Jakob Nielsen on Design, RSS, Email, and Blogs

Carl Bialik from WSJ writes "Jakob Nielsen took some time to chat with the Wall Street Journal's Lee Gomes about RSS, email newsletters, web design and blogs. When asked whether blogs must maintain a 'conversation' with readers, Nielsen says, 'That will work only for the people who are most fanatic, who are engaged so much that they will go and check out these blogs all the time. There are definitely some people who do that -- they are a small fraction. A much larger part of the population is not into that so much. The Internet is not that important to them. It's a support tool for them. Bloggers tend to be all one extreme edge. It's really dangerous to design for a technical elite. We have to design for a broad majority of users.'"

Lee Gomes

[19thNervousBreakdown]

That wouldn't be Lee... "Underpants" Gnomes, would it?

What?

[Odin_Tiger]

It's really dangerous to design for a technical elite.

Yeah, just look at what a colossal failure Slashdot is... ... ...Wait a sec...

Re:What a joke!

[ribuck]

Yeah. He didn't even bother to select a font size for the body text; he just left it at the browser default.

There are no animated graphics, and he missed the opportunity to provide an interactive Flash marketing experience.

And black text is just, like, so readable.

Re:Blogs

[Infernal Device]

but think about future generation being able to go back and read the blogs of the past.

Future generations will soon learn that our generation was composed mostly of airheads, wankers, OMGPonies, and timecubists.

Our old blogs and emails are what OUR children will be reading when we die.

No, they'll be reading MySpace entries and bleaching their eyes when they discover that the hot chick flashing her hooters at Mardi Gras was their mom.