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

[Timothy Karsjens]

The 99% wrong comment was a play on the words of Mr. Nielsen himself.

I mostly think that his statements and opinions are not well researched, however, sometimes I do agree with him.  I have always been an advocate of doing what works and in the simplest manner.  This pretty much means that rules should not apply between situations, unless you are on a separate project, doing the exact same thing, with a similar user base as the one you were just on a month ago.  Jakob Nielsen is all about "rules".

I agree with him on Flash being 99% bad.  It is.  I won't use it for anything remotely critical to any functionality. Then again, I feel the same way about Javascript and DHTML.  I can make pretty complex shockwave movies (advanced flash), write DHTML to tap the powers of the DOM, and write a javascript bit to auto populate a form field based on a different form field, but that does not mean I will.

I disagree with his antiquated notion of the number of things that a human being can comprehend.  The whole 7 +/-2 concept was disproved by cognitive psychologists many years before the web was ever introduced.

These are just two examples...

Part of the problem that a lot of designers have with him, in my opinion, is that his natural opinion is to stifle creativity for plain-ness.  He has always been an advocate of no images, no fluff, no eye-candie.  However, real-world experience dictates that if a site is boring, in other words, nothing to break up the monotony of the information, it will have a lower success rate.  Sure, his sites may be *usable*, but by who?  Being able to forcibly drag a users attention through data through subtle space manipulation of a website is something that he does not grasp.  Being able to keep a user reasonably interested in the subject matter, while not distracting them from it is another thing that I do not think he grasps well.  In numerous articles, he basically advocates throwing a few thousand years worth of proven practices out the window.  I asked him once why "Illuminated Manuscripts" even exist, and his response was, I don't see the relevance to usability.

Because of his oft-quoted articles and self-proclaimed expertise in Usability, Jakob has become a very important figure in the modern net technology industry.  Those of us that have had to fight the battle with a CIO who was quoting Nielsen articles at us will tell you that his opinions are often abused by the executives that want to act like they know what they are talking about. It is frustrating to have the conversations over and over again where we have to basically refute Nielsen and convince a stakeholder that no, this is what the real users want, not what mister nielsen wants.

My biggest beef has always been this:  1. Jakob Nielsen writes an article (more of an op-ed piece, but let us ignore that for now). 2. IBM (or some other major organization) does a study that finds results that are completely contrary to the Nielsen article.  3. Jakob takes his article down, or edits it without annotations, to fit the new research.

I used to track the changes to his articles on Alertbox, but I stopped doing that a few years ago.  I do not know if he intentionally did it to save face, or he just thought it was a good idea, but the change of opinion based on new facts made me struggle to read any future articles of his with an open mind.

I should get off my soapbox now...

--timothy karsjens

PS: I actually respect the man.  Not for his "expertise" in usabilty, but for the fact that he has successfully positioned himself as *the* expert in the field.  Kudos to him for that.