Technikwürze – Web Standards Podcast

Todays podcast is about Web-Usability and the first Technikwürze show entirely in English. Sascha Postner and Daniel Jagszent conducted an interview with Jacob Nielsen at his home in Silicon Valley, California.

Websites and articles mentioned in this episode:

• Jakob Nielsen’s Web-Usability website
• Nielsen Norman Group: Conferences, reports and more
• Eye-tracking study
• F-Pattern
• Banner Blindness
• The mentioned »The Guardian« article

For our German listeners: Nächste Woche könnt ihr die Übersetzung vom Interview hören.

Interview transcript

Sascha Postner

OK, Welcome listeners to a new episode of technikwuerze, our favorite podcast about web standards and accessibility and today also with a main subject on usability. We are at a wonderful place overlooking silicon valley. It’s the house of Jacob Nielsen. Hello Jacob.

Jacob Nielsen

Hi, How are you doing.

Sascha Postner

Thank you for the opportunity to have this interview with you. Let me introduce you in the first place. You are the principal of Nielsen Norman Group. One of the principals I guess. And I found on your website that your self imposed vision is to “help companies enter the age of the consumer, designing human-centered products and services”. Is that right.

Jacob Nielsen

That’s about right. So actually Don Norman and I started the company together, which is why it is called the Nielsen Norman Group and about almost 10 years ago now. And at the time we both had done a lot of usability work in the silicon valley style technology companies, but we both had the feeling at a same time, that the time was right to bring this out to a broader set of companies. And one way we phrase it was that we are in trend of the age of the more consumer oriented company and of products and services and websites designed more for human needs, as opposed to be designed for engineering needs, which was the case in the past.
And I have to say that history over those last 9 years, 9 years not 10, has certainly proven us right, that it has 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.

Sascha Postner

OK. So I don’t have to ask the question now, what that means. You explained it to us and I hope even the listeners who did not know you before have an idea what you are doing now. So the first topic we like to talk about is the eye tracking studies you are publishing right now. There is a book coming up.

Jacob Nielsen

There is a book coming up, it just takes a very long time unfortunately to analyze this data because it is extremely rich. We have Millions, I mean literally Millions, of data points of people looking at specific things. And so getting it into a book has taken longer that I would have liked, but anyway the book is coming out in a few month.

Sascha Postner

When did you start with this study?

Jacob Nielsen

Well it is going on for more than a year now. Which is why I’m saying it should have been out. The goal was for the book to being out already. But now it is gonna be out in 2008 rather then in 2007. That’s okay!

Sascha Postner

We just read the introduction, the summaries you published on your website. There where some interesting findings, like the F-pattern and stuff like that. Of course we do not want to take away something reading from the book, but do you have a summary of your findings from this study?

Jacob Nielsen

I think the one thing that is really striking when you review eye tracking recordings is how fast the eye moves. And I actually always said that people are really fast-paced when on a website. I mean websites are for navigation, for movement, for getting things done. In contrast to some older media where people maybe can sit and enjoy or admire something, websites are more for moving. That has always been the case. And we can recognize that fact without eye-tracking just by observing peoples behavior and listening to what they say, when they say things like “I don’t want to wait for this download or things like that”. But the eye-tracking just brings forward how quick the eyes move over the page, how little people really read. The focus must be on minimalistic, precise communication if you want to reach new users.
Then there are very specific findings, like what kinds of images people look at, which they not look at and that they not tend to look at things that look like banner advertisement. There are definitely a lot of findings like that. But the main thing, it is not even a finding it is more like an impression, is watching that blue ball dance around the screen, The blue ball is the representation of the eyes looking into the eye-tracker. And that ball moves fast.

Sascha Postner

This is interesting. I really think and agree. talking about the text and this is also one of your usability guidelines, that writing for the web is really important and the text is usually not getting enough attention.
But you were just talking about something, I don’t know if you just made the word up for the study, you were talking about banner blindness, advertising blindness. I read the text in which you said that people say it is non ethical to trick people if common advertisements do not work. But I agree that you can not hide findings just because they are not ethical. But do you have any suggestions for advertisers or the people who own the websites or run the websites. They of course want to have advertisings that do work. I read that you said that the best idea to generate high click rates would be to use advertising that looks like content. Which is giving high click rates but maybe not the happiest visitor. And for example in Germany it is even illegal. You always have to mark it as an advertisement. But what would you suggest? How can you do it?

Jakob Nielsen

Well, it is almost impossible, because as advertisers come up with new ways of running advertisements that are maybe not as obvious as in the past, in the beginning people might click on them. But then they adapt. People are very adaptable. And so the fundamental reason that advertising is a problem in the web is, the web is a navigational hypertext environment. And so people click where they want to go and they compose their own user experience in real time. And that’s the essence of the web. Get me what I want. Right now.
People tend to not want what is being advertised. And there are few exceptions to that. And those ads work brilliantly well. Mainly search advertisement. That works very well, because users just told the search engine “I am searching for this thing” and it shows me 5 ads for it and I am rather likely to click on one of those ads. Particularly if I want to buy it, because often the best offers are from the advertisers. Those ads work very well.
Another thing that works very well are classified ads. Things like ebay. You want to buy an antic doll or some other thing that people are collecting and it is hard to find. So if people are advertising that they are selling that people will actually go and will search it out. Those are things that work very well on the web.
Another example would be real estate advertising. People who are looking to buy a new house. Well you can search for a house in a certain area, certain price, certain size, all those things. And then you can see 20 photos. In the newspaper you can either see now photos or just a small black and white photo. Web advertising is so much richer than the print ad. These are all examples were the advertisements work WITH the users goal or intention. And I think a lot of ads are trying to work against the users goal and intentions. They are trying to interrupt people and disrupt them and take them away form what they want to do. That works very poorly on the web because the web is so goal driven. People are so driven by what the want to accomplish. Taking away form that is just fighting the nature of the web. Why does the web even exist since it has a very large number of negative properties? And despite being such a bad medium compared to other media, you can compare it with television or the movies they have much higher production qualities, compared with a newspaper much bigger high quality typography and denser text, or with a book – much more pleasent to read a book then to read a website, despite that the web is actually very successful. That is 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 is a big tension to want to fight it and turn the web into television or turn the web into magazines. But it’s not. So I say don’t do that.

Sascha Postner

There is one important question for me because I am also a web designer or at least trying to be and I can not have such an expensive equipment like the eye tracking devices or something. I of course can read books from authors like you, but when having my own design and having a new project I would like to have some basic usability tests. Do you have any suggestions, or maybe there is something in your books, how small projects or little companies could do something like it?

Jacob Nielsen

Oh yes completely. I think there is always two things that you can do. The first one is to take advantage of the knowledge that already exists in the usability field. The second one is to start their own user testing. And to start with existing knowledge, we have a lot of usability guidelines that have been developed by testing 1000s of users, 1000s of websites. So we know that these things are generally speaking true. And they are also true around the world. I mean we have done these studies in China, Japan, Korea and lots of countries in Europe, Australia and of course North America and we tend to find the same things about the general issues. Like how to do a navigation, what type of search works and so forth. So things are really general guidelines They can be acquired very cheaply. You know books cost honestly nothing compared to the year it takes to write them. Or even going to my website or our conference. Things like that. That is available just for having hundreds of checklist items. That is the first thing. Just check for existing general knowledge that used to be true about most websites.
Know that is a little bit of qualification here. “Used to be true about most websites” So there is always a little bit of exception to these things, which is why they are called guidelines as opposed to, I guess laws or standards. But it usually true. I would say in more than 90% of the cases it is true. 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 there are special circumstances. But people always believe that they have more special circumstances than they really do. But they have some anyway.
And that leads to the second point. Which is test with your own customers because there is no way that I or any other person can write a book about that specific problems in selling your type of product or presenting your type of data to your type of customers. Cause that book would be sold in 10 copies to you and maybe 9 competing companies that do the same thing. But we need to sell 1000s of copies to make it worth writing the book, since we make no money or one dollar per book sold. Nobody can write a book or do a conference presentation about the very specific issues in just your business. So you gonna have to test your own customers. And luckily this is very easy to do. It is a misconception that user research requires expensive equipment or big fancy laboratories with one way mirrors or that you had to test 100s of users. It is a qualitative methodology not a quantitative one. So it is not about numbers, it’s about insight. So if you test 5 users and I mean literally 5, this could be done in about a day, because you test every user for about an hour and they start to get tired, or two days. But one or two days worth of testing and you will know all the important things. Cause if something is important, it will come up with those 5 users. Now if there is something in a little corner of the site and it is a small issue, well maybe you don’t find it. This is a reason to do a second test 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 gonna double your sales, those points come out with testing 5 users.

Sascha Postner

That’s brilliant explaining that you do not need the high quantity. But you mentioned another point in the end now, which is really interesting for me and others, and we got a question on the phone about that. “How to deal with non-believers?” You just said, if you do that then you might double your sales or something like that. And I found a very interesting essay on the Nilson Norman Group website talking ROI. As I am working part time in a car company in the PR department and I know executives like return of investment. That is one big argument. I didn’t have the opportunity to download or read it. So I only had a look at the summary. How are you dealing with non-believers? I guess when you come to a conference or companies are calling you just for an in-house presentation then there are usually one or maybe two people who invited you and believe this guy is great, he can help us. And there are these designers and developers and they are sitting there and they say, we are already doing it the right way. How do you deal with them?

Jacob Nielsen

Actually often if you can get a little project done kinda almost on faith out of a so called slush fund 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 would never has 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 seeing the users, hearing what they say. and the rest typically become convinced if it’s passed and we go go to the next step which is to make a few of this changes. i mean usually we end up with a report that says here is like 100 things we recommend you changed. but even if they only change kind of the top 4-5 things typically what happens is that sales double. So if it’s a site that actually has measurable business value then you will see that double. And then people really become bought in. The problem is that there are a lot of sites that don’t have that hard core measurable business value. So sites that are purely marketing sites that are just there for improving the companies reputations and brand and so forth. What happens in real life is that if they are undermining the companies brand because they annoy customers. But it’s not that easily measurable if you improve them you will also improve marketing value of this website because all the sudden now you are speaking to the customers, you are helping them, you’re getting a reputation of being a company that’s good to do business with, that takes care of its customers and so forth. Those are all desirable but they are not as easy as you just sold 5 million dollars more of this because you improved your website, improved your shopping cart or improved your check-out. I mean just, sometimes very small things can be the question of doubling the business. I mean it’s so common. I just tell doubling the business is actually the average. Sometimes it’s 10 times as much business on the other hand sometimes it’s only 10 percent more business. So there is a huge range because obviously there is no guarantee that any one website has that particularly disastrous design. Sometimes they have only a little bit of a bad design. But even the ones where it’s only a little bit. Again if it only takes one or two days and you can find ways to improving your business by 10 percent that is still very much worth doing.

Sascha Postner

Yes, of course.

Jacob Nielsen

And then i also want to point out that sometimes you are one of those guys where it comes 10 times more if you fix it.

Sascha Postner

Yes, of course. I have like I’m mostly working with low-budget customers. Sometimes fundraising agencies and stuff like that. So they are used to think – ok and specially if it comes to fundraising because there IS something measurable here just getting money for projects. – they are used to think ok we don’t like for example if we are talking about writing for the web which i think is really really important and i totally agree on this “ok i’m just scanning the text” and i really like how you are doing it on your website just by making important words bold or just having headlines and stuff like that. But they are used to think if we do that then it will cost us more money. I don’t know how much more. They are… Like you said i guess if you can gain there trust and convince them that putting this effort in the beginning into the project it’s just worth and it might be a good idea.

Jacob Nielsen

And often the way to do it is to start by by some corner or some specific example. The promotion for a certain new product. So not redesigning the entire website what can be a big project but rather take a small specific small element and improve it. It is actually the same if we talk about intranets the internal networks in companies because they are often even worse than websites. one of the reasons that they are worse is that the designers don’t have the ability to learn from the best. If you are designing a e-commerce site you can go and look at amazon. Even though i want to say, amazon’s design is good for that type of big site. Not as a ??? 0:21:02.0 for a smaller more focused website. But anyway, you can in fact learn from from looking at 20 other e-coomerce sites and you can take their how to do a shopping cart. You don’t need to read our report on how to do a shopping cart you can just look at 20 shopping carts – I still think it is worthwhile also reading the report because you then see the analysis otherwise you likely to maybe pick some of the bad aspects of some shopping carts. But the point being is that it is available for anybody to look at. You can try it for yourself. For intranets you cannot. This is actually one reason that I have focused a lot in the last few years on really collecting best practices in intranet design and publishing them as well. But Intranets are – 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 internal knowledge base. And so those are another example where you cannot go and change the entire thing at once. Very often you want to take a certain aspect and improve that. One thing we often like to look at is the employee directory, because it is a commonly used feature if you want to find other employees, find who is in charge for a project. What is there phone number what do they even look like. Having a decent photograph there is immediate – it is something that everybody likes and usage can grow dramatically on those intranet features once they are improved. That’s another thing that is very provable. It is not so much in direct sales it is more in employee satisfaction employee productivity. In terms of just use. Are you having this big project and nobody uses it? Well then there is something wrong with it and usage will typically double. Doubling is the average outcome when you do a project. Either double sales or double usage depending on that type of site you are talking about.

Sascha Postner

Not bad. One should do that more often. OK, then we have a question on your site. Because while we were preparing for this interview we of course researched the latest writings of you and we also had a look at an article in the Guardian. It’s about why your website is at it is. The article in the Guardian was focusing more on style and the optic. But as we are really fond of web standards and accessibility we also had a look at the source code and realized that it is just made with tables. So for our listeners that don’t know the article in the Guardian: Why is your website like it is? Why are you not changing it? We understand it now.

Jacob Nielsen

Well tat is actually an example of what i said. There are things that are true in general and there are things that are deviations from the guidelines. And it is interesting that I myself am kind of a deviation of the guideline in some way because one of the guidelines certainly says that having a pleasantly nice looking appearance is as important as many other aspects of the site as well. But my site really has the goal of standing out and standing for something and by standing for something you are often also standing against something. In my case it is against the notion of glamourous or overdone design. There is of course a middle road between overdone design and underdone design. If you could call mine underdone. The middle way of course is one would actually recommend for a company to do. But one can gain a more prominent, a more clarified positioning by going to that kind of extreme of – in my case – underdesigned website and very old fashioned. Which also stands for something as well. Which stands for this notion of back to basics. Let’s just simplify things and don’t do any advanced stuff. And again in real life you shouldn’t do no advanced stuff you just should take care that you don’t do too much advanced stuff. The general advice is: Middle of the road. What do you have to do if you want to stand out in the Web as kind of a voice in the wilderness? 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 the goal of your website is no to be a usability expert website but rather to be (take any random example of a website) a website selling nuts online or a tourist agency website for some town in Germany of course you should not pick this approach. Because you would not getting the benefit of having an extreme positioning on usability because that is not your business. But in my case it is. And so in my case I need to stand very strong for something and also therefore against something which will provide some prominence. On the other hand o have more like a middle of the road website is highly recommended for most businesses because they do not want to call attention to their site they want to call attention to their content: what they are selling, promoting or doing. In my case what I am promoting and what I am selling is usability and therefore I end up being more than extreme on my own website than I would actually recommend for most others site.

Sascha Postner

OK, that makes clear why it looks like that. Can you give a comment why you are using for example tables? Is it more like a convenient way or just you did it 4 years ago?

Jacob Nielsen

Yes. The honest truth is that in my case it is really because I did it actually more than 4 years ago – more like 8 years ago. But also because the site really does not have a lot of advanced layout which you think that’s where you could start benefitting from doing something that is more oriented towards CSS and stuff like that – which we actually doing on the pages for our conferences because they tend to be updated more and be in need for more maintenance. For me, when I write an article I just stick it there and it is going to be there for the next 10 years. Now and then i might go back and fix a link. If I’m linking out to another website and it breaks – what happens much too often – then I have to go back and fix it. But other than that once I write something it is kinda just there. And this means that it often stays in a very old format.

Daniel Jagszent

Another question of our listeners is about animation in UI. He was asking what’s your point of view about all this new JavaScript animations in the websites. All the fading, sliding and stuff like that.

Jacob Nielsen

Talking about writing old articles… I think i wrote an article about multimedia in the web in ‘95. So that is 12 or 13 years ago and I actually sill stand by most of what I said then. Which is that most animations tend to be annoying but it can also be used for good effects. It can be used to call attention to a change which is this fading idea. Or it can be used to illustrate things that change over time. A lot of educational style animations I think are quite nice. E.g. if you look at some medical sites we have done some consulting for where animations was nice to show the blood flow and things like that. So I wouldn’t say on the average don’t do any animation. I think there was certainly a time – maybe 5 years ago – where animation was very overdone in the web. The Flash splash pages era. That was definitely bad.
When you come to things like some of the AJAX effects and changing components on a web page type of areas. The danger here is more that people may overlook. So you cannot depend on, just because you made something fade for a second, that people actually know that it changed. That is just a little bit dangerous and I would recommend an extra tend to do user testing on those types of technics. Whereas often the old fashioned approach – take shopping carts for example: If you push the button that says “Add to shopping cart” and you get the shopping cart as next page. That does not confuse anybody. Whereas on a site where they have the shopping cart as little corner on the screen and they update that you often see people overlook that. And they say “Wow, I pushed ‘Add to shopping cart’ and nothing happened”. Something did happen but they didn’t notice it. These things can be too soft, they can be overlooked. Remember, if you are designing something, you know what to expect and where to look. You may think something is obvious and in fact it is not.

Daniel Jagszent

Ok, generally it is not that bad to have animations… ?

Jacob Nielsen

I would just say ‘Caution’. I warn against just doing it because it is popular, because the other people do it. I really would encourage people to do testing any time they do animation. It goes back to the point about: How can you ensure the usability. And there are two ways ensuring usability. One is to go by the general knowledge and the second one is to test your own customers. The general knowledge for websites has evolved for 13 years or so now. A lot of classic technics 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 – I would still encourage people to test it because there is so much money at stake for shopping carts. But honestly we mainly know how to do that. If you try to do something new or different then you really do need to test it. That’s my main point.

Sascha Postner

So at least you have to have an alternative. Specially if we are talking about JavaScript or Flash and that might be a really hard thing to do. So but just to end the interview: Maybe you have one statement or tip for us and our listeners coming from middle or small sized companies. Just like: Do it! Do you have any tips for us to increase usability and to convince other people to believe in the same thing.

Jacob Nielsen

I think it is important not to be persuaded by fashion or by the big websites you read about in the newspapers because they are typically very different. They are different because of the very fact that they are mentioned in newspapers. That is sites like Facebook or Myspace. They are not the classical small business website. People will go to a website like Myspace or Facebook to hang out and talk to their friends. That is very very different than going to a business to find out about the cost of green or the new tire for your forklift truck or some other very pragmatic, practical reason. Which the millions of websites are doing. They are doing very day to day practical business. It is not glamorous but it can work very well and it can get you customers worldwide because the Web reaches worldwide. It can get you many many new customers.
I say: Whatever your business is right now you can at least double it by improving the usability. But do that by focusing on your customers needs and precise and concise communication of your business concerns. Not on emulated or try to be like the ones you read about in the newspaper because that is a very different type of site, a very different type of business. And also a very different type of user tasks. People try to accomplish something very very different on Facebook than they are going on yours companies website.
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. I don’t think there is any excuse to not do tests with your own customers and find out for yourself. If you don’t believe me, believe your customers.

Sascha Postner

Ok, that was a really good summary. Thank you for this interview and we hope we can increase usability knowledge and wisdom in our listeners.

Jacob Nielsen

Let’s hope so, Thank you.