS, you need to understand the limitations of web browsers as a medium, you need to understand how users interact with webpages, and you need to have a decent handle on typography/visual design. I don't have good tutorials/articles for all of these areas, unfortunately: they're things I've learned over a pretty long period of time by reading a lot of different disparate articles. In general, A List Apart (http://www.alistapart.com/) is an excellent resource for articles on design. While it's frequently linked, a lot of the stuff on Smashing Magazine (http://smashingmagazine.com/) is awful. Their articles on how to do things with HTML/CSS are usually decent, but their articles about actual design usually demonstrate a complete lack of understanding of what good design is. I'm also haven't really found any resources with good exercises. One of the things about design is that you really need to be getting feedback from a real person. If you're doing things and would like design-related feedback, I'm usually happy to give it. (My email is in my profile.) For learning HTML and CSS I recommend HTML Dog (http://htmldog.com/). It's a bit dated and won't cover HTML5/CSS3 stuff at all, but it does teach good practices, and I haven't found anything better. I also haven't found a good article/tutorial on web browser limitations. You need to be aware of web browser width (people generally design for a 1024px wide…

Very often it is. But it's not as simple as that. Try to turn things around - there are a lot of designers (and kids and grandpas) that code something up. This usually ends up as a horrible mess, not following any programming paradigms, spaghetti code, non-existing security, etc. We've all seen it happen. But you only see this if you're a professional programmer. Non-professionals don't see the detail, the design decisions, the security measures, the scalability, etc. They just see a slow or buggy site. Or worst-case they see their credit cards exposed. Design is the same, just to a larger degree - everyone thinks they can do it, because well done design seems so simple. When they try to do their own, however, it is never quite as good and they don't understand why. The reason is the exact same as why novice programmers create crappy programs. To do a great and simple design you need a lot of experience and a lot of knowledge. Certain things need to align, some colors match others don't, certain design elements send certain signals to the user, etc. Have you ever noticed the drop-shadow on the logo on Google's homepage? Chances are you haven't, but it is a core part of their design - you don't notice it, but it holds up the whole page. As a novice designer you can only get so far until you start running into problems that require expert knowledge and experience. Just like programming. And when you start talking about usability (which I think the flaws in the linked pic…

In the early 2000s there was a site usability movement centred around the work of Jakob Nielsen and http://useit.com. Fortune 500s were paying him huge sums to have extraneous crap removed from their home pages and just for a while sanity and minimalism ruled. Then Web 2.0 arrived.

I date all this to Jakob Nielsen retiring the ever-so-wonderful https://useit.com for the utterly forgetable https://nngroup.com (Fortunately the redirect still works.)

Great, finally micropayments http://www.useit.com/articles/the-case-for-micropayments/ will work? If Google wants to display its good intentions, they would take a lower percentage when the user bought the ads. The same price paid by an user would top the advertiser.

> In other words, I can tell that there's a potentially poignant idea about web design in this post, but it was a little drowned out because of the way it was presented. I think it would be difficult to find an idea in this post that hasn't already been more poignantly formulated on [0] or more funny and even less respectfully on [1]. I really don't see the point. [0]http://www.useit.com [1]http://maddox.xmission.com

It's interesting you mention your reasoning for wanting to add the functionality. I believe this falls under the "Better Than Reality: A Fundamental Internet Principle"[1]. This is such a common pitfall in the web that I feel like it needs to be reiterated over and over. That's not to say your effort wasn't worth it - you achieved your goal and that's important. http://www.useit.com/articles/better-than-reality-a-fundamental-intern… (note - this is from 1998 and is still relevant!)

Any idea or theory why that is? E.g., after reading sites like http://www.useit.com/ you'd think the only thing that people do is scan (not read).

This has strong similarity to the thesis of the classic article "The Anti-Mac Interface": http://www.useit.com/papers/anti-mac.html The connection to the ideas in the Kingdom of Nouns, though, is new and intriguing. It's obvious only in hindsight that job-specific apps can be thought of as nouns, while unix-style tools can be thought of as verbs.

The whole "mason" best fit I suppose. In comparison to say reddit and HN, no real linear flow of headlines. Your eyes tend to dart all over the place with this design looking for information. The F pattern seems to be proven as the best layout for information absorption http://www.useit.com/alertbox/reading_pattern.html

Read Don't Make Me Think by Steve Krug. http://www.amazon.com/Think-Common-Sense-Approach-Usability/dp/0789723… Read everything on Jakob Nielsen's blog about Usability: http://useit.com/

You mean like this? http://www.useit.com/ I would make a distinction between designers and researchers in the field. The researchers and scholars, almost without fail, seem to care the least about their own website aesthetics.

Just saw another classic in the comments of a different story: Top 10 mistakes of Web design http://www.useit.com/alertbox/9605.html More classics anybody?

My guess is that eventually (a lot of) web sites will become more like games, where the highest quality experience is achieved by maximally utilizing the amount of resources available. So in that sense we could expect many websites' bandwidth usage to follow Nielsen's law [http://www.useit.com/alertbox/980405.html]

Regarding a website that doesn't act like a website: that's classic mistake #8: http://www.useit.com/alertbox/9605.html You can get away with it if a) you're doing something that really isn't a website (e.g., a game or a single-serving site), or b) your users come back an awful lot (e.g., Twitter).

Before listening to anything Jakob Nielsen says about usability, go look at his website: http://www.useit.com/. Can you honestly tell me that the man is a usability expert who has a website designed like that? EDIT: I've read some of his books and agree with what he says most of the time--I definitely don't write off everything he says. I should have worded my post differently. About useit.com, it's hard to be completely terrible since there is not a functionality. I would argue that the organization of the links is a little odd, lack of dates on news items is not ideal, and the search bar buried at the very top right of a page that scales 100% is a little hard to notice (design & usability intertwined).

My favorite explanation of this phenomenon, beyond the visual demonstration, is that lag time reminds the human mind that it is interfacing with a machine. Because that feels unnatural, it creates fatigue and builds separation between the user and his work. UI guru Jakob Nielsen has an excellent description of this here: http://www.useit.com/papers/responsetime.html

When I think of usability as an exact science, the name that comes to mind is Jakob Nielsen. He's been writing his Alertbox bi-weekly articles since 1995. http://useit.com/

Opening new browser windows has been on the Top 10 list of design mistakes of 1999: http://www.useit.com/alertbox/990530.html I hate it, if the back button breaks. I know many people who use the back button as one of the main elements of the browser. I have been present several times, when somebody got really angry because of a broken back button. So I would recommend the following rule as best practice: Don't ever break the back button! It takes much work and creativity to make visitors love websites. We should not ruin that hard work by a silly design decision like target="_blank". Also, the target="_blank" is a relic from the time of framesets. This time is over.

After this article the Nielsen Norman did work with Macromedia on developing Best Practices. http://www.internetnews.com/dev-news/article.php/1178941 Jacob Nielsen later added the summary findings: http://www.useit.com/alertbox/20021125.html

I agree with the article (and always have done), but it's always bothered me that useit.com is a website devoted to usability and it looks like this... http://www.useit.com/ http://www.useit.com/alertbox/

These usability stories make me laugh. Anyone else thinks http://useit.com homepage is almost unusable?

Statements concerning the need to test aside, "almost unusable" is very likely a gross overstatement. To state http://useit.com is almost unusable is equivalent to saying, at the very least, that it is hard to use. It probably could be easier to use (what isn't?), but hard to use it is not. You can argue that the site is not the most aesthetically pleasing. There may have been a time when this could have been changed, however as the site and Jakob Nielsen have been well known for many years, the visual appearance serves strong branding purposes: it's very obviously useit.com, it's very recognisable, even standing well back from your screen. Jakob has supported this notion as the reason not to change.

URLs will continue to be an important part of the browsing experience. http://www.useit.com/alertbox/990321.html Jakob Nielsen wrote this in 1999 and I don't think much has changed, as recent updates to the article at the end show. I love browsers that get out of the way, so displaying the address bar in a more intelligent way is something I welcome. I doubt it will disappear entirely.