Interfacing with Jakob Nielsen [part 2]

By Steve Malone

Posted on 11 Nov 2002 at 15:06

We continue our interview with usability guru Jakob Nielsen

What is your view of the increased use of Web advertising such as eyeblasters and popups which, by their nature, is designed to get in the way of using a site?

I absolutely agree and advertising can be made positive. The example of that is the little text boxes that you will find on a lot of search engines. They are clearly ads. People don't confuse them with search results and yet people click on them a lot. The point is that these ads are not intrusive but they do get a lot of business. The whole concept of using intrusive ads for Web advertising is never going to work, It's old media thinking that the way to connect to your customers is to annoy them. The Web is a customer relationship medium. It's not really a one way medium like television where the way to succeed is smacking customers over the head. What is appalling is that after 10 years of commercial Web sites, most people still don't get it in terms of it being a customer relationship medium. It just shows old habits die very hard.

This year you assessed a number of Web sites against your 'e-commerce usability guidelines' and found that Europe (International) lags behind the US 40% to 49%. Do you see the gap narrowing?

I see parallel movement in both regions, I don't think I see that the gap is narrowing, its just at a higher level which is the good news. Now whether the gap will narrow in the future is an interesting question. One of the problems is that right now a lot of Web stuff is hand made and this means the resources available become very important to the outcome. European companies tend to be smaller than US companies and so have smaller resources available. I think in the long run it will be cheaper and simpler to build Web sites because there will be more and more features that you need but these things will be built in as we talked about with Flash. As that happens there is a possibility that the Europeans might pull ahead as there is a little bit more understanding of the quality aspects here than there are from a number of very big American companies which are alienated from their customers and don't have the same quality attitude but that effect will not happen while we still have to hand build everything.

Do you think we will get to a stage where we might see some kind of standardisation of features and templates across Web sites as people, for example, come to expect their search box in the top left corner?

I think so. I think it's the wrong idea that everyone has to think through those things for every Web site because most people are not good interaction designers. They are not going to be able to devote years of research to figuring out every detail. So there are two problems. The first is that they are not going to do this well because they are not going to have enough time to do it properly and secondly doing things differently in itself has a downside. This comes down to Jakob's Law which says people spend most of their time on other Web sites so when they come to this Web site, their expectations are already set. So that's an incredibly powerful rule and that dominates a lot of specifics of Web usability. So that means we can allow every company to focus on what they are actually good at - which is not interactive design - which is development of their own thing.

Standardisation around Microsoft Windows gave a big boost to desktop Usability as it provided a common interface for all applications. Do you see any kind of common usability standards becoming established across Web sites