Yet Another Reason to Hate Jakob
From Wired:
‘If you are going to go and buy something on a new website, you will fail. If you go to a new website, you will not be able to use it.’
He’s telling me that NO ONE HAS EVER PURCHASED ANYTHING FROM THE INTERNET, EVER? (I understand that he’s referring to the ‘average user,’ but still. My mother has purchased things online, and she only owns an iMac.. :>) Can someone please explain to me why he is perpetually referred to as a ‘guru?’ He’s got about as much guru in him as David Siegel. And Peter Catapano over at Wired even referred to the whole Nielsen Group as ‘a collective of forward-thinking tech experts.’ Forward thinking? You’re kidding me, right? I mean, these guys are designing (excuse me, they don’t even ACTUALLY DESIGN, they just preach about it) for a web that existed 5 or 6 years ago.
Nielsen believes the industry’s refusal to heed the calls of usability proponents directly affected the steep Internet market drop.
Now this might be true. Let me just reiterate that what this sentence seems to mean by ‘the industry’ is the people making the decisions, not the people developing the internet. But this….
Many of the recently dead dot-coms, he said — especially in e-commerce — made the fundamental mistake of drawing users to their sites with expensive promotions, then losing them forever with ineffective design or subpar services. And sub-par services are the designer’s fault? It takes a self-appointed ‘guru’ to say that companies fail because people don’t like how they do things?
Or maybe they weren’t shitty sites to begin with, but were endlessly tweaked by the client or the management until the design resembled nothing like what the designer had originally designed. How many times have I heard ‘We need a banner ad here… here, here, here and how about one here’ from a client? It’s never the designer’s idea to put a banner ad on the page.. I can see it now.. ‘You know what would really make my design …. pop? A ‘Punch-The-Monkey-And-Win-Twenty-Bucks’ ad right about… here.’ He seems to think that we could give a shit about the user, when actually the reverse is true. We strive to do excellent design for the user to be interested in. Because if they don’t like the way a site looks they won’t even stay for 10 seconds to find out how it works.
Those who are ready to see the light and mend their ways can download a series of reports for a fee from the Nielsen Group website. The reports contain the group’s 222 rules for usability improvement. For a fee? Are you kidding me? Rules? See the light? I can’t even begin to start telling you much that sentence makes my blood boil.
‘We can forgive a man for making a useful thing, as long as he does not admire it. The only excuse for making a useless thing is that one admires it intensely.’
— Oscar Wilde