Alex Wright

i seem to find myself

July 26, 2000

i seem to find myself paying less and less attention to jakob nielsen these days, but his recent alertbox column on the end of web design has sparked some fiery discussions of late in webbie circles. michael sippey has written an excellent rebuttal that prompted me to jot down a few reactions of my own:

while it's hard to argue with nielsen about the importance of conventions and best practices for things like search, registration, and other common tasks, or that interoperability between platforms and applications will necessitate a focus on semantic structures over presentation ... i have to ask whether any of this really comes as news to anyone by now?

i agree with michael that jakob has it pretty much backwards. interoperability between sites is in fact _not_ going to necessitate consistency at the presentation layer - quite the opposite: the growing sophistication of application servers and ASP tools increasingly make it possible to separate structure from presentation so completely that we can build entirely new presentation layers across multiple sites and services at once. think blogger, atomz, bigstep, and XML in general.

jakob's web seems to me a pretty dreary place, where all any of us would ever want to do is carry out mundane transactions and retrieve "information" in rote, predictable ways. which is not to dismiss the importance of transactional services - but surely there's more to life, and to the Web?

what really irks me is jakob's implicit assumption that "information" = ASCII text, with perhaps an occasional decorative image thrown in. he seems to dismiss the mixed-media and more experiential aspects of the Web completely, other than perhaps to allow that images, sound and video might play some servile role as "content" on a Web site. to jakob, every Web experience amounts to a series of transactions; everything else is fluff and flutter. this seems to me a pretty cold view of the world, and of the Web.

ultimately, jakob keeps returning to "users" as the justification for his insistent claims for consistency and predictability. his argument that because most users spend their time flitting between sites, that therefore all sites must look and behave alike seems like a bad case of reductio ad absurdum to me. yes, many things ought to be more consistent. but let's be wary of absolutisms like "Websites must tone down their individual appearance and distinct design in all ways."

finally, at the risk of wanton jakob-bashing, how about that reference to the "the early years of the Web in 1991 and 1992." geez, talk about being ahead of the curve - apparently jakob was ahead of Mr. Berners-Lee himself?

ok, whew, that's off my chest now. i should add that i actually have an enormous respect for nielsen as a seminal figure in the history of usability engineering - his early work on usability heuristics should be required reading for anyone going into the web design business - i just think the man's gotten a bit too rigid and doctrinaire of late - here's hoping he'll learn to lighten up one of these days....

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