Usability Ain’t Everything – A Response to Jakob Nielsen’s iPad Usability Study

http://johnnyholland.org/2010/05/26/usability-ain%E2%80%99t-everything-a-response-to-jakob-nielsen%E2%80%99s-ipad-usability-study/

by fun2have • 16 years ago

14 20 16 years ago

johnnyholland.org

ThomPete3• 16 years ago

All standards are learned. What Jakob nielsen misses is that the touch interface is a new paradigme because it removes abstraction from the interaction. You can't judge it on old metrics that themselves in so many ways are wrong and clumbsy.

Jakob nielsen is wrong and have been for a long time. Usability isn't any longer a field to be taken serious in itself. Only when paired with actual design skills does it start to make sense. As a qualifier not as a discipline in itself.

I've said it before. In five years from now usability is nothing more than another tool in the designers box on the line of grid systems typography etc.

butterfi• 16 years ago

When you say "Neilsen is wrong", you really need to back that up. The Neilsen/Norman group conducts empirical studies and has a fair amount of transparency about their work. Most of the "professional" web designers I've worked with tend to favor their design over the user's needs. I would agree that Neilsen advice falls into the conservative design camp more then I appreciate, but at the very least he has actual metrics and user testing to draw his conclusions on. Having been in multiple user testing sessions and seen many a fancy design go down in flames of user confusion, I'll believe that "usability is nothing more then another tool in the designers toolbox" when I see it applied more consistently.

fun2have2• 16 years ago

I don't think anybody that knows about Usability Metrics takes "Neilsen" that seriously. Neilson is more popular with the 5 user is enough camp while most people dealing with Ux Metrics believe that you need to be testing with at least 50 to 300 users.

ThomPete3• 16 years ago

The problem is that his metrics are not applicable to creating successful products.

He is testing on users not on actual customers, there is a world of difference.

You are welcome to show any study that proves that usability testing in general equals better products (i.e. more successful products)

So downvote me all you want. It is a dying field.

If you want a longer answer you I wrote one here http://000fff.org/getting-to-the-customer-why-everything-you....

Nekojoe2• 16 years ago

I used to read a lot of Jakob Nielsen's writing, on his website and books. I don't read his work so much now because I find what he says tends to be too conservative. He tends to be too strict with guidelines. For years he insisted that all unvisited hyperlinks should be blue and all visited ones should be purple.

One of the tricks with usability I've found is knowing which rules to stick to, which ones to bend and which ones to break.

mstevens2• 16 years ago

I'm still in the "all unvisited hyperlinks should be blue and all visited ones should be purple." camp. It's simple and everyone knows what to expect!

imp• 16 years ago

You've managed to use this website though, despite no blue or purple links.

patio11• 16 years ago

Back on the first version of my site some years ago, I tested blue links versus my design's default (orange, if I recall correctly). Blue won by a mile.

Your mileage may vary. I've also had folks cite usability experts who suggest that changing navigation options is a Very Bad Thing. I do it when folks go to the purchasing page. It is a Very Bad Thing That Pays My Rent And Then Some.

Nekojoe2• 16 years ago

I agree, it's a sensible guideline, but he would be critical of websites that don't follow this guideline.

It's good to be consistent. But lots of sites now have an colour scheme that makes it clear which links are visited and which ones are unvisted. Generally the visited ones are a duller / subdued.

someone_here• 16 years ago

Thankfully, he has research to back up his position. He actually got to his position based on experimental data.

pedalpete• 16 years ago

I've always thought the flaw in Jakob Nielsen's thinking was that he was completely focused on standards and almost ignored design.

I much prefer Donald Norman's work.

As a contrast to 'design around standard so that people understand what to do', Norman says 'make things beautiful and playful so people want to use them'.

MWinther2• 16 years ago

First, I dispute saying that just because it's touch based, the iPad doesn't have a Graphical User Interface.

Second, another kind of device which got a no-holds-barred canvas to create beautiful and stylized interaction-based content was the DVD. The DVD menus for a LOT of titles are seriously crappy.

Even though Nielsen might err on the side of caution, he definitely has a point. People without guidelines have been producing pretty-but-non-functional GUIs before. Let's not keep the traditions alive.

Usability Ain’t Everything – A Response to Jakob Nielsen’s iPad Usability Study

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