[Sigia-l] Nielsen: It's the end!

[T. Karsjens]

I used to carry around a packet of examples as to why Jakob Nielsen is an
idiot.  Included in that packet was a print out of two main pages from two
very different websites.  The first was the home page of Alertbox.com and
the second was the home page of Amazon.  That alone was normally the end of
the conversation about Mr. Nielsen.

Now, "idiot" is a strong word.  I would not necessarily stand by that
estimation of J. Nielsen.  I have met him several times and the guy is
fairly sharp.  However, that does not preclude him from being 99% wrong
(most of the time).  I just consider him to be the Windows of the Usability
world...

--timothy karsjens

-----Original Message-----
From: sigia-l-bounces at asis.org [mailto:sigia-l-bounces at asis.org] On Behalf
Of Listera
Sent: Tuesday, October 11, 2005 1:12 AM
To: SIGIA-L
Subject: Re: [Sigia-l] Nielsen: It's the end!

Andrew Boyd:

>> You've heard'em before, the arrogantly confident prediction turns out be
>> laughingly wrong.
>> 
> Here's a confident statement for you: "The frequency of accuracy in
> prediction is not related to the relative arrogance of the predictor".
> IMMHO, just because someone is obnoxious does not mean that they are
> invariably wrong (or right, for that matter). The natural human tendancy
> is to confuse opinion with fact more and more as the predictor rises in
> his or her profession. This guarantees entertaining debates on this and
> many other mailing lists. :)

To be sure. :-)

Incidentally, when I said "arrogantly confident prediction" I meant exactly
that. Since, in this case, I don't personally know J Nielsen I have no idea
if he's arrogant in person or not, and I don't care one way or the other.
What I do care is the constant stream of edicts and predictions coming from
his direction that are just plain wrong that make my life in the design
profession that much more difficult.

Sure as Eric will "correct" me in a couple of hours from down under :-) I
will spend a minimum of 10 hours in the next few weeks explaining to some
manager why we haven't "reached the limits of the current GUI paradigm."
Unfortunately I can't bill NN/G for those unnecessary hours. :-)

---- 
Ziya

Best Practices,
For when you've run out of your own ideas and context.

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