121–130 of 204 posts
It must have been released around 1995 or so. It used Mosaic browser throughout all the examples, which looked so different than the IE3 that I was using. There was a heavy focus on forms and controls. And it was hundreds of pages. Familiar to anyone?
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 He did this to the detriment of "looking good", which is why his stuff ended up looking "hopelessly outdated", but I think he was on the right side of the fight.
The old UseIt.com https://web.archive.org/web/19990125092506/http://useit.com/ will forever live rent-free in my brain.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I always had more respect for Nielsen’s lineage of human-computer interaction than I did for Nielsen himself. At the time I remember thinking how neither designers nor classic HCI people (or programmers) really got the web. Nielsen was at least focused on the web, but the problem is that he was fixated on user expectations for a brand new medium without recognizing that it was early days and would inevitably evolve.…
Honestly, I believe that the Web would have been better had we stuck to those expectations more diligently and evolved more slowly and thoughtfully. That one can does not imply that one should. Blue links and purple visited links were fine. And now on most sites there is no differentiation, and it’s sometimes difficult to tell what is a link, and a lot of sites don’t even bother linking. This is not an improvement!
For me, usability mattered a lot and I saw how a lot of the web design experimentation was falling short, but Nielsen was just too backwards looking. We needed forward thinking UX rooted specifically in web culture, and that's what we got through the Zeldmans, Veens, and 37signals of the era.
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 He did this to the detriment of "looking good", which is why his stuff ended up looking "hopelessly outdated", but I think he was on the right side of the fight.
This is important to keep in mind when focusing on user centered design for a general purpose website. You need a testing pool representative of your users (or who you want your user to be), you need to figure out what to do if there are conflicts among users, during testing, etc. It might be obvious, and you can probably still fit in into a framework, but what I'm getting at is that it is less empirical than it might seem at first pass. There is still an art to user centered design, and if you have this in mind, your designs don't have to look hopelessly outdated.
Another seminal book for me, was Web Pages That Suck . They actually used to throw shade on Creating Killer Web Sites . Lots of big egos, back then. I learned quite a bit from that book. I think Flanders may still have a site. I was on his mailing list, but I haven’t heard anything for the last decade or so.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Teenage me thought there was NOTHING cooler than a flashy splash page and those micro bitmap fonts a la "silkscreen". Who am I kidding I still think it's awesome.
8pt Tahoma is the GOAT and I miss it desperately. I remember vividly when Windows (XP I think?) introduced a new kind of font smoothing that messed with the look of those fonts. In hindsight, I feel like that moment was part of the catalyst toward Web 2.0-style designs. Screens started to get bigger, sites became higher resolution as bandwidth increased, and the tiny pixel font started to be both less relevant (you c…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yes, to be fair, Nielsen essentially has had the last laugh. Simple navigation, consistency, fast loading times, and ruthless minimalism, and the full Flash intro page is a relic.
The full flash intro page is only a relic because Apple dropped support for Flash. Now, so many designers have a full page video that play, and prevent text from loading until every bit of bloated JavaScript finishing downloading and executing. It's a different package, but it's the same junk.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Teenage me thought there was NOTHING cooler than a flashy splash page and those micro bitmap fonts a la "silkscreen". Who am I kidding I still think it's awesome.
8pt Tahoma is the GOAT and I miss it desperately. I remember vividly when Windows (XP I think?) introduced a new kind of font smoothing that messed with the look of those fonts. In hindsight, I feel like that moment was part of the catalyst toward Web 2.0-style designs. Screens started to get bigger, sites became higher resolution as bandwidth increased, and the tiny pixel font started to be both less relevant (you c…
:: news :: contact :: last updated 2000-07-31 ::