Jakob Nielsen in interview (engl.) Technikwürze 108

Hi, this is Jakob Nielsen. You're listening to Technikwürze.

Herzlich willkommen zu Technikwürze, eurem Design- und Webstandards-Podcast. Von und mit David Maciejewski, Nadja Müller, Sascha Postner und Daniel Jagdzint. Okay. Welcome listeners to a new episode of Technikwürze, uh, our favorite, uh, podcast about web standards and accessibility, and today also with a main subject on usability. Uh, we are at a wonderful place overlooking, uh, Silicon Valley. It's, uh, the house of, uh, Jakob Nielsen. Hello, Jakob.

Hi. How you doing?

Um, thank you for the opportunity, uh, to have this interview with you, and, uh, let me introduce you in the first place. You are, uh, the principal of Nielsen Norman Group, one of the principals, I guess.

Yes.

And, um, I found on the website that your, like, self-imposed vision is to help companies enter the age of the consumer, designing human-centered products and services. Is that right?

That's about right. Um, so actually, um, Don Norman and I started the company together, which is why it's called the Nielsen Norman Group, and, uh, about almost 10 years ago now. And at the time, um, we both had done a lot of usability work in, uh, the Silicon Valley style technology companies, but we both had a feeling at the same time that the time was right to bring this out to a broader set of companies.

Um, and then one way we phrased it was that we are entering the, the age of the more consumer-oriented company, and of products and services and websites needing to be designed more for human needs, as opposed to be designed for engineering needs, which was the case in the past.

And I'll have to say that the history over these last nine years, actually, not 10, nine years, has, uh, certainly, I think, proven us right that it has become more and more important for a very broad range of companies to understand usability, to understand user-centered design, to understand customer-focused product development.

Okay. The, so I don't have to ask the question now what that means. You explained it to us, and I hope, uh, even the users or the, the listeners who didn't know you before have an idea what you're doing now. So, um, we, uh... Like, the first topic we want to talk about is, um, like the n- I don't know if they are really new, but the eye-tracking studies you are, uh, publishing right now. There's a book coming up?

This book coming out, it just takes a very long time, unfortunately, to analyze this data because it's extremely rich. We have millions, I mean, literally millions of data points of, you know, people looking at specific things, and so getting it into a book has taken longer than I would've liked. But anyway, the book is coming out in a few months, yeah.

Now, when did you start with this, uh, study?

Well, it's been going on for more than a year now, which is why I'm saying it-

Yeah.

... it should have been out. The goal was for the book to have been out already, but, you know, it's gonna be out in, in 2008 rather than 2007. That's okay.

Yeah. So, um, we just read, like, the, the introductions or the, the, um, summaries you, you published on your, on your website, and there were, like, some interesting, uh, findings, like the, uh, F pattern and stuff like that.

Mm-hmm.

So do you have... Of course, we don't want to, uh, take something away from reading the book, but do you have some, uh, a summary what, what, uh, came out of, of your... What are your findings about this?

Well, I think the one thing that really is striking when you review eye-tracking recordings is how fast the eye moves.

Mm-hmm.

And, uh, I mean, I've actually always said that people are really fast-paced when on the website. I mean, websites are for navigation, for movement, for getting things done. In contrast to some older media that are more immersive, where people can maybe sit and enjoy or admire something, websites are more for moving.

Uh, so that has always been the case, and we can, we can recognize that fact without eye tracking just by observing people's behavior and listening to what they say, and when, when they say, "I don't want to wait for it to download," things like that. But the eye tracking just brings forward how quickly the eye moves over the page, how little people really read, and really the focus on immensely precise, quick communication if you wanna reach, uh, reach the new users. So that, I think, is...

I mean, then there are very specific findings about that, like how, what type of images people look at versus not look at, and that they do not tend to look at things that look like banner advertisements and so forth.

Yeah.

So there are definitely a lot of findings like that, but the, I think the main, it's not even a finding, it's more of an impression-

Yeah

... is watching that blue ball dance around the screen, and the blue ball is the, the representation of-

Yeah

... where the eye is looking, uh, in the eye tracker, and that ball moves fast.

Yeah. That's interesting because I really think, and that's one of your, uh, or there are many usability guidelines, um, talking about the text, and that's really one, one thing I really agree with. I, I really agree with nearly everything, but, um, I, I think that writing for the web is, uh, really important, and people are usually not, uh, getting, uh, or the text is not getting enough attention. So, um, but you were just, uh, talking about this.

Uh, you, you, I don't know if you just made, uh, the word up for the study, or you, you were talking about banner blindness.

Oh, yes. Yes, yes.

Uh, advertising blindness. Um, I read the, the, um, the text, uh, where you said, okay, um, people were talking about- It's non-ethical to just say, you know, um, it's not working, and how to trick the user and, but I agree you have, you cannot just, uh, hide the findings just because they are not ethical. Um, so do you have any suggestions for, uh, advertisers or, um, the people who own the websites or run the websites? They, of course, want, like, w- want to have advertisings that work.

And, um, I, I read that you said, okay, the best idea to have high click rates would be to, um, to, to, yeah, to, uh, use advertisement that looks like content, um, which is giving high click rates, but maybe not, like, the, the happiest, uh, uh, visitor. And for example, in Germany, it's even illegal to have it like that. You always have to, um, to mark it as an advertisement. But what, what would you suggest? How can you do it?

Well, it, it is almost impossible because, um, as advertisers come up with new ways of running advertisements that are maybe not as, as obvious as in the past. Well, in the beginning, people might click on them, but then they adapt because people are very adaptable. And so the fundamental reason that advertising is a problem on the web is that the web is a navigational hypertext environment.

And so people click where they want to go, and they com- they compose their own user experience in real time, and that's the essence of the web is, "Get me what I want right now."

Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

And so people tend to not want what's being advertised, and there are a few exceptions to that, and those ads work brilliantly well. And the main exception is search advertisement. That works very well-

Mm-hmm

... because people have-- the user's just told the search engine, "I'm searching for this thing," and it shows me, you know, five ads for it. Well, I'm rather likely to click on one of those ads, particularly if I wanna buy it, because often the best offers are from the advertisers.

Mm-hmm.

So that, you know, those ads work very well. Another thing that works very well are classified ads, things like eBay. You know, you want to buy, um, you know, an antique doll or some other thing that-

Yeah

... people are, you know, collecting and, and it's hard to find. And so people are advertising that they're selling that. People will act-- users will actually go and find, you know, search it out.

Mm.

And so those are things that work very well on the web. Or another example would be real estate advertising, uh, people looking to buy a new house. Well, you can search for houses in a certain area, certain price, certain size, all those things, and then you can see t- 20 photos.

Yeah.

In the newspaper, you know, you can either see no photos or just a small black and white photo. So the web advertisement is so much richer than the print ad. So but these are all examples where the advertisements work with the user's goal or intention.

And I think a lot of ads are trying to work against the user's goal and intentions and trying to interrupt people and disrupt them and take them away from what they want to do, and that works very poorly on the web because the web is so goal driven. People are so driven by what they wanna accomplish, um, that taking away from that is, is just fighting the nature of the web. Like, what is-- why is, does the web even exist since it has a very large number of negative properties?

And so despite being so negative and impoverished and bad medium compared to other media, you can compare it with, you know, television and movies, you know, much higher production qualities. You can break-- compare it with a newspaper, much bigger, high quality typography and, and denser text, or with a book, you know, much more pleasant to read a book than to read a website, right?

Well, despite that, the web actually works, is very successful, and successful because it has another property that these other guys don't have, which is interaction and give me what I want right now. And so I think advertisers should find ways of working with the strength of the medium as opposed to fighting it. And there's a big tendency to wanna fight it-

Yeah

... and turn the web into television or turn the web into magazines, but it's not. So I say don't do that.

Okay. Um, so, um, yeah, do you have any suggestions that's, uh, like, uh, one, one important question for me, as I'm also a web designer or, um, trying to be, um, and I cannot have, like, such an expensive, uh, equipment like eye tracking or something. And of course, I can read, uh, books, uh, from authors like you, but, um, when I, um, have my own designs and, um, having a new project, I would like to, um, have some basic usability tests there.

Right.

Do you have any, um, suggestions maybe? I, I don't know if, um, there's something in your books or, um, maybe you can just give an, a short idea how, like, small budget projects or little companies could do something.

Well, I always say there are two things that any company can do and should do, and the first is to take advantage of existing knowledge. The second one is to run their own user testing. And so to start with existing knowledge, we have a lot of usability guidelines that have been developed by testing thousands of users, thousands of websites. So we know that these things are, generally speaking, true, and they're also true around the world.

I mean, we've done the studies in China and in Japan and Korea, and there are lots of countries in Europe and Australia and, of course, North America. And we tend to find the same things about sort of general issues, like how to do navigation, what type of search works, and so forth. And that-- So those things are really general guidelines, and they can be acquired very cheaply. You know, books cost honestly nothing compared to the year it takes to write them.

Uh, or, or going to my, even just my website or, or some of our conferences, things like that. So, so that's available just for, for having hundreds of, of checklist items. So that's the first thing. Just check for existing general knowledge that's usually true about most websites. Now, there's a little bit of qualification. They're usually true about most websites.

So there are always little bit ex-exceptions to these things, which is why they're called guidelines as opposed to, I guess, laws or, or standards.

Yeah.

Uh, but it's usually true. I would say more than 90% of the case it's true. And so most likely, your particular project is in this majority. It could be that there are some of these guidelines that are not really applied to your project because of special circumstances, but people always believe that they have more special circumstances than they really do.

Yeah.

But they have some anyway. And so that leads to the second point, which is test with your own customers, because there's no way that I or any other person can write a book that talks about the specific problems in selling your type of product or presenting your type of data to your type of customers, 'cause that book would, would be sold in 10 copies to, to you and maybe nine compete- competing companies that do the same thing.

Yeah.

But, you know, we need to sell thousands of copies to make it worthwhile writing a book, since we make no money or $1 per book sold, you know?

So it needs to really sell a lot of copies. So nobody can write a book or nobody can do a, you know, conference presentation about the very specific issues in just your business, and so you've gotta test your own customers. And luckily, this is very easy to do. And, uh, it's a misconception that user research requires expensive equipment or big fancy laboratories with one-way mirrors, or that you have to test hundreds of users, because this is a qualitative methodology, not a quantitative.

So it's not about numbers, it's about insight. And so if you test five users, and I really literally mean five, this could be done in about a day because each user you test for about an hour and then they start to get tired. So, or two days, but one to two days worth of testing, and you will know all the important things. If something is important, it's gonna come up with those five users.

Now, if there's something that's a little corner of the site and it's a small issue, well, maybe you don't find it, and that's a reason to do a second test, you know, next year and so forth. It never ends. You can always get better. But the big points, the points that if you fix them, you're gonna double your sales, those points come out with testing five users.

So, um, that's, uh, that's brilliant, um, just explaining that, that you don't need, like, the high quantity. But you mentioned another point just in the end now, uh, which was, uh, really interesting for me, or which is still interesting for me and maybe, uh, and I guess so because someone, uh, asked this question on the phone, uh, for us, um, that's what we, uh, uh, was, uh, were, were calling how to deal with non-believers. And, um-

Mm-hmm. Yeah

... you just said, "Okay, if you do that, then you might double your sales," or something like that. And, um, I found a very interesting, um, uh, what, how do we say? Just a very interesting, uh, essay on the, uh, Nielsen Norman Group website, uh, talking about return of investment.

Right. Right. Yes.

So, and, uh, as I'm also, uh, I'm working part-time in a, uh, at a car company in the PR department, and I know that executives like return of investment-

Oh, yes. Yes, yes

... and that's one big argument. I hadn't, uh, had the opportunity to download it or to buy it or to read it, um, so I only had a, a look at the, um, summary. Um, but how are you dealing with non-believers? So I guess when you come to a, a conference or when a company is calling you just for an in-house presentation, then there's usually maybe one or two people who-

Right, right

... have invited you and saying-

Right, right

... "Yeah, this guy is great. He can help us." And, uh, there are these designers or developers, and they're sitting there and saying, "Yeah, you know-

Right, right

... we, we're doing it the right way." And how do you deal with them?

Well, actually, often, if you can get a little project done, kind of almost on faith or out of a so-called slush fund budget or something like that, that often turns people into believers, because it really is true that a very small user test will find al- not always, but almost always will find a few really glaring errors in the website, and that people just never have thought of because they don't have that user thinking. They have the internal thinking because they work on the project.

And a lot of people become convinced just even actually seeing the users, hearing what they say. Um, and the rest typically become convinced if it's possible to then go the next step, which is to make a few of these changes. I mean, usually we end up with a report that says, "Here's, like, 100 things we recommend you change." C- but, but even if they only fix kind of the, the top four or five things, typically what happens is that sales double.

So if it's a site that actually has a measurable business value, that, then you will see that double, and, and then people really become, become bought in. The problem is that there are a lot of sites that don't have an im- a, that hardcore measurable business value. So sites that are, that are purely marketing sites, that are just there for improving the-

Mm-hmm

... the, the, the company's reputation and brand and so forth, uh, what happens in real life is that it, they are undermining the company's brand because they annoy customers, but it's not as easily measurable.

And so if you improve them, you will, you will also improve the marketing, you know, value of this website because all of a sudden now you are speaking to the customers, you are helping them, you're getting an, a reputation of being, uh, a company that's good to do business with, that takes care of its customers and so forth. Those are all positive qualities, but they're not as easy as you're just gonna, you just sold for $1 million more this month-

Yes

... because you improved your website, right? You improved your shopping cart or improved the checkout. I mean, just sometimes very small things can, can, uh, can, can be the q-question of doubling the business. I mean, it's so common. I should say that doubling the business is actually average, and, and it's the average of sometimes it's 10 times as much business. On the other hand, sometimes it's only 10% more business.

Yeah.

So it, it, it, there's a huge range because obviously there's no guarantee that any one website has- That particular disaster as a design. I mean, sometimes they just have a little bit of a bad design. But even the ones where it's only a little bit, again, it just takes one or two days, and you can find ways of improving your business by 10%. Well, that's still very much worth doing.

Yes, of course. Um-

And, and then also I wanna point out that sometimes you're one of those guys where it's come, it becomes 10 times more if you fix it.

Yeah. Yeah, of course. Um, yeah, I, I had like the, uh, the impression when, uh, I'm mostly working with, like, low-budget customers, sometimes fundraising-

Right. Right, right, right

... agencies and stuff like that. So they, they used to think, okay, and especially when it comes to fundraising, because there is something measurable here, yeah.

Right. Right. Oh, exactly.

Just getting money for, for projects. And, um, they, they used to think, okay, um, we don't... Like, for example, when we, we are talking about writing for the web-

Right

... which I think is really, really important, and I totally agree on this. Okay, I'm scanning just the text, and I really like how you are doing it on your website just by, um, making important, uh, uh, words bold or just-

Right

... um, may- having important headlines and stuff like that. Um, but they used to think, okay, if we do that, then it will cost us, uh, more money. I don't know how much more. And, um, they, they are... Like, like you said, I, I guess if you can gain their trust and convince them that putting this effort in the beginning into the project is just worth it, then-

Right

... it might be a good idea.

Right. And, and often the way to do it is to start by some corner or some specific example, uh, the promotion for a certain new product or, uh, so not redesign the entire website, which can be a big project, but rather take a specific small element and improve it. It's actually the same if we talk about intranets in the internal networks in companies, 'cause they are often even worse than websites.

And one of the reasons they are worse is that the designers don't have the ability to kind of learn from the best. If you're designing an e-commerce site, you can go and look at Amazon, even though I wanna say Amazon's design is good for that type of big site, not necessarily for a smaller, more focused website. But anyway, you can in fact learn from looking at 20 other e-commerce sites, and you can take, you know, how to do a shopping cart.

You don't even need to read our report on how to do a shopping cart. You can just look at 20 shopping carts. I still think it's worthwhile also reading the report, because it has the-

... the analysis. Otherwise, you'll r- you're likely to maybe pick some of the bad aspects of some shopping carts. But the point being, anyway, that you can-- it's available for anybody to look at, and you can try it for yourself. For intranets, you cannot, right? Uh, and so this is actually one reason that, that, that, that I have focused a lot in the last few years on really collecting best practices on intranet design and publishing them as well.

Um, and intranets, but intranets are often, in a big company, extremely large. They can have millions of pages, often much bigger than the website, because every department, every group, every project has a large, you know, internal, uh, knowledge base. And so those are other examples where you can't just go and change the entire thing all at once. Very often, you wanna take a certain aspect and improve that.

So one thing we often like to t- look at is the employee directory, the, f- 'cause that's a commonly used feature that people wanna find other, other em- other employees, find who's in charge of a project. What is their phone number? What do they even look like? Having a decent photograph in there is, is immediate, uh, you know, something that everybody likes. And, and usage can grow dramatically on those intranet features once they're improved. And that's another thing that's very provable.

I mean, it's not so much in, in direct sales. It's more like in employee satisfaction, employee productivity in terms of just use. Are you-- Have, do you have this big project, and nobody uses it? Well, there's something wrong with it, you know?

Yeah.

And we can improve it, and, and usage will typically double. I mean, that's, again, that, that doubling is, is kind of a norm, the average outcome of a usability project.

Wow.

Either double sales or double use, depending on what type of site you're talking about.

Yeah. Not bad. One should do that more often. Um, okay. Um, then maybe just a, a question on your side.

Mm-hmm.

Because, um, this is just we, while we were just, uh, um, uh, preparing for this interview, we, we of course researched, uh, like the latest, uh, writings of you. And, uh, we also, uh, had a look at a, a article in The Guardian you-

Mm-hmm

... know about.

Sure.

And it, it was, why is the, the, your website like it is? And the artic- article in The Guardian was focusing more on, on, on style and on, on, on the optic. But, um-

Right

... as we are really fond of web standards and, uh, accessibility, we also had a look in, in, in the, uh, source code.

Right. Right.

And we just, it's just b- made by tables. So for our listeners who not know the article of The Guardian yet, maybe they will read it afterwards, but, um, why is the website like it is, and why, why are you not changing it? So we understand it a little bit now with maybe-

Well, um, that's actually w- an example of what I said, that there are kind of things that are true in general, and there are things that are maybe deviations from the guidelines. And it's interesting that I myself kind of a deviation from the guidelines in some way, 'cause one of the guidelines certainly says that to have a, you know, a pleasing, nice-looking appearance is, is, uh, as important as many other aspects of design as well.

Um, but my site really has the goal of sort of standing out and s- and standing for something. And by standing for something, you're often also standing against something. And in my case, it's kind of against the notion of kind of glamorous or overdone design. Now, there's of course a middle road between overdone design and underdone design, if you could call mine underdone. Um, and the middle is of course what you would, one would actually recommend for a company to do.

But one can gain more, more prominent positioning, more clarity of positioning by going to that kind of extreme of, in my ca- case, under-designed website and, and very old-fashioned really, which also stands for something as well. It stands for this notion of back to basics. Let's kind of just simplify things and make it, and not do anyth- any advanced stuff. And again- In real life, you should, you should not do no advanced stuff. You just should take care not to do too much advanced stuff.

So again, what is the general advice? The general advice is middle of the road. What do you have to do if you wanna stand out on the web as kind of a voice in the wilderness? You know, you, you have to go to the extreme. And so I'm going to the extreme on my website in a way that would not really be recommended for a mainstream website.

So if your, if the goal of your website is not to be a usability expert website, but rather to be, you know, take any random example, like, like, somebody who sells nuts online or somebody who is a tourist agency, tourist bureau for some, some town in Germany or something like that, well, of course you should not take this approach because you would not get any benefit from having kind of, um, an, an extreme, uh, positioning on usability 'cause that's not your business. Now, in my case, it is.

And so in my case, I need to stand f- stand very strongly for, for something, and also therefore against something, which will provide some prominence. On the other hand, to have more like a middle of the road website is highly recommended for most businesses because they do not want to call attention to the site. They wanna call attention to their, their content or their, their, what, what they're selling or what they're promoting or what they're doing.

Well, in my case, what I'm promoting and what I'm selling is, you know, is usability, and therefore I end up being more of an extremist on my own website than I would actually recommend for most other sites.

Okay. So, um, that, uh, makes clear why, why, why it looks like that. But, uh, can you give a comment like, uh, why are you using like, for example, tables? Is it more like a convenient way, or just because you did it like four years ago?

Yeah.

Yeah. Okay.

I mean, th- that's the honest truth is that in my case, it's really because I did it actually more than four years ago, more like eight years ago.

Yeah.

Um, but also because the site really does not have a lot of sort of advanced layout, which I think that's where you could start really benefiting from, from doing something that's more oriented towards, uh, CSS and stuff like that.

Yeah.

Which we're actually doing on our, the pages for our conference because they tend to be-

Yeah

... be updated more and be, um, be more kind of in need of, of being ma- more maintained, you know?

Yeah.

Then f- for me, when I write an article, I kind of like stick it there, and it's gonna be there for the next 10 years. It's not really... I mean, I maintain in the sense that every now and then I might go back and fix a link. If, if I'm linking out to some other website and it breaks, which happens much too often-

Yes

... then I have to go back and fix it.

Yeah.

But other than that, once I write something, it's kind of just there.

Yeah.

And this means that it's often stays in a very old format.

Okay. Um, so now I, I will hand over the microphone.

Okay. Um, another question of our listeners was, um, was about animation in UI.

Oh, yeah. Yeah.

And, um, he, he was asking, uh, how's your, how's your point of view about, uh, animation in, and this new JavaScript animations in, in the, on the websites, all the fading, all the sliding way and so on.

Well, um, I think... Actually, I wrote a... Talk about writing old articles. I wrote an article about multimedia on the web in, um, in, uh, '95, so that's sort of 12, 13 years ago, and I s- actually still stand by most of what I said then, which is that, that most animation tend to be annoying, but it can also be used to good effects.

And so it can be used to call attention to a change, which is that kind of fading idea, or it can be used to illustrate, uh, things that change over time, and there's been... There's lot of sort of educational style animations that I think are quite nice, which look at some, some medical sites that we've done some consulting for, where animation was nice to show kinda like the blood flowing and whatever, things like that. So I'm not...

I wouldn't say that, you know, never to do any anim- animation. I think there was certainly a time, maybe like five years ago, when animation was very overdone on the web, kinda like the f- the Flash splash pages kind of thing. That was, that was definitely bad. Um, when it comes to things like some of the, the Ajax and, you know, kind of changing components on the webpage type of a- areas, the danger here is more that people may, may overlook it.

So you can't depend on just because you made something fade for a second, that people actually know that, that it changed. And so that's just a little bit dangerous, and I would s- recommend, you know, extra attention to doing user testing and those type of techniques. Whereas often the old-fashioned approach, like take shopping carts, a good example of this.

If you push the button that says, "Add to shopping cart," and then you just get a pag- the next page is the shopping cart, that does not confuse anybody. Whereas on the sites where they have the shopping cart as a little kind of corner on the screen, and then they update that, we often see people overlook that, and they say, "Wow, what... I pushed add to shopping cart, and nothing happened." Well, it... Something did happen, but they didn't notice it. So these things can, can be too subtle.

They can be overlooked. And, and remember that if you're designing something, you know where to look. First of all, you know what to expect, and secondly, you know where to look. And so you may think something is obvious, and in fact, it's not.

Okay. So generally, it is, um, not bad to have that animations, but, uh-

It's just, it's just, I would say, caution. I would, I would say war- I warn against just doing it because it's popular, because you see other people do it. I really would, would encourage people to do, to really do testing anytime they do animation. It goes back to this point about how can you ensure the usability, and there's sort of two ways of ensuring usability, and the one is to go by what sort of the general knowledge, and the second one is to test your own customers.

And the general knowledge has, for websites, evolved over about s- uh, about, I guess, 13 years or so now. Um, and so a lot of kind of very classic techniques have been polished off very well, like how to do a shopping cart, for example. We kind of know how to do a shopping cart. And so I would still encourage you to test it just because there's so much money at stake for shopping carts. But honestly, we mainly know how to do that.

And so then if you're trying to do something new or different- Then you really do need to test it. That's my, that's my main point. Okay?

So at least, uh, you, you have to have an alternative, for example, e- especially when you're talking about JavaScript or Flash-

Mm-hmm

... or something, and that's might, that might be really a hard thing to do. Um, so but, um, just to, to, to end the interview here, maybe you have just, like, I don't know, uh, one, one statement for us or, uh, uh, uh, one tip or something for, like, our, how, how you, how you would say, like, a middle, middle, uh, or small-sized company. So, um, just like, okay, do it, or-

... you know, something like, uh, do you have any tips what, what we can do to, to increase usability and to try to convince other people to just, uh, believe, uh, on the same thing?

Right. Um, I think it's, it's important not to be swayed too much by, by fashion or by the big websites you read about in the newspapers, uh, because they are typically very different. Uh, they're different in, in one way, just b- the very fact that they are mentioned in the newspaper. Uh, let's say things like maybe Facebook or Myspace or those type of, of, of big websites.

Um, they are not the classical small business website, and the-- people will go to a, a website like Myspace or Facebook to hang out with their friends and talk to their friends, and that's very, very different than going to a business to find out about the cost of grain or the, the new tire for your forklift truck or some other very pragmatic, practical reason, which is the millions of, of websites, that's really what they are doing. They're doing very day-to-day practical business.

And so it's not glamorous, but it can work very well, and it can get you customers worldwide, actually, with the web reaches worldwide, and it can get you many, many new customers. Uh, and I say, whatever your business you do right now, you can at least double it by improving the usability.

Uh, but do that by focusing on, on your customers' needs and on the very precise, concise communication of, of your business concerns, not on emulating and trying to be like the ones you read about in the newspaper because that's a very different type of site, very type of-- different type of business, and also very different type of user tasks. People try to accomplish something very, very different on Facebook than if they go to your company's website.

And so don't emulate what you read about in the newspaper, but do test with your own customers. Find out what they like, what they don't like, where they get stopped. It takes about a day to do it honestly, and so I don't think there's any excuse for anybody to not test with your own customers and find out for yourself. If you don't believe me, believe your customers.

That was a really good summary. Thank you so much for the interview, and, um, we will hope to increase usability knowledge and-

... wisdom in, in, uh, our listeners.

Let's hope so. Thank you.