PukeIt

alternateorg on June 10, 2001

From the sunshiney-as-ever Jakob Nielson (via Camworld):


Forcing users to browse PDF documents can reduce your website’s usability by about 300% relative to HTML pages. This is my rough estimate, based on watching users perform similar tasks on a variety of sites that used either PDF or regular Web pages. Because I have not performed a detailed measurement study of PDF on its own, I can’t calculate the precise usability degradation. However, whether the true number is 280% or 320%, one thing is certain: the number is big and reflects significant user suffering in terms of increased task time and decreased success rates.

ARRRGHH. Like ‘usability’ can be measured in fucking percentage points, fucker. I again cannot accurately express how much I hate this jerkoff. Who the fuck even uses PDF for in-website, on-screen viewing anyway? No fucking body. Argh. Jerk. Yet another example of him making shit up in order to further his $20,000/day usability-seminar rates. And as an after-thought:


PDF pages lack navigation bars and other apparatus that might help users move within the information space. Because PDF documents can be very big, the inability to easily navigate them takes a toll on users. PDF documents also typically lack hypertext, again because they are designed with print in mind.

Okay, so that Propellerheads Reason 1.0 documentation I was reading this weekend with the navigation on the left-hand side must not have really either a) existed, or b) been a PDF. I thought I was reading it in Acrobat 4, but I must not have been, because I’m a fucking idiot, just like all the people on the web, according to Jakob. I think it’s time to rekindle this anti-Jakob fire that’s been dwindling in embers lately. If there was a way to embed Flash inside a PDF, I’d do it, just to make him mad. With music, rollover-sounds, and the most unintuitive navigation ever.

Reader interactions

4 Replies to “PukeIt”

  1. jen June 11, 2001 at 7:27 am

    Actually, quite a lot of sites are now using PDFs for in-site viewing…the plug-in automatically loads, and I have to say it is pretty aggravating, b/c if it’s big enough or formatted enough to require a PDF, chances are I wanted to look at it later in-depth. But it takes up the browser window, so I lost the screen I was on, and if I go back, then if I wanto see the PDF I have to load it again (which in many cases is pretty slow). Really aggravating. People should have two links, one for in-browser display and one for download.

  2. Jim Jones June 11, 2001 at 9:03 am

    And Jakob *is* right about Acrobat crashing certain machines.

  3. jen June 11, 2001 at 7:27 am

    Actually, quite a lot of sites are now using PDFs for in-site viewing…the plug-in automatically loads, and I have to say it is pretty aggravating, b/c if it’s big enough or formatted enough to require a PDF, chances are I wanted to look at it later in-depth. But it takes up the browser window, so I lost the screen I was on, and if I go back, then if I wanto see the PDF I have to load it again (which in many cases is pretty slow). Really aggravating. People should have two links, one for in-browser display and one for download.

  4. Jim Jones June 11, 2001 at 9:03 am

    And Jakob *is* right about Acrobat crashing certain machines.

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