Confusability

Usability Views - 10,000 articles done so far

Three years ago I created Usability Views. It was an attempt to collect and organise links to articles that were of interest to me.

You are now reading article number ten thousand. That means that I have added an average of ten articles a day for the last three years. Phewwwwwww.

Why would anyone do such a thing?

Well it isn't for the money that's for sure. Whilst I do earn enough from ads and amazon links to just about cover my hosting costs I donate my time and effort for nothing.

Being an atheist I know that I won't get my reward in heaven, but that's Ok because the friends I have made through the site is reward enough for me.

Thanks to everyone who has given me support and help during the early days, especially the Webword crew (you know who you are).

However there are two people who deserve extra special thanks. My wife Heather and nine month old son  Gabriel. At various times during the week they will hear those ominous words "I'm just updating my website." I will then disappear for an hour or so while I check my source sites and add any new articles that take my fancy.

Gabriel wanted to say hi to all of those people from all over the world who visit his dad's site, so here he is waving hello.

If you are a regular visitor or a first time viewer, why not come over and leave me a message. It would be really great if you could spare the time just to say hello.

Or maybe you would like to post a link to picture of you waving back at Gabriel.

Ps: here are some links to the site from the wayback machine so you can see how Usability Views has changed over the years.

11 Oct 2002 - 628 articles

28 Nov 2002 - 2,421 articles

16 Jun 2003 - 4,524 articles (a little bit political)

22 Jun 2004 - 8,059 articles

Lazier, stupider and evil(er) designers: An interview with Obi-Wan Jakobi

JS: Having a cup of earl grey and a danish pastry with Jakob Nielsen, the web usability deity from Nielsen Norman Group, I asked him what was holding up progress on his plans for world domination.

JN: Three things, really: I call them lazy, stupid and evil designers. The second of my five year plans was intended to make me the acclaimed ruler of the design world with "Jakob's Little Green Book" being taught to children all over the world in preparation for their role in the 'Blue Link Forward' movement.

---

JS: Why do you think that you have to go on constantly repeating your simple mantra that "People should just do what I say". Are designers just too stupid to listen to your enlightened views?

JN: Well, I would hate to agree with your analysis, but if it quacks and is yellow then perhaps it is a duck. I have experienced this reaction before when I used to be the "best film reviewer in the world". I had reviewed a movie called "Time Trax" where I pointed out a number of problems with the movie, the worst being the sign saying "Smithsonian Institute" when in fact it is actually called the "Smithsonian Institution". You can read more of my review of Time Trax if you would like to be further enlightened on this matter. You may also like to study my methodology for using a VCR which has been ignored by the lazy, stupid people who watch movies.

You should also read some of my book reviews where I explain why the publishing industry doesn't cater for people with an intellect as massive as mine.

---

JS: How do you get along with your fellow partners at NNGroup. Is there a lot of discussion about the usability of cutlery in the canteen?

JN: Well, you might think that it's fun, but it's actually very hard work. Don seems to spend a lot of time in the bathroom messing around with toilet paper, whilst Tog spends most of the day in the parking lot, tinkering around with his motorhome.

I do wish that Don wouldn't spend so much time in the executive washroom as I do need to brush my hair on an hourly basis so that I can make a good impression with my followers disciples fans.

---

JS: Whatever happened to Brenda Laurel. There was a big fanfare when she joined NNGroup but then she disappeared without anything being said. What's the inside story on her departure?

JN: We did have someone called Brenda working with us for a while, but she didn't meet my guidelines for female employees and we had to let her go.

---

JS: You have been described as "The Six Trillion Dollar Man" with regard to your claims for productivity gains for intranets if they would just follow your usability guidelines.

JN: Yes, there has been a lot of confusion over my remarks about the savings that could be made if people just did as I told them. I wasn't talking about the savings a company could make, I was talking about the amount of money I would make if everyone in the world bought two of my books and attended one of my seminars.

---

JS: Some evil people have criticised you for being behind the times and not following your own guidelines. The search on useit.com is abysmal and there is no returns policy available on nngroup.com. Some would say that your tabloid approach is having a negative impact on your usability peers.Would you like to take this opportunity to answer these specific ctiticisms?

JN: No.

---

JS: What is the most important thing that people can do to help you achieve your goal of 105% guideline compliance by the year 2018?

JN: I would advise all right-minded people considering careers in any industry to request their organisation to arrange for us to run an introdution to usability course which will give you the fundamentals of the one true path to usability enlightenment.

My latest "Usability Universe Tour" resulted in the creation of over 2,500 usability professionals in just six weeks.



This means that we should reach our total of 1.2 million Nielsen accredited usability professionals at 7.45pm on Wednesday 24th March 2014 (approx).

---

JS: Thank you.

JN: Yes.

---

This interview of Obi-Wan Jakobski by Jake Sconepaddock was carried out purely in the imagination of Chris McEvoy and bears no relationship to any other interview, real or imaginary.

Opening up the usability archives

The most recent arlertbox from Mr Nielsen tells us that 33% of the usability practitioners surveyed don't keep any of their old usability reports. This tells us something about the value that is placed on these reports.

Almost 40% keep theirs in an organised repository, whilst the remainder keep theirs somewhere around the place (in a box under the stairs perhaps).

But Jakob doesn't mention one of the most useful types of usability reports option: "The Public Archive".

Sauli Laitinen has published "Better Games Through Usability Evaluation and Testing" at Gamasutra where he talks about the importance of usability for game design and gives specific examples of usability problems found during an expert review of a game.

There are dozens of game design post-mortems available on the site where designers talk about lessons learnt from different games. This level of honesty is hard to find in other industries where usability is just as important.

Donald Norman publishes a page "In Praise of Good Design", where he ""illustrates products that have some special positive characteristic worthy of comment". Don is looking for more examples, so please send suggestions to products @ jnd.org.

We encourage to talk about their usability experiences at our South West Usability Group meetings, but people can be afraid to talk about their failures which makes it diificult to explain how they produced successful designs as we learn an awful lot from our failures. (Anyone who would like to come and talk at SWUG is more than welcome).

Unless we are able to be more open about our usability experiences we are implying that it is shameful to make silly mistakes in our designs, whilst in fact I am proud of the fact that I make mistakes but then learn from them and do my best not to make them again.

Perhaps it's time to start publishing our internal usability reports on the internet. Anyone interested?

Is Jakob Nielsen evil, stupid or just plain lazy?

Jack Schofield published a story today about a conversation he recently had with Jakob Nielsen where Jakob informed him that the three things that were holding up progress on the web were "lazy, stupid and evil design".

I would like to propose the addition of "Jakob Nielsen" to that list. By continuing to talk to web designers as if they are ignorant, lazy philistines only serves to undermine the role of usability specialists within organisations.

Jakob himself is guilty of many of the sins he berates others for. If you try a search for "lazy design" on useit.com you will see a search engine that hasn't seen a usability testing session this side of the millenium. One of Jakob's e-commerce guidelines states that you should have a clear returns policy prominently available on your site. You won't find one on nngroup.com.

Frank Spillers recently published an article in the Spring 2005 Edition of Interfaces where he made a similar argument:

One of the things I have noticed about people who take Nielsen’s teachings at face value is that they end up communicating like him. The blaming, critical, and selfrighteous tones that characterise Nielsen’s articles and interviews are not to be confused with how a professional usability consultant ought to communicate. Of the hundreds of people I have trained in the past few years, I have noticed the “Critical Jakob” in their findings. The danger is that armed with Jakob’s influence, we can assume that we have a hammer large enough to break anything. A reader comment to Jakob’s partner Tog a few years ago raised this issue. Tog’s response was that this communication style was for marketing purposes only and that it was not the way he and his colleagues speak to their clients.

It’s rich to criticise something as if no other dependencies exist. Even better to pretend like you have all the answers and that no humans (with feelings) were ever involved in the design. By taking the National Enquirer (a supermarket tabloid newspaper) approach to communication, Nielsen is doing a disservice to the usability practitioner community by not imparting best practices in communicating usability insights.

If Jack had been a little less lazy in his reporting he would have found that Jakob has given the same talk in 2001 :"Evil, stupid, and lazy design: three reasons the Web is so hard to use" and 2003 : "Why Usability Matters". Although I should commend Jack for not being as lazy as the BBC when they managed to publish three NNGroup publicity pieces posing as news items in October 2003.

I have attended the Nielsen roadshow in the past but I would recommend you spend your money on conferences and events that are a little more inclusive instead. Three years ago the programme included presentations from amazon, yahoo and oracle as well as the ususal NNGroup suspects. This year the schedule is wall to wall Nielsen Norman Group apart from one session in London which had five different organisations talking about "Great Intranets".

These Jakobian traits have been commented on for years by various people and will continue to pop-up from time to time.

Every time Jakob has one of these public outbursts his credibility drops a little bit more. Like The Incredible Shrinking Man, Mr Nielsen's voice will soon be no more than a distant whine if he continues to come across like a little hitler.

NoGoDaddy

Adam Greenfield draws our attention to Bob Parsons post stating his support for the use of torture in Guantánamo Bay:

Key prisoners at Gitmo still have not talked -- because our interrogation methods are so weak.
Given the type of individuals we have incarcerated at Gitmo (all of them would love to gouge out your eyes --- and most certainly my eyes), the interrogation techniques we are using there are incredibly mild. All of the prisoners receive regular medical attention. In contrast, Americans who are captured in the Middle East have their heads hacked off. The point here is that there’s just no comparison.
Bob Parsons Blog

Bob seems to be saying that "Torture by Americans Good, Torture of Americans Bad".

Well, I will join the boycott and stop using or recommending GoDaddy. I notice that TypePad mention GoDaddy in their help files as one of four "popular registrars". Whilst not actually recommending GoDaddy, I wonder if the people at SixApart would remove the implied support of GoDaddy and remove the reference from their site. I'll e-mail Anil and see what happens.

Guantánamo detentions enter fourth year as torture allegations mount
"Along with the individual detainees and their families, the rule of law is falling victim to this disdain for the judiciary", Amnesty International said. "The example being set by Guantánamo is of a world where basic human rights are negotiable, and where arbitrary detention and selective second-class justice become acceptable in the name of security."

Amnesty International reiterates its call for the Guantánamo detainees to be brought to fair trial or released -- with proposed trials by military commission terminated once and for all. All allegations of torture or ill-treatment in Guantánamo or elsewhere must be independently investigated, and anyone responsible for torture or ill-treatment brought to justice. All secret and incommunicado detention must be ended immediately, as must secret transfers of detainees between countries.
Amnesty International Press Release

Halliburton given $30m to expand Guantanamo Bay
Not only Democrats but also several prominent Republicans - among them Mel Martinez, Florida Senator and former Bush cabinet member - have publicly argued that the damage to America's image caused by the prison now outweighs any practical benefits it might have. Joe Biden, the senior Democrat on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, has described the prison's image as a "recruiting agent" for al-Qa'ida.
The Independent

The Yes Men

Just watched the Yes Men movie and I can heartily recommend it to anyone who likes a bit of humour with their anti-capitalism.

"The Yes Men story follows Andy and Mike from their beginnings with GWBush.com, and on to their tasteless parody of the WTO's website. Some visitors don’t notice the site is a fake, and send speaking invitations meant for the real WTO. Mike and Andy play along with the ruse and soon find themselves attending important functions as WTO representatives.

Delighted to speak for the organization they oppose, Andy and Mike don thrift-store suits and set out to shock their unwitting audiences with darkly comic satires on global free trade. Weirdly, the experts don’t notice the joke and seem to agree with every terrible idea the two can come up with.

Exhausted by their failed attempts to shock, Mike and Andy take a whole new approach for one final lecture."

Thanks to Bruce Lawson for the recommendation.

BBC homepage exterminated by daleks

Today the BBC used their homepage to promote the Dalek Invasion in Doctor Who.

I am guessing that they are having some problems putting the old homepage back as I am getting this page when I go to bbc.co.uk

Oops. I guess some poor sod will get it in the neck for this!

Update (8.40pm)

I have just checked again and the homepage is now working fine, with this somewhat ironic version of the homepage.

I second that nomination

Bruce is urging us to vote for Julie Howell in the New Media Age Effectiveness Awards.

Just trust me follow these instructions from Bruce:

The winner is decided by public vote. If you are in the UK, you can vote for Jooly by texting NMA 6 to 83338 before midday June 17 2005. There’s no surcharge for texting, just your normal network rates.

BBS Documentary is shipping

I have just ordered my copy, when will you order yours?

I think we're now officially at the end of "production" and completely in the "sale" and "publicity" phase of the BBS Documentary. With 4,000 copies of this thing in my basement, I think the motivation is there to tell as many people as possible about this project, and get them out the door. Here's the physical side to the theoretical arguments I've made about creative commons and what people look for in a product. If I sell a lot, this pile gets smaller. If I do not, it stays like it is and I have a new roommate.

Regardless.

We have here, in box form, a dream I first considered back in the summer of 2001 and which I strove to accomplish in the ensuing years; it is, in other words, a dream come true.

Now let's see how many people share/want this dream as well.

BBS Documentary News

"BBS: The Documentary" is an 8 episode series about all aspects of the history of the dial-up Bulletin Board System, or BBS. 3 years in the making and the result of over 200 interviews, this collection puts in one convenient package a sense of the variety and wide-reaching effects of the BBS phenomenon. All in all, over seven and a half hours of material is included across the three region-free DVDs.