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MASTERY: A simple user interface is not boring. It excites users because it lets them connect with the content and engage the company behind the site.MYSTERY: Website designers stare at their designs all day, every day. In contrast, users visit for four minutes and then leave....Don't aim at an exceptional experience for yourself and your team members.
MISERY: ...mainly espoused by certain analysts who wish the Web would turn into television and offer users no real choices at all. Splash pages, pop-ups, and breaking the Back button are typical examples of the misery ideology.
[useit.com...]
I'd just like to query this. I know some very minor browsers that follow all current standards very well. I'd say it doesn't matter how popular a browser is (or how many people are forced to use it). What's more important is how accurate a browser is.
Apart form that, I don't have much to add. Here are a few random thoughts:
Harry Potter- I don't know because I was locked out and could only get the text version...
Empowering Users > Search engines ... "serves up a simple, linear list of rank-ordered choices".
I don't know how many people are familiar with kartoo.com, but for a subject you don't know very well, this can prove useful. What you get on the results page is a nonlinear map of all the subcategories. If they'd improve their AI and indexing a little, they'd be a top contender. It's a little like the spider diagrams you used to use when revising for exams. Just as useful as a list.
As for isitreal: "show me the skills and I'll respect what you say". What specifically are you looking for? You want him to show that he's a CSS expert and that he can slap together a fancy menu?
encyclo: "(or a link, a search icon and a stock-price link!)" Thankfully I've never visited a site that used these. If I did, then I certainly wouldn't stay around long enough to get to the bottom of the article.
oldskool79: "when you go shopping do you want every store to be set up for maximum accessibility to product information and accessibility?". You got it. I definitely don't want a store where the racks are so close together that I have to squeeze through with all my bags. I'd like it nice and easy, with wide moving walkways, clear signposts, maps, and elevators.
As for isitreal: "show me the skills and I'll respect what you say". What specifically are you looking for? You want him to show that he's a CSS expert and that he can slap together a fancy menu?
What I would like to see is a usability expert who doesn't casually ignore one of the most important (and paradoxically most well known and understood) concerns regarding the usability of printed material: typography.
It's weird that simple readability isn't on Nielsen's radar at all, either in the way his website is made or in his writings. As I mentioned before, CSS's typographical tools are mediocre, but there are things that could be done to improve the presentation of the information in his website - and before someone who hasn't thought it out jumps in to remind me that content is important not presentation, let me say that when it comes to material that has to be read content can be made much more difficult to access by poor presentation.
-B
CSS's typographical tools are mediocre
isitreal-
I'm using Firefox user stylesheets that set a default max-width: 34em for paragraphs
CSS's typographical tools are mediocre[IMO, font rendering, line breaks, letter/word spacing are all problems for the user-agents. If the web-site is written to W3C's ideal, with content and presentation separated, the user-agent has all the information it nees. The user-agent knows everything. It knows the content, it knows the authors' suggestions on how it should be presented, it knows the user's preferences - font sizes, screen resolution, etc. The user-agent is the one responsible for rendering the webpage in a readable way (be it graphically, speech synthesis, or whatever).
I can't believe what you're saying -
The user agent should be responsible for presentation?!
What does this mean? That every site on the web should be rendered by the two or three stylesheets available with any given user agent? That every person who surfs the web should be authoring their own stylesheets?
I want to say that that's a crazy thing to say, except that I can't believe you mean it... It's one thing for the user/user agent to be able to override presentational defaults, but it's another thing to shift the responsibility - and expertise - for default presentation from the content publisher to the users of the information and their user agents.
There seem to be a few odd views about who the mysterious 'user' is on the internet, and what that user's requirements actually are. On the one hand, there is this weird idea that internet users are nothing more than data consumers and that any presentation more advanced than setting dark text on a light background is an excessively great concession to 'the designer' and not to be borne, and on the other hand there is the equally strange point of view that all internet users are fanatic individaulists, each of whom regards any stylesheet but their own as some kind of unwarranted intrusion into their liberty.
Two things that have been known in print design for many centuries, but have yet to be widely understood on the internet:
You should also do what you can in the service of accessibility, ensure that your page's styling fails gracefully, and it's probably good to offer alternate (but still professionally designed) stylesheets of your own, but you should not simply abdicate your responsibility as a publisher by placing the rendering of your important information entirely in the hands of a useragent. If it's necessary, the user or useragent can override your styling. It's your job to make sure that it's not necessary.
-B
Think about the history of computing devices; we've only just begun to enter an era where we can override the hardware/software's presentation...why would we give that up?
The user agent should be responsible for presentation?!
That every site on the web should be rendered by the two or three stylesheets available with any given user agent?
The "cascade" in cascading style sheets also refers to combining user/author style settings as well.
Think about the history of computing devices; we've only just begun to enter an era where we can override the hardware/software's presentation...why would we give that up?
Of course, Firefox, Winamp, Windows XP, virtually ever UNIX Window manager ever written... all come with a default look and feel, but they give the user the freedom to change that to what suits them.
HTML is a markup language. If you want PDF, you know where to find it.
The user agent should be responsible for presentation?!
This is how it is and always has been, web-wise. Pretty much every style reference makes this point up front.
Quick example: Some people need to read webpages in Hebrew. This requires a near-complete rearrangement of the text on the screen, including font-family. They can easily override author-specified style instructions with a couple of clicks in their browser's preferences.
Use of CSS or other style syntax is primarily to indicate the author's choices, and not to force people to view the page as the author desires.
The web is all about flexibility. If your stylesheets are not flexible, they fly in the face of the web's original intent, which is (to paraphrase): make information accessible to all.
If your stylesheets keep me from viewing your material as I would like to view it, or as I need to view it, then it is imperative that I be allowed to override your specs. Pretty much every browser ever published has included that capability, and we can expect it to be used.
The user agent should be responsible for presentation?!
Absolutely right!
The days of the designer-controller are nearly over after thousands of years. And thank goodness.
Let' sput it crudely: it's your content, but it's my bucket.
Your content is a guest in my bucket.
You have no control over it after the shovel has tossed it over from your site to my bucket.
You have no visiting rights either.
(Of course, you retain ownership and copyright -- but you can't dictate the way I look at it).
That's part of the vision of CSS. It's the way the world is going. Any other approach is quaintly 20th Century.
If a designer so badly wants to create something thought provoking without proper function, they should become artists.
I've rarely heard such a good definition for 'art'. And on webmaster world to boot : )
What I see a lot of people noticing through this thread (a very interesting read by the way) is a widespread designer reluctance to accept that the long-researched rules that lead to an optimal everyday 'analog' consumer environment should also apply to webpage content. First off I want clear, legible and informative signs telling the user what he will find in my store and where to find it; I would then want my storefront to attractively but accurately and clearly show what a visitor would find inside; Once inside, I would want the customer's path to what attracted him to my store to be as short and clearly marked as possible; I would also want to supply the customer with additional information on what interests him should he want it; Lastly I would want the customer, should what he finds interest him to the point where he wanted to buy it, to have a short trip to and hassle-free payment at the cash register.
'Good design' starts with the above. We get into the realm of 'Tasteful' when design, while embellishing a decor that a vistor normally wouldn't think of touching, doesn't block or mask the doors and handles he would need to travel from room to room. Great design is when everything the user came for is presented to him, in the order he expects it, with clarity and taste.
Store design and web design should go hand in hand - how do you think consumers built their habits before they found the web?
But I'm a little at a loss to explain the responses I'm reading. I still can't help wondering if you actually read my post, as what I'm arguing is that good design is fundamental to accessibility and usability, and that it is the content publisher's responsibility to ensure that in its raw form as delivered to end user, content is in a readable, accessible form.
You guys are making this an argument about control, and insisting that that control belongs solely with the end-user. Fair enough, but I don't see it as an issue of control, but one of duty.
There are two problems as I see it:
An individual user may not necessarily be the best judge of even their own needs in this respect. Do not try to misconstrue this as some kind of paternalistic designer's arrogance. It's a lot to expect of every person that uses the web that they be a good page designer in just the same way that it would be a lot to expect that every person that uses a toilet be a good plumber. There is a reason why we don't just swap around unformatted text files and format them ourselves.
What length of line is most readable for lines set for continuous reading in Roman type? Got a number? Ok, what unit of measurement is that number in? What font sizes will that line-length work with? Why should I offload this part of my job to the end user?
A knowledgable user can change my styles, but my styles have to be better than unstyled text in most cases without the user's intervention.
Any decent modern user agent can override an author/publisher's presentational choices - the user already has this control, provided they are educated enough or have sufficient priveleges on the user agent to exercise their control.
But what if they don't have one or the other? If the content publisher or author has made no effort to style the text in a readable form, then those users may simply have too difficult a time to make use of the information on the page. And this is why I say that it is my job as a content-publisher to try to deliver my content in a way that can be accessed easily, and as I mentioned previously in a way that degrades well and is flexible enough for the end user's needs.
We have all seen amateur webpages with hideous designs...purple text on black pages; garish headlines; God help us, blocks of blinking text. We experienced techies can simply shudder, switch to one of our own stylesheets and carry on, but an inexperienced user may not even know that this is possible and will either suffer in an attempt to absorb whatever information he was in search of, or just leave without it. The fault is with the publisher of the page whose responsibility it was to ensure that his content was presented in a usable, readable form. And just imagine what his alternate stylesheet for browsing would look like...
Now for the quotes:
I don't need you to try and set text to a font size that is too small. That is why I set a minimum font size in my user-agent.
And this is why my hypothetical responsible publisher has made available alternate stylesheets and not specified the font size in an absolute unit like pixels. Again, it is the publishers responsibility to do this - as I mentioned in the last post.
You mean with skinable apps, where the user can decide how they want an app to look, instead of how the author decided it ought to look?
See above, I thought you meant the software should control this without user intervention ;-) This is obviously a good thing.
HTML is a markup language. If you want PDF, you know where to find it.
This could start a whole new thread, so I will confine myself to saying that the data/presentation model, while practical and intensely useful in some applications, is not a good model of how humans actually use written language. Content and presentation are not as easily separable as many of the web's loudest voices apparently believe.
Quick example: Some people need to read webpages in Hebrew. This requires a near-complete rearrangement of the text on the screen, including font-family. They can easily override author-specified style instructions with a couple of clicks in their browser's preferences.
Nice straw man argument ;-) Presumably content delivered in Hebrew should already be styled to be ltr instead of rtl and with an appropriate Hebrew font - this is the publisher's job. If that means separate stylesheets for separate languages, that's fine.
Use of CSS or other style syntax is primarily to indicate the author's choices, and not to force people to view the page as the author desires ... If your stylesheets keep me from viewing your material as I would like to view it, or as I need to view it, then it is imperative that I be allowed to override your specs
I agree. Maybe re-read the last paragraph of my last post...
You have no control over it after the shovel has tossed it over from your site to my bucket.
True, but I also can't assume that your bucket knows how to present any particular one of my documents without my help. If I do make that assumption, I risk that you may take your bucket and play elsewhere. Presumably as a publisher that is exactly what I don't want.
-B
Presumably content delivered in Hebrew should already be styled to be ltr instead of rtl and with an appropriate Hebrew font - this is the publisher's job.
The publisher cannot know the demands of all users. In order to meet the demands of the material being published and to meet the publisher's goals of readability, etc., the publisher's job is (for this instance) producing web documents which are designed to be flexible with regard to content flow, typestyle and size, and page layout.
I believe most of us are agreeing that the user-agent is the final arbiter of what the user experiences. It is the publisher that needs to be better-informed about how much control they have over the presentation, and learn to accept that their design will look different to almost every viewer.
A real quick example: Linux doesn't come with MS web fonts (Tahoma, Verdana, Georgia, etc.). If a publisher wants to insist the user see those fonts, the publisher is simply out of luck with Linux users who have not gone to the trouble of installing the MS fonts and their interpreter.
However it is not the publisher's job in this publishing medium to anticipate every language required by visitors to the site. I use this as an example of a user-agent with above-average demands placed on it.
Um...a web page can only be available in whatever language the author/publisher authored it in...If the publisher hasn't sent text in Hebrew to the user's browser/user agent, why would the user want to read it rtl in a Hebrew font? (Better: if it wasn't served in a Hebrew charset, how could any settings in the user agent make it available in Hebrew?) If the publisher has sent Hebrew text, he should presumably have specified at least a token font or two and (obviously) the correct direction (e.g.
"direction:rtl;"I guess I don't understand your example...
-B
Content negotiation for language may be part of that empowerment. Allowing the user agent to determine line breaks may also be part of the picture -- and given the wide number of fonts name "Arial" and "Times" that come with various browsers and systems, we should definitely allow some freedom here, as we also exercise some prudent "directions".
But it's more than these fine points. It's a global philosophy of approach to authoring web documents.
As I work to empower users -- to create a simple, seamless and intuitive interface that uses menu labels and site responses that users can easily comprehend -- I discover that it's a big job, it takes more time than controlling or showing off. And it puts me, the developer, back in the shadows.
I'm just the middle man, the guy that introduces web traffic to those who want to serve them. That's my focus: getting out of the way so that the key relationships can be built. Those relationships are the reason I have a web development job at all. I need to do everything within my power to give those folks the tools they need.
I shouldn't be intruding; I'm just a match-maker.
But to jump in... Surfers don't like to be controlled. Period. In the ten seconds that they may or may not spend on your site while on their usually many-dozen site surfing tour to find what they're looking for, you have to give them something coherent to look at when they see your pages. It's the webmaster who decides what the user will see in that brief span of time. I really doubt that users will set their preferences to 'optimally' see just one site (and yes, even if it's yours), and I'll bet that 98% of users have never opened their browser preferences at all.
It comes down to this: The user sees garish gobbldygook: he's gone in a second. The user sees lines of hard-to-read text : unless the user is on a 'mission' of finding information pertaining exactly to the text's subject, he will read a couple lines and he's gone. Lot's of ads and hard-to-discern-at-first-glance content: even if the page holds (somewhere) the exact information that the user is looking for, in most cases he's gone. New windows with no visible means of navigation: the user's first reaction will be to regain some sort of control over his browsing, which usually means closing the 'navigation-less' window - or in other words: he's gone.
It is up to the webmaster to prepare his site for the above sort of user if he wants to catch traffic from the SE's. CSS has different effects in different browsers and different platforms, but it's up to the webmaster to test them all if what the user sees concerns him. I think this almost goes without saying.
I agree with Jakob Nielsen's article in the sense where I would rather have a simplistic but comprehensible site than pages of hard-to-find garish useless content, but I don't agree with what seems to be his stoïcism in regards to his thinking that we should all be reading simplistic lynx-friendly text pages who's style really doesn't matter in regards to the content. Or so I see by looking at his site.
For a 'stray' visitor to actually take the time to read your content there must be a 'hook', or something 'new' hasn't seen in the possibly hours of surfing he's done before he found your site. Yet that hook can be simplistic, pleasing and coherent design without the use of all the doodads. I think the word "obvious" can well describe an effective hook.
It's the buzzers, fireworks and whistles that tire users the most.
Well, Nielsen seems to rely on the browsers/users default styles. That's good enough if you ask me: I'd like to think that the user customized their browser to suit their own needs/tastes. Or if they didn't or couldn't customize it, then I'd like to think the browser maker shipped their product with a perfectly usable set of default styles.
What he's serving up isn't an unstyled document, it's a document that has default styles (ie minimal ones, or prefered ones) applied to it.
"a web page can only be available in whatever language the author/publisher authored it in"
Well, to some extent that's true, but not in all cases. And the situation will change more as times goes by. For better or worse, Machine Translation is now getting widely used. I think Netscape 6 was the first browser to have a View>Translate menu item, where any page could be automatically translated to any other language (I guess that's the main reason why we have lang='). And who could forget the MSN/Opera/Muppet Bork edition?
Example: I don't speak Russian, but I'm sure there are plenty of Russian websites out there that I'd like to access. To some extent, modern browsing software (or google) allows me to do this.
I went to read one of their articles, and the article itself is of short line lengths, well written, and informative ... but literally half of the page is taken up by a gigantic vertical Flash banner running alongside the article copy. It's HUGE!
So, since I normally don't pay attention to these types of ads (but this one's HUGE!), I was irritated by the fact that it got my attention, distracting me from the reading of the article, which gave rise to my interest.
The pages have other, normal advertising (AdSense, small menu banners, etc.) which do not distract from the text. But that giganto banner it quite intrusive.
At what point (perhaps area/volume-wise) does unrelated content tip the scales toward user-UNfriendliness? Or is their a design that can incorporate a majority of unrelated content and still do the job well? Or have we just not discovered the "right" way to incorporate unrelated ads?
Could we start the bidding at somewhere around "content=75% of the viewing area is the minimum for user-friendliness"?
You want him to show that he's a CSS expert and that he can slap together a fancy menu?
No, I didn't say that. What I want is for someone who talks about a subject such as design to show me he has the right to talk about it. Hopefully this concept isn't that extreme....
Tedster:
shouldn't be intruding; I'm just a match-maker.
Again, I know who I'm paying attention to here... and it's not Nielson
[edited by: isitreal at 10:12 pm (utc) on Sep. 8, 2004]
What does this hold for the rest of us? Probably a slow-moving wave of litigation to force popular sites to be accessible to everyone.
Will site/page design be a primary focus of such litigation? You betcha.
(See [webaim.org ], too.)
Think about what people want. They aren't coming to your site to view "your content", they are coming to your site looking for "their content".
I shouldn't be intruding; I'm just a match-maker.
Now that I re-read this, maybe it's a bit of a strech to compare the 12 Months thread to the Nielsen article, but I think the philosophy behind each is the same or at least parallel.
Nothing in Nielsen's article was groundbreaking, but sometimes I need a reminder to be sure I'm giving my users their website along with their content.
The large majority of users have no clue about the proper way to format content to make it easy to read and find information.
99.9% of users aren't going to say "I don't really like the way this is laid out, let me adjust my browser settings and change it to better suit me".
Instead, they will simply leave your website.
I design my sites to appeal to the widest range of users as possible. This, of course, is different depending on the content of the site and who the target audience is.
If you are designing a technical information site aimed at advanced users, then a nearly pure text based site would be ideal.
However, if you're building a fan site for a pop star that is aimed at young teens, then you want to make it more jazzy, which a cool interface (although still easy to use) and animations, sounds, etc.
Jakob Neilsen's 'style' works great for some websites, but is horrible for others.
In addition, people like good design...even if it causes usability to suffer slightly. For example, I'd much rather live in a Frank Lloyd Wright house than a house whose design was based soley on usability.
The world would get boring very fast. Imagine what our cities would look like if architexts adding no artistic elements and focused soley on practical usability. Boring.
[edited by: oldskool79 at 5:18 pm (utc) on Sep. 9, 2004]
Michael Dertouzos -- in the Foreword to "Weaving the Web"
Website visitors are not just passive lumps of potential income. Treat them as humans. It works.
The problem is when you have images, or other non standard content like flash, applets, etc.
To be honest with you, I think it's completely rediculous that anyone has to do anything special just for the disabled. Why should a company have to spend tens of thousands (or sometimes millions) to make their product or store accessible to a small minority of people (that may never even buy their product anyway)? That's a stupid economic policy that makes the 'abled' suffer for the 'disabled'.
Anyway, I'm fully able-bodied, and I love sites that are accessible- in NO way do I "suffer". It's so much quicker and easier for me if things are laid out in a logical manner with decent fonts and obvious controls, etc. So that "special extra work" makes it better for everybody, not just the disabled. I'd say it's easier for the webmaster if they don't have to do any extra work just to please the people who can view flashy content.
And let's not forget that I'm allergic to adverts and I always turn off images when I'm using a modem. So if a page doesn't work with me because there isn't any alt-text, then, I'm not gonna stay long enough to see what you're selling (which is I guess what the article was about). The same thing goes for my able-bodied mother, who I've told not to download any new plugins for fear of maliciousness, and so cannot view much of the fancy stuff.
There are other people who can word this a lot better than I can, so be prepared for a very persuasive 5-page rant on this issue...
Actually, thinking about that last sentence, I suppose it's a bit like saying "Black people are in the minority, so why spend money catering for them? They probably won't eat in our restaurant anyway."
Part of being a professional webmaster involves doing everything in your power to make sure the broadest number of potential customers have superior access to the wares being sold. A webmaster who wants to make a site so complicated that a page-reading program has difficulty with parsing it has bigger, more fundamental design problems than simply making the site accessible to the vision-impaired.
Black people are in the minority, so why spend money catering for them? They probably won't eat in our restaurant anyway.
I'm not sure exactly how you specifically 'cater' to black people in a restraunt, but regardless of that, I think that statement makes perfect sense. Why would you spend money on something if it was not going to help your business in any way?
A business should spend it's money where it will be most effective - not where it will make the most people 'feel good' or whatever it is the disabled are looking for.
My father used to own a restraunt that was inaccessible to wheelchairs because you had to go up about 15 steps to get to the entrance. Because it was grandfathered in, they were not required to provide wheelchair access (and even if they wanted to, it wasn't feasible to build a ramp). Because of this, they got at least a phone call or two per week from some irate disabled person who was furious that they were unable to eat at this restraunt. These people would actually scream at us on the phone.
They expected (demanded) us to spend thousands of dollars of OUR money so they could eat in OUR restraunt. Interestingly, not a single one of these people offered any of their money to pay to make the business wheelchair accessible. They want everyone to bend over backwards to help them, but they refuse to help out themselves.
That's a stupid economic policy that makes the 'abled' suffer for the 'disabled'
A couple of points here:
1 - Making a website accessible is *not* expensive, especially if it is designed accessible from the start.
2 - Accessible websites tend to be easier to use for normally-abled people too.
I realize he was specifically speaking of IntelliTXT...I wonder how this line of thinking might apply to say authority sites, or even to links to other related sections of your own site.
Doubt Mr. Nielsen would follow that line of thinking as he'd have to at the very least redo his site's navigational structure.
