Feb. 14, 2002
Critical note: J. Nielsen. (2000). Designing Web Usability. Indianapolis, In. : New Riders Publishing
I nearly put down Jakob Nielsen's Designing Web Usability (2000) before finishing the preface. He defends his decision to write a print book instead of publish online. He argues the limitations of technology and people's expectations dictate a wider audience in print, but he predicts printed books could go away by 2007, to be fully replaced by online information (and warns publishers print books will go away) (p. 5). Technology will improve rapidly enough to overcome any readability problems and that readers will be become increasingly comfortable with non-linear presentation of information.
As a reader and bibliophile, his statement colored my experience of his book it because it undercut his credibility. Book and print publishing may become a smaller enterprise, but disappear completely? Despite the rapid growth of the Web, few experts seriously predict the disappearance of print, any more than handwriting, painting, staged drama, or even radio were completely replaced by newer media. Certain uses of the older media were taken over by the newer, but all continued to co-exist.
Nielsen has a reputation as a user interface and usability guru - currently over 76,000 Web pages contain links to him and his work. Now a principle of the Nielsen Norman Group, co-founded with Donald A. Norman (of The Design of Everyday Things fame), Nielsen was a Sun Microsystems Distinguished Engineer until 1998. His book addresses what works on the Web and what doesn't. Subtitled "The practice of simplicity," the book argues for reducing complexity as it covers many aspects of design, including the page, content, site, and intranet, as well as designing for disabilities and international audiences. Many of his recommendations make sense and the many examples show why; overall, they will be useful to me in my own design work, but his thoughts about print vs. Web were the most intriguing.
Why not use print conventions for the Web? Beyond the obvious use of hypertext, Nielsen points out that even if some similarities exist, they are different media and we respond to them in differing ways. One main difference is readability - almost none of the commercially available displays have more than an extremely low resolution compared to print, which means that print on a computer screen is simply hard to read and users get tired quickly. From this observation, Nielsen argues that writing for the Web is a fundamentally different style than for paper publication. His guidelines include:
He notes most people won't wade through a sea of text and will usually print a document anyway (p. 101).
Does this mean e-book readers are doomed to fail until display technology provides the equivalent of print resolution? With his predicted disappearance of the book, will print style be completely outmoded as well? The Web is full of PDFs of long documents, in addition to e-books produced by projects such as Project Gutenberg, long articles and full-text journals; will they reach their audiences only if they are rewritten a la PowerPoint presentations? Nielsen supports this idea, calling a long page from Time magazine's site "shovelware" and holding it up as a great example of why repurposing doesn't work (p. 119). He does, however, support providing print-friendly versions of long documents as a necessary adjunct to an HTML presentation (p. 96).
If viewers' willingness to navigate hypertext is increasing, might their willingness to delve into longer texts also increase? Nielsen doesn't speculate on this possibility, although he notes more people are willing to scroll (p. 115). Perhaps his predictions about improvements in technology are correct, even if his timeline is optimistic, but if history is any guide, print will continue to live on, even while some types of printed material such as reference works disappear. In the meantime, Nielsen provides many useful guidelines that can improve the visitor's experience - and increase the chance they will return.