Gadgetopia

Digital Web magazine has a good interview with Jakob Nielsen where he discusses among other things his changing views on Flash and how his Alertbox called "Flash: 99% Bad" rankled Web designers all over the world. He is much more conciliatory towards Flash these days, it appears: "...there ...

Talking-Head Video Is Boring Online : Jakob Nielsen has published a bit about how bad video apparently is for the Web. What's interesting is his eye-tracking study, where he shows you what someone looks at while they're watching video. He has an image which show where the viewer's eyes rested, ...

Boxes and Arrows: Report Review: Nielsen/Norman Group's Usability Return on Investment: The Nielsen/Normam Group has made a nice living from selling their reports on usability. These reports are often considered the Holy Grail of usability experts....except for these two guys, apparently. They bought one of the reports "Usability Return ...

I could put dozens of Nielsen's AlertBox columns up here, but this one hits close to home. The practice of hard-coding a font size so the default browser function of enlarging or reducing the displayed font size is disabled just drives me up the wall. What's worse is when developers ...

PDF: Unfit for Human Consumption (Alertbox): Tough to argue with any of this, though it will no doubt cause an uproar. "Users get lost inside PDF files, which are typically big, linear text blobs that are optimized for print and unpleasant to read and navigate online. PDF is good for ...

I've heard design critic Jakob Nielsen blast so many designs that in my mind he's become the Internet's cranky old curmudgeon of a neighbor ("You kids keep yer Flash intros off my lawn!"). That's why I was shocked to read this in a NY Times article on the design of ...

Jakob Nielsen Declares the Letter "C" Unusable: He's out of control. "'The letter 'C' is 95% bad,' states Nielsen's latest bi-weekly newsletter which is entitled 'Stop Being Stupid.' ... 'Our research indicates that 83% of the words being looked up are words that contain the letter "C".' states Nielsen. 'Most ...

ReUSEIT: There's a contest on to redesign Jakon Nielsen's site. Apparently Nielsen himself has blessed it...sort of. "Web usability maven Jakob Nielsen has been writing his "Alertbox" column on web usability since 1995. His web site, UseIt.com is read by millions of web professionals and other interested parties each year. ...

Jakob Nielsen is on The Screen Savers right now railing against PDFs. He makes a good case. This is a follow-up to his previously-posted diatribe on the subject. To clarify, Nielsen isn't against PDFs altogether. In fact, he sells many reports in PDF format (I even bought one once). He ...

Weblog Usability: The Top Ten Design Mistakes: My boy Jakob Nielsen takes on blogs in this version of the "10 Biggest Mistakes" list. He has some good advice. Here are the 10 and what we have done or plan to do about them: No Author Biographies I want to do ...

Time for a Redesign: Dr. Jakob Nielsen: Here's a good interview with Jakob Nielsen about general Web usability in which he has some strong words about the state of search and information design. [...] the individual pages, or units of information, are typically poorly described in terms of things like ...

Right-Justified Navigation Menus Impede Scannability: Jakob Nielsen, demigod that he is, has just published an interesting alert box about right-aligned menus (something we re guilty of). He claims they reduce readability. Aligning a navigation menu with the right margin might look cool, but the resulting ragged left margin severely reduces the ...

Search Engines as Leeches on the Web: This is a very interesting Alertbox from Jakob Nielsen. He essentially argues that search engines unfairly benefit from any "arms race" between companies, because they make money when the bid price of the ads goes up. So companies in a competitive ad zone ...

I purchased the Nielsen Norman Group s Intranet Information Architecture report this week. It was almost $400, and you couldn t download it it s 1,200 pages and 750 screencaps of 56 intranets. Total file size is almost 120MB. It came on a CD in the mail. I bought the single-user license. ...

AskTog: Multiple Mistakes Drown Dishwasher: Bruce Tognazzini founded Apple's Human Interface Group and is now a principal in the Nielsen-Norman Group (with Jakob Nielsen, no less). This article is a pretty funny look at a dishwasher's interface and the problems it causes. Humor is in the first half, usability geek ...

This is a Jakob Nielsen article which is a good wrap-up of mistakes people make when building Web sites and what to avoid. I got this in the mail (I don't remember from whom) as a poster which I proudly hung on my wall (mainly to antagonize my boss, who ...

Widgetopia: A good collection of UI elements from various Web sites. A boon for designers. Good blog name, too. Reminds me of one of the appendices of Jakob Nielsen's last book.

silverorange | building powerful web-based systems: I first heard about silverorange when they won the "Best Intranet of 2001" award from the Nielsen-Norman Group (Jakob Nielsen's outfit). At that time, I thought they were purely Web design. It looks like that they've taken to selling (and hosting) their award-winning intranet ...

BitPass: This is a new micropayment service, allowing you to charge as little as one-cent for your content or whatever you're selling. You "buy" a BitPass card via PayPal or credit card. You can store as little as $3, making it within reach of kids and their allowances. Jakob Nielsen ...

Beyond PDF: Digital Delivery Develops: Interesting article on the future of the PDF and competing platforms that have developed to knock PDF of its perch. Yet it has its share of critics who complain that it's not the most effective digital distribution method. Among its most famous broadsides was Jakob ...

Userscripts.org - Universal Repository: Here's a site full of Greasemonkey scripts for about everything you could ever imagine. I like this one, that automatically switches all Amazon affiliate links in the page you're viewing to your own affiliate ID. Sneaky. This one for Blogines continually checks your feeds in the ...

Eolas says it would settle over IE 'In response to newly revealed details of Microsoft's potential plans to redesign its browser, Eolas founder Mike Doyle urged the software giant to leave Internet Explorer alone and pay his company a license fee instead." Further down in this article, it mentions that ...

Prioritizing Web Usability: Jakob Nielsen's early book, Designing Web Usabillity was a masterpiece -- it fundamentally changed how I built Web pages. It's the Bible of Web design, in my mind. This is the updated version. Not a sequel or a new edition, but: A second goal of the book ...

Last year, I wrote a short essay wondering how the look of a site affected its usability. I said: To what extent will the 'look' of the site help or hinder it from achieving reaching its goal, whatever that may be? [...] Can simply re-skinning a site fundamentally change the ...

I m reading Jakob s Nielsen s Prioritizing Web Usability off and on. He has an interesting aside in his chapter on typography. Why do so many Web sites have illegible text? Didn t anybody read the text while designing the site? The unfortunate answer is no. It s quite common for Web sites to ...

IE, Flash, and patents: here comes trouble: Zeldman highlights a big problem with this Eolas patent ruling. Technically, rich media is now no longer allow to play automatically in the browser window. This means that Flash movies cannot start without user intervention. "Besides paying over half a billion dollars to ...

Look at the arrow on this page -- it indicates that there's a horizontal scroll, and there are more products available by scrolling to the right. I never thought I'd see this again, and certainly not dell.com. And it's a bad design. Not just because Jakob Nielsen says so, but ...

These web sites are identical or are they?: Here's a wonderful page that takes 10 sites all very popular in the blogosphere then examines them for common elements like search boxes, righthand columns, footers, etc. Degrees if incidence and dissonance are calculated and lead to interesting conculsions. ...

Why Mobile Phones are Annoying: Jakob Nielsen comments on a study of why overheard mobile conversations are considered so annoying. The study had actors fake regular conversations (between two people) and cell phone conversations, then surveyed the bystanders to find out how annoyed they were with what happened. ...even phone ...

Examining the Role of De Facto Standards on the Web: Here's an examination of design elements of Web sites that have become "standards," whether or not we planned them that way. Think of site layout, and what comes to mind a designer friend of mine once talked of "moving ...

Ideal Science: Bulletin Board Software: Here's a very high-end Web forum product that runs on Windows. With all the free alternatives out there Invision, PhpBB, vBulletin, Snitz, etc.) I don't know how someone can stay float selling these things (especially for $2,000...on Windows, no less). I mention it because their ...

A few weeks ago, I read a good article on paper prototyping over at Jakob Nielsen's site. And then the other day, I wrote a bit about how overall application design and interface was more of an influence on an app's success than the actual code behind it. So, in ...

Web developers want one thing: control. HTML is such an imprecise language that building Web pages has continually been a struggle between what we want to do and what the language is capable of. As a result, the short history of the Web has been an exercise in perverting HTML ...

To make tabs, you ordinarily wind up creating a table, chucking a row in for the tabs, a row in for the tab page, etc. Using tables for layout? The CSS Gods will frown upon you and Jakob Nielsen's ghost will haunt you to your grave (after he passes on, ...

My wife sent a Hallmark eCard to someone today. She picked a format then typed a paragraph or so of text. The length of her prose was nothing out of the ordinary. Hallmark then generated an email to the recipient and CC'd my wife. In this email was a link ...

I'm about to admit something odd, and perhaps career-threatening: I'm sick of learning. There, I said it, and I feel better. It's true: learning about new technologies and new ways of doing things is something that plays on an addiction of mine and of many other geeks, I'm sure. We ...