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Gurus of 90s Web Design: Zeldman, Siegel, Nielsen

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Re: Gurus of 90s Web Design: Zeldman, Siegel, Nielsen

#41

Post by jmisavage »

dcminter wrote: post #12
vanschelven wrote: post #10

This article put Nielsen in the corner of "technically correct", but the influence he had on me at least was a strong focus on "empirically correct". i.e. doing actual tests (with humans) on what kind of things work to convey information. He did this to the detriment of "looking good", which is why his stuff ended up looking "hopelessly outdated", but I think he was on the right side of the fight.

He did a book ("Designing Web Usability" I think) with an unconventional layout and it clearly hadn't been user-tested as it had a flaw (text too close to the binding) that made it ironically hard to use. I think he was on point with a lot of stuff, but I've been a bit jaded ever since!

I thought the same thing of his website when he first hit the scene. Great info, but the design was so bad it made it difficult to read. It was quick though, and today’s reader view would have fixed that issue. Being usable doesn’t mean zero design; everything needs to work together.

Re: Gurus of 90s Web Design: Zeldman, Siegel, Nielsen

#42

Post by mikepurvis »

vr46 wrote: post #18

I enjoyed Zeldman's A List Apart, and had no idea that he was so old at a time that we were all in our mid-twenties, I thought he was our cohort :D Nielsen I can honestly leave, maybe he did help millions of people have easier to use sites, but I found him rigid and boring; especially rigid with his prescriptive approach to sites - "the home page should have these links". I think Philip Greenspun skewered him at some…

That early 2000s CSS/design blogosphere was such an interesting place; I was just in high school at the time but loved following Dave Shea, Andy Budd, Doug Bowman, Shaun Inman, Mike Davidson, and probably a whole bunch more I'm forgetting now.

Re: Gurus of 90s Web Design: Zeldman, Siegel, Nielsen

#45

Post by rudasn »

mikepurvis wrote: post #42
vr46 wrote: post #18

I enjoyed Zeldman's A List Apart, and had no idea that he was so old at a time that we were all in our mid-twenties, I thought he was our cohort :D Nielsen I can honestly leave, maybe he did help millions of people have easier to use sites, but I found him rigid and boring; especially rigid with his prescriptive approach to sites - "the home page should have these links". I think Philip Greenspun skewered him at some…

That early 2000s CSS/design blogosphere was such an interesting place; I was just in high school at the time but loved following Dave Shea, Andy Budd, Doug Bowman, Shaun Inman, Mike Davidson, and probably a whole bunch more I'm forgetting now.

There was also this guy, don't remember his name, whom you could email your questions/issues etc, reply with great detail and post the discussion on his website for others to learn from. Like a one on one precursor to stackoverflow.

I remember email him and asking about why my photo gallery didn't work when I tried to save the "currently selected image" as a cookie. He replied and explained to me that cookies contain string values and that you can't save a reference to a DOM element as a cookie. So, cookie = document.getElementById('image0') will not work, but cookie = 'image0' will :)

Re: Gurus of 90s Web Design: Zeldman, Siegel, Nielsen

#46

Post by onli »

vr46 wrote: post #18

I enjoyed Zeldman's A List Apart, and had no idea that he was so old at a time that we were all in our mid-twenties, I thought he was our cohort :D Nielsen I can honestly leave, maybe he did help millions of people have easier to use sites, but I found him rigid and boring; especially rigid with his prescriptive approach to sites - "the home page should have these links". I think Philip Greenspun skewered him at some…

The users were also different back then. It was not only about putting it all on one page, but even about putting it all above the fold, based on the today astonishing fact that many users did not scroll down. Because they did not know they could, with later experiments observing a tipping point when scrolling became normal.

Think about that, what a different environment the sites had to work in. Not only technically, but also socially. Completely normal that details like that don't carry over into today.

Re: Gurus of 90s Web Design: Zeldman, Siegel, Nielsen

#47

Post by donatj »

I yearn for the early days when I could just "View Source" to see how something neat on a page worked.

Now there's rarely anything neat, and when there is you can poke around with the inspector but it's likely buried deep in some obfuscated JS you'll never decipher.

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