Notes from interview with Jakob Nielsen about Website usability
The interview is published at: http://www.stonetemple.com/articles/interview-jakob-nielsen.shtml
The following are some notes I put down for my reference:
You don’t want your customer to puzzle over how to operate your user interface, you just want them to focus on your product, on your argument, on your ideas, whatever you are trying to promote. And if you then get in their way by doing things in unusual manner, then for sure you are going to lose a large percentage of people.
- Use plain language
Describe in plain language, more people will know what they are going to get, if they go there, if they click there, if they use that feature.
- Be straightforward
People tend to spend about 30 seconds total on a homepage. So it’s a very initial impression that decides whether it’s most likely to be useful for them or not, and then they will start reading a bit more. First 2 words are really where you have to get users, and that’s why you shouldn’t use generic feel good vocabularies like welcome to try our etc. You have to answer what’s in it for me, why should I click here; try to put some of those action oriented words to tell people what it’s going to do for them.
-Caution about use of graphics
When using graphics make sure you are showing real
content and not just decorations. If it’s just smiling models out of a clipart
catalogue, that does no good. And those images become an obstacle course to a
people’s actual appreciation of the page. Because you have to look and look
around so much junk, so much irrelevance to get to what you want.
-Placement matters, not the flashing lights
or colours.
The better way is to put it in a place where people tend to look the most which is upper middle or upper left of the page. People have a tendency to scan web pages in an F pattern, which is they look across the top, and a little bit across a little bit further down and they kind of scan down the left hand side of the content area.
-Common hatred of advertising on the
web
Because people have evolved a very aggressive hatred
of advertising on the web, not in the sense of being anti-commercial,
anti-business because people want to buy stuff. It’s more that advertising on
the web has become so polluting. It’s information pollution, it’s yelling and
screaming at people and bouncing up and down and slapping their face, and
because the advertising is so aggressive now-a-days, and a lot of pages are
filled with blinking, flashing, moving things, people are evolving a protective
mechanism to protect themselves from that intrusion on their peace and quiet.
The protection mechanism is called selective attention.
With flashing lights or colours, you might thought
you have the information stand out, but what actually happens is that people
think that it’s a foreign element and it’s probably an ad, and it ends up being
ignored. We see this so many times that websites put up what they think to be a
promotion or special feature, something they really want to have people pay
attention to, and in fact a lot of the users completely ignore it, because it
looks too much like an ad.
