Jakob Nielsen on Design, RSS, Email, and Blogs 161
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.'"
What a joke! (Score:4, Insightful)
Hmm (Score:4, Insightful)
His idea about calling RSS feeds "News Feeds" makes sense to me (c'mon Apple, do you really need the blue RSS badge in Safari's bar? I predict this is gone in Safari 2.5/3 - replaced with an aquafied version of the universal newsfeed icon)
Beyond that and what appeared in the summary, there isn't much to the article. How does one "design" for a blogging audience? I can understand his point that bloggers, while influential on the web, are a vast, technical, vocal minority - but what does that mean in terms of design? What does it also mean that, with regards to MySpace, one of the most popular destinations on the web is also one of its most amazingly poorly designed? I mean, it's slapdash - but it's agile, meaning that they've succeeded by throwing a whole bunch of stuff to the wall, and seeing what sticks.
Blogs (Score:5, Insightful)
Journals and diaries have fallen into disuse. Our old blogs and emails are what OUR children will be reading when we die.
Nothing New Here, Move Along (Score:5, Insightful)
Why should I design for or even think about my grandmother's tastes if I'm doing a coding blog, or a baseball blog (that's assuming Grandma isn't a rabid Ichiro fan)?
I view Nielsen as someone who has taken a good idea and turned it into ideology. And when you do that, the goodness begins to evaporate.
Design for two audiences... your users and Googlebot. That's my motto.
- G
Acronymns (Score:5, Insightful)
I've been trying to convince my work that for years now! But instead we have systems named
Re:What a joke! (Score:2, Insightful)
In his defense: while the page is butt-ugly, one of his major points about usability is that usability needs to have priority over design.
But I do agree with you. It's got that Stallman-esque "I am so pushy about my principles that it's annoying" feel. He's overapplied his own advice, to the point where his web site looks so generic that it has no unifying brand. I don't think he realizes that if every website stuck with a white or light background, dark or black text, blue/purple/red links, and relatively tame fonts, it would be almost impossible for web site owners to create a memorable brand. As he has pointed out, people don't read most of what websites contain, so wowing people with great prose won't help. All we have left is slogans, then? I would point out that my Slashdot T-shirt says "Bathing Geeks in its Soothing Green Light since Nineteen Ninety-Seven", not "Pestering Geeks with its Super-Cool Slogan, "News for Nerds, Stuff that MAtters" since Nineteen Ninety-Seven". People remember sites visually.
RSS and blog design (Score:5, Insightful)
Nielsen has an interesting riff in this very slight interview (couldn't WSJ have expanded the online version of it?) on what to call RSS. It's an excellent point -- lay people don't know "RSS" the way they know "web" or even "Myspace". It is useful technology that could help a good number of people. But between the utter proliferation of newsreaders and naming conventions, it far too fragmented to cement widespread public understanding.
For a guy who loves to throw around numbers, I find Nielsen's comment about blogs incoherent and worthless. Is there evidence that blogs are being designed for the technical elite? What is this "one extreme edge" that bloggers are on? Is there evidence that blogs are corporate marketing tools even are trying to find a broad audience? These are incredibly dubious assertions. Any thoughtful strategy for reaching out to customers is going to combine blogging, email, RSS and other technologies in an audience-specific way. Duh.
Re:What a joke! (Score:4, Insightful)
An oversimplification of his position, I'm sure, but that's the impression he gives. As you say, it doesn't help that his homepage is an oil spill of inscrutable links, an assault on the senses.
Re:Nothing New Here, Move Along (Score:3, Insightful)
Given that this article was published in the Wall Street Journal, I think Nielsen was (rightfully) assuming that his audience would be people who work on websites used by the general public, not the so-called "technocratic elite". Sure, if it's a coding blog, do what you want. Most of your users will figure it out, and the ones who can't don't matter. But if you're creating a web site for the general public, with wide appeal, you'll want it to be accessible to as many people as possible. If that means offering an email newsletter in addition to a news feed for people without newsreaders, or who prefer email, then so be it--it's not that much extra effort.
Please people (Score:1, Insightful)
RSS and email are different modes of communication (Score:4, Insightful)
But email is a two-way communication; RSS is really primarily one-way. That makes for a technological difference: with RSS, because it's fetch, you know you're not getting spam. Email is push, and so it's hard to distinguish newsletters from spam. And it's one more site to give your email address to, meaning one more opportunity for spammers to steal/buy it.
Getting newsletters out of the email loop will make it easier to support some anti-spam technologies. Newsletters are one of the downfalls of pay-to-send schemes, because a free newsletter emailed to a million people at $.00001 turns into real money.
I like integrating RSS into the email stream. Some email apps already support RSS, and I would like to see them show up in just a single queue of "stuff to read".
Re:Nothing New Here, Move Along (Score:3, Insightful)
The fanatics (Score:2, Insightful)
Fighting the good fight against irrelevance (Score:5, Insightful)
It's nice to have a face for your industry but I'd really rather see someone like Steve Krug [sensible.com], Luke Wroblewski [lukew.com] or Jennifer Tidwell [jtidwell.net] who have done more than design a pre-Cambrian version of Sun's website and a bunch of pie-in-the-sky concept projects. The fact of the matter is that "real artists ship".
Re:Ahhhh (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Blogs (Score:2, Insightful)
Now, there are some legitimate news sites that have moved to a blog format, but that has nothing to do with blogging.
I consider a majority of blogs to be little more than shameless self-promotion. SPAM, if you will. As more and more people catch on to this, the less relevant they will become and they will join "guestbooks" in the great nothingness. Eventually people will stop updating their blogs because, face it, that's what happens. It's nothing more than a regurgitation of the early "personal" internet. It's a bit prettier and easier to maintain.
Re:What a joke! (Score:4, Insightful)
Your second thought is the correct one: your opening statements are a gross oversimplification of Nielsen's position.
I've read more than my fair share of his writings -- and disagree with Nielsen on any number of points -- but he isn't opposed to paratextual content in the least. He is, as you sense, quite opposed unthinking graphic and interactive design, though.
right, but not that right (Score:5, Insightful)
By "dangerous", he means just to the corporate bottom line. by "we", he just means businesses.
The rest of us "elite" are being designed for just fine, thanks.
He does have a point about the difference between email and rss. That's why I swear by rss2email [aaronsw.com]. it scans feeds, and wraps up items into my email inbox. best of both worlds.
Re:RSS (Score:3, Insightful)
Says who? TBL's first version of H T ML didn't include IMG, and his first web browser couldn't display graphics.
Re:Email newsletters better than feeds? (Score:3, Insightful)
I was in exactly the same situation. My inbox stopped being about communicating with people and became a time-sink for keeping up to date with various things. So I went through a phase of unsubscribing from every mailing list, and once unsubscribed, I'd try and replace the information with an RSS feed. If I couldn't find one, I'd email them, tell them why I unsubscribed, and ask for a feed. Sometimes I was pleasantly surprised to find that they had one squirrelled away and not linked to on their site.
It sounds like I'm just shifting the burden elsewhere, or "hiding the mess", but it's amazing how much quicker things flow when you don't open your mail client in the morning to find dozens of things you need to sort through. And no, mail filters don't do the job for various reasons. As much as I hate to sound like a self-help book, it changes from your information controlling you to you controlling when and how you get that information.
I believe people interact with periodical articles in a fundamentally different way to normal email, and that email newsletters lead people into trying to handle both of them in the same way, resulting in chaos. Email newsletters might be the most effective way to reach your audience, as Nielsen says, but that doesn't mean that email newsletters are the most effective way for your audience to be notified of your articles. So leave your audience members who don't know any better reading your email newsletter, but make sure you give people the option of an Atom feed.
By coincidence, Nielsen's was one of the newsletters I unsubscribed from. He didn't provide a feed, and when I emailed him to ask if he had one, I was told that he'd get back to me because he was on holiday. He never did, so he has one less reader now.
I can accept that he believes that email newsletters are better than feeds, but I think it's uncharacteristic of him to not even allow the possibility of handling his Alertbox column in the way that fits into his readers' workflows best. It's not as if offering the option will harm usability for the people who don't want or understand Atom feeds.
Re:What a joke! (Score:5, Insightful)
I couldn't disagree more with the original poster--I think it's an absolutely great web site. The layout is clean, simple and instantly comprehensible. The purpose of this page is to direct you to information about web design...so it gives links to articles and conferences. What else could you want? A bunch of animated screenshots of web pages that dance in circles around the text? --In fact, that's what popped into my head when the original poster mentioned "garish"!
As for your (parent) comment, I think that following conventions such as using dark type on a light background, blue underlined links and legible type is not a bad thing. In fact, it's a very good thing for web pages to follow conventions. A good user interface is always a consistent interface. This principle is what made the Macintosh such a success--nearly every program that ran on the Mac had a similar menu structure, the buttons looked alike and did what you expected, and so on. (I speak in the past tense because I haven't used a Mac in years.) I hate programs that use a glitzy unique interface just to be different; you would say they are establishing "brand" identity or something--I say that they are annoying the crap out of me by having to learn a new interface just for their stupid program. (This happens a lot in games.) In this case, doing things differently doesn't make the software cool--it makes the program look amateurish.
Now, I understand that the web isn't an operating system, or a set of related application programs. Web pages serve many different purposes, and what works for one page doesn't necessarily work for another. But I have seen many more examples of web pages that defeat themselves with their unique graphics or typographical layout than I've seen examples of successful web pages that depart radically from convention. The same general rules do apply to most web pages as apply to any user interface--make me feel at home, make it clear where I'm supposed to click to do what, let me recognize a link when I see one. The first rule about breaking rules is, "Have a good reason". Break the rules only when it makes your page more effective--don't break them just to be "different".
More information (Score:5, Insightful)
He's gone into more detail in his latest Alertbox column [useit.com]. One thing that caught my eye:
This makes no sense whatsoever. If you are reading a feed, the website is a click away. If you are reading an email newsletter, the website is a click away. In both cases you aren't reading the information on the website.
It only make sense once you substitute "some of our users" for "some publishers". Email newsletters don't really have a strong tradition of including the entire article in the notification email, but plenty of people complain if you only provide partial feeds as opposed to full-text feeds.
I've seen a lot of resentment from some publishers because they think that because the person is reading their article, that they should be able to dictate that they read it on the website. But I've never seen any users complain that Atom/RSS feeds aren't "serendipitous enough". That makes no sense.
Re:What a joke! (Score:3, Insightful)
He has far too many links of the main page.
In addition, I see the following as problems:
Easy to get lost below the fold (no indicators of what each column means;
lack of organization of links (no indicators of organization);
lack of information explaining page;
lack of actual content.
Not all of these may be agreed on by those who visit, but I think you get the point: it's not a very usable site.
Re:Nothing New Here, Move Along (Score:2, Insightful)
Standing up for Jakob (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Email newsletters better than feeds? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:RSS (Score:3, Insightful)
HTML is now graphical; RSS was, in my opinion, designed to be easily machine readable. I do now have filters built in now, but I am still discovering additional creative techniques people have for complicating something that was supposed to be simple, which then requires more code;
If you want to publish HTML data to your customers, I recommend using HTML.
Re:Email newsletters better than feeds? (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Blogs (Score:3, Insightful)
Now why do you suppose that the massive amounts of prose that's being churned out by today's bloggers will be any more interesting to future generations than our hypothetical diaries? Who is going to care about your opinions or about your latest gadget a thousand years from now? Blogs give their authors a (mostly) unjustified sense of self-importance. I don't bother to read them now because there's just too much crap out there and too little of what's being written is of any importance whatever. I really doubt whether future generations will take notice.