Response to: How Usable is Jakob Nielsen?
In response to How Usable is Jakob Nielsen?
While I don’t hold Jakob Nielsen up to Guru status, I do find his comments accurate and thought provoking. In the realm of web design and usability, I believe it’s important to survey the entire industry, not a single person. Thus, we should all be reading as much as we can from several different sources in order to balance out our own views of current trends in web design and usability.
It seems that this particular article was mostly a personal attack on Jakob-that he had conflicts of interest, that he doesn’t care about graphic design, that he has a bad writing style, etc. These personal attacks, while they may be true, don’t affect the content of his articles. I still think he has good things to say, though I would not base my entire opinion on usability on one person’s views, be it Jakob or Jared or Edward (Tufte) or Ben (Schneiderman)… (I could list several more here).
As for the argument of visual design, I completely agree. Jakob is entirely focused on usability-does the site work? If the answer is yes, then you’ve met his goal. However, there can be a marriage between graphic design and usability; form and function. I believe that as technical communicators, as web developers, as content owners, as graphic designers that is our job.
An interesting side note on the use of blue for links: Anatomy has shown that blue is the worst color to use because there are actually no blue cones in the fovea of the eye. This means that we can only perceive the color blue indirectly. When we focus on something, we use the fovea of the eye. The fovea allows us to focus on something about the size of a thumbnail held at arm’s length. We can only see blue using our peripheral vision, that is, outside of the fovea because we literally have NO blue receptors (cones) in the fovea.
Jakob should not have a “Monopoly on Usability Consciousness.” That doesn’t mean we don’t listen to what he says, it just means that we apply it with a grain of salt.
