I generally agree with much of what web usability guru Jakob Nielsen says, but get the impression he’s pretty stubborn about applying his principles to his own website. Wouldn’t it be great if he could demonstrate how usable websites can still be beautiful?
And I didn’t get the impression he was very forthcoming about suggestions, despite other people’s attempts to give him a makeover (however, I like this post about spicing up useit.com with more semantic markup).
[Side note: I had a prototype for this 2000 redesign competition, reUSEIT, but didn’t enter in the end. I only just visited the site again, to find that no entries were submitted! Dang. Now I wonder where I saved my old design! In 2003 there was a more successful redesign competition, endorsed by Nielsen himself. Unfortunately, nothing was adopted for his site. ]
And the other thing is – why doesn’t he have RSS feeds? I’d see that as a form of ‘usability’ in the sense that I don’t have to go to his website to see if any new articles are up. Of course, I could still subscribe to his e-mail newsletters, but my mailbox is already jammed and I’m unlikely to read it – at most, just skim through it.
But thanks to this post from Boing Boing, someone’s kindly scraped the content into a bootleg RSS feed. Thank you, kind soul.
Hmm … not practising what he preaches all the time … not wanting to improve the look of his own site … not blogging or providing his own RSS feeds. Getting a little bit out of touch? Time to stop resting on laurels and get ‘with it’!
[Update: Check out youzit.com, a spoof of useit.com. Yes, it’s in Flash. ]
Comments
ewwww. what’s up with useit.com? no doubt it is informative, but without proper navigational layout – how can any reader procure any form of information without having to subject one self through a tedious, and mundane, array of un-parsed HTML codes.
semantic? i think he should stop using the computer altogether.
Hahaha! Those years of Nielsen-bashing relived! Just check out the page where he has photos of himself. Would have given you a clue as to why he doesn’t take well to suggestions.
He was a forerunner, in his time. He’s still there. In his time.
Hey Jakob why don’t you do a demo for us. I will be really delighted and also u can practise what you preach.No one can ever question you.