Scott Hanselman's Computer Zen - Jakob Nielsen at Corillian Connect

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Jakob Nielsen at Corillian Connect

Posted 2005-09-21 07:10 AM in Corillian.

I'm down in San Diego (Del Mar actually) at the Corillian Connect Conference (our annual Users' Conference). We had Jakob Nielsen give our keynote presentation. If you're not familiar with Jakob, you should be. He's a usability guru and has been since darn near the web's inception. He started the Nielsen Norman Group along with Donald Norman and added Bruce "Tog" Tognazzini a while back. They're giving a User Experience Conference in Boston and London this year that looks pretty amazing with talks from Amazon and Ebay.

I've been a fan since Jakob's original book Designing Web Usability. A classic and largely still valid today. He also runs UseIt.com. (No RSS though?)

Wednesday, September 21, 2005 11:12:52 AM (Pacific Standard Time, UTC-08:00)

Eh...not as cool as the picture of you with Uhura, but...okay.

Andy

Wednesday, September 21, 2005 1:33:13 PM (Pacific Standard Time, UTC-08:00)

Did you tell him "Web pages full of nothing but text are hard to read"?

Scott

Thursday, September 22, 2005 6:59:09 AM (Pacific Standard Time, UTC-08:00)

Definitely the highlight of my trip, which was limited to CTAB.

Well, I also enjoyed the presentations by some Hanselman guy, but compared to Nielson? ;)

FYI, a scraped RSS feed of Nielson's site can be found at:

http://bootleg-rss.g-blog.net/useit_com_alertbox.php

Cam

Thursday, September 22, 2005 11:20:09 PM (Pacific Standard Time, UTC-08:00)

I was under the mistaken impression that Jakob was still charging something like five thousand dollars to pause long enough for a photo to be taken. Has the bubble burst on the usability hype?

secretGeek

Thursday, September 22, 2005 11:27:43 PM (Pacific Standard Time, UTC-08:00)

I didn't pay him to have a picture taken. :P However, I will be charging people to have their picture taken with ME.

Scott Hanselman

Saturday, September 24, 2005 9:54:44 AM (Pacific Standard Time, UTC-08:00)

I'm with Scott -- Nielson's site is no advertisement for his usability expertise. As noted, he has no graphics, which he explains this way:

"Download times rule the Web, and since most users have access speeds on the order of 28.8 kbps ..."

Uh ... true?

There's something *too* purist about his theories (or at least on his site), which ignore the subjective value of aesthetics in page/web design. The value of an attractive Web page has some weight in how "usable" it is ...

mike

Sunday, September 25, 2005 8:18:24 PM (Pacific Standard Time, UTC-08:00)

mike:

+1

I found the mass of text and lack of artwork to break it up quite off putting actually.

I'm not convinced about the 28.8k either.
It may be that that majority of users (in certain countries) are not on broadband (yet) but can you even buy a 28.8k modem any more?!