25 June 06
I bought Jakob Nielsen’s and (the less famous) Hoa Loranger’s book Prioritizing Web Usability and have been reading it most of this afternoon and evening. It’s completely amazing. Really.
It’s made me realise how rubbish the web is. It’s terrible. There’s so many high-profile sites in the book which blatantly don’t care about users – just as long as their site looks nice. Companies forgetting that the internet is all about information and user1 interaction, rather than being some glossy throwaway leaflet that looks ‘nice’.
But who’s let it get so wrong?
I think most people in the web industry would blame clients. They have no technical knowledge, not much idea of what the site should actually do and seem to be impressed by moving shiny things (a la Flash sites). Blaming a client, however, is like a builder blaming an elderly couple for not putting up their conservatory properly. Clients don’t necessarily need to have technical knowledge – they just need a web site. A nice web site too. Something that isn’t going to scare the customers away and make them buy products and/or services. They don’t need technical knowledge. You’re the one with the technical knowledge. So, let’s not blame them.
Who else can we blame? How about designers? Surely, they can take the blame for the internet being so bad when it comes to usability? They sculpt the aesthetic of the site, so if a design is obviously unusable, then surely the finished build will be too. It’s almost unfair to blame designers though, they don’t think in the same way as normal humans. They use the creative bit of their brain – ‘thinking outside the box’ if you will. Logic isn’t usually a designers strong point. Anyway, they’re probably far too busy reading Newstoday or playing on a PSP to care about web usability.
We, as web developers and the people who care about interaction, need to be the ones to blame for getting it wrong.
Why? Because we don’t push the necessity of usability and promote it as an important part of web sites. We need to work with everyone involved to push it. We (probably) have the most knowledge and care about the subject. I know the stereotypical developer is shy and retiring – can of diet coke in one hand, donut in the other – but we need to confront others. Web usability is such an important issue when making a site that we need to think about users, not whether the site looks ‘cool’. It’s up to you, but when your site appears as a bad example in a web usability book, you should start to worry.
It’s your job to warn people about the pitfalls of bad design.
1 I should say ‘person interaction’, ‘user’ would imply someone with some strong technical knowledge
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Flash sites in general are bad. I have a collegue who is a Flash developer, and he says that he never goes to any Flash sites because he doesn’t like them and thinks they’re terrible. A strong claim from someone who develops them all day!
(Apparently, he enjoys coding in Actionscript and that’s why he’s not got fed up of Flash just yet!)
Comment by Steve Tucker on 26 June 2006, 22:39
There was an article recently (which sadly I dont still have the URL of) about a certain respected body’s “greatest websites of 2005” list. I took a look at it and remember it being well and truly awful – full of flash designs so difficult to use (think spash screens n such) that it was almost irritating to navigate around. Sounds like a good book though Rik, and on a very important subject – might invest in a copy ;)