You decide

Every year I make a resolution to be kindler and gentler. :-) So it was in that spirit I read the latest Nielsen Alertbox when someone asked me to comment on it:

Reviving Advanced Hypertext
"To manage a huge, worldwide information space, users need proven features like fat links, typed links, integrated search and browsing, overview maps, big-screen designs, and physical hypertext."

http://www.useit.com/alertbox/20050103.html

OK, whatever.

What did attract my attention, though, was this gem:

"The benefit of explicit structural commands is that they FREE USERS FROM SLAVERY TO INDIVIDUAL SITE DESIGNS. Users need no longer suffer under bad sites."

Slavery. Individual. Design.

Is this the usual Nielsenian poor communication skills showing or a sign of design fascism rearing its pretty head, again?

Ziya

Still waiting for machine-generated, anatomically-correct, medically-sealed site design

Ziya:

I think you're overdoing your response to Jakob Nielsen a wee bit. I don't think Nielsen was brilliant in what he said, but the quote you gave at least wasn't awful.

I don't know that I've ever used a site that you've designed. I have, however, used sites where I couldn't easily link back to a home page. If my browser provided me the option to get around poor design (which abounds) that would be great.

If I happened to browse to a good design, then I'd be happy to leverage the good design instead of having to use my browser controls. But for those times when I come up against a poorly designed site (in my perception, even if it is a great deisgn) Nielsen merely suggests that:

a. The internals of a site are coded in standard ways.

b. Browsers make use of this where possible to offer synergistic functionality.

Unfortunately, one of the phrases in Nielsen's "gem" of a statement that you didn't latch on to was: "Users need no longer suffer under bad sites." Nielsen's target here is sites that users perceive to be poorly designed, even if they are well designed. Some users will always have difficulty, even with world-class sites. If Nielsen's suggestions help them, isn't that a good thing?

I missed the design fascism. Sorry!

-Gerard

-- Gerard Torenvliet
g.torenvliet at gmail.com

Gerard Torenvliet writes:

<<Nielsen's target here is sites that users perceive to be poorly designed, even if they are well designed.

I'm curious about this statement; it makes me wonder what "well designed" means, if not that it supports people in achieving their goals and objectives. What is the purpose of design, if not that?

I would ask: How can a site be well designed if a substantial number of its users perceive it to be poorly designed?

On the other hand, you didn't say how many of its users perceive it to be poorly designed; and knowing you to be a thoughtful kind of guy, Gerard, it occurs to me that maybe you meant that even if a site is borne out to be "well designed" for the vast majority of its users, there will always be some who don't "get it" and will perceive it to be badly designed. I could go along with that, I think.

Elizabeth
—
Elizabeth Buie
Computer Sciences Corporation
Rockville, Maryland, USA
+1.301.921.3326

This is a PRIVATE message. If you are not the intended recipient, please delete without copying and kindly advise us by e-mail of the mistake in delivery. NOTE: Regardless of content, this e-mail shall not operate to bind CSC to any order or other contract unless pursuant to explicit written agreement or government initiative expressly permitting the use of e-mail for such purpose.

Who decides what "bad sites" are? I think that's the facism piece.

I happen to agree pretty strongly w/ Ziya on this one.

The browser should be a non fixture of the solution. Browsers should be like a platform. Manipulatable through good design, not a lockdown system that people have to mold their design concepts to. Hard-wiring the browser while "good intentioned" will lead us to a world of mediocrity.

Think of the analog of freedom of speech. Yes, a powerful concept. But to make sure great expression is allowed we need to make sure that bad expression is equally allowed and to tolerate bad expression is the real sacrifice we all make towards supporting freedom of speech.

The same holds true here. You can be upset with "bad sites", but won't the market forces take care of that? This is what its all about. I mean even MS w/ its huge monopoly is making usability a bigger and bigger priority every year. The market requires it.

-- dave

My issue with Nielson's article is that badly designed sites will continue to ignore these standards just like they ignore others. So building in browser functionality that only works on well-designed sites is inherently redundant, from the perspective of trying to improve usability. Well designed sites already offer a consistent link to the homepage. They already offer internal/external link types. How would a browser standard impose those complex design decisions on poorly designed sites? You can't legislate good design.

~ James

-- James Melzer
SRA International

On Tue, 4 Jan 2005 09:40:04 -0500, Gerard Torenvliet g.torenvliet at gmail.com wrote:
Ziya: I think you're overdoing your response to Jakob Nielsen a wee bit. I don't think Nielsen was brilliant in what he said, but the quote you gave at least wasn't awful. I don't know that I've ever used a site that you've designed. I have, however, used sites where I couldn't easily link back to a home page. If my browser provided me the option to get around poor design (which abounds) that would be great. If I happened to browse to a good design, then I'd be happy to leverage [trim]

James Melzer jamesmelzer at gmail.com a écrit :

My issue with Nielson's article is that badly designed sites will continue to ignore these standards just like they ignore others. So building in browser functionality that only works on well-designed sites is inherently redundant, from the perspective of trying to improve usability. Well designed sites already offer a consistent link to the homepage. They already offer internal/external link types. How would a browser standard impose those complex design decisions on poorly designed sites? You can't legislate good design.

Yes, but that does not mean you should never try to legislate or give regulations to some design elements and some related elements that influence good design. The Government of Canada has enacted Common Look and Feel (CLF) rules for all of its Web sites. Many of those rules pertain to Metadata, and some of them give strict definitions of the look of certain sections of any Web page. Theres is an enormous amount that is missing in the rules, because, as you say you cant legislate GOOD design. But the regulations force you to think about all of the aspects in a more structured when the time comes to roll out the Web pages.

Alain Vaillancourt

Lèche-vitrine ou lèche-écran ?
magasinage.yahoo.ca

OK, a mega-response here.

Dave Heller points out that the fascism could lie in who it is making the determination that a site is bad. I don't think a determination needs to be made. If an individual user doesn't understand that design of a site, no matter how good that design is, they use the functionality in their browser. No explicit judgment is being made, and even implicitly, if said user is an outlier who only ever reads alertbox (grin) and so doesn't really understand design, the site won't need to change. The user just gets results.

Between Dave Heller and James Melzner I get the idea that browser functionality will mean that sites need to be coded a certain browser-specific way to work in that browser. I agree that returning to that sort of world would be a very bad thing. However, if browsers can leverage defacto standards (like the fact that if you are on www.a.com/b/c/d/e/f.html, www.a.com is probably the home page) and so make reasonable assumptions to help a user's experience, why not?

In reality, I advocate coding to XHTML 1.0 Strict and separating presentation from content as much as possible. (I'm glad to be in the company of Tim Berners-Lee on this one. I think he's the uber design non-fascist.) If site designers / authors do this, then there is a ton of stuff that browsers can leverage (i.e., style-sheet switching for accessibility concerns, etc.). That's the extent - let's choose a non-proprietary standard and make it a good community practice to use it.

So, I think I agree with Dave Heller / James Melzner that the type of design fascism inherent in browser-specific standards is a bad thing. However, I don't think this is what Nielsen is saying.

And, Elizabeth Buie is always charitable. Of course I was talking about outliers who can't use, or don't take the time to use, a proven good design. If more than a handful of your target audience can't use your site, that is an important message that you should attend to, no matter how well designed the site is in the eye of the designer. To be even more specific, proving of a site could be done either by testing on your target audience, or by revenue- or satisfaction-specific metrics.

Phew.

I hope I haven't misconstrued anyone. I think we're in violent agreement, except for on the single point of the offensiveness of Jakob Nielsen's advice.

Regards,
-Gerard

P.S. More generally, I think if we as a community stopped reacting to Jakob Nielsen (either because we disagree with him, or just because he has a staid viewpoint) he would be a problem that might just go away. Reacting to him might be part of the problem.

-- Gerard Torenvliet
g.torenvliet at gmail.com

Gerard Torenvliet wrote:
I hope I haven't misconstrued anyone. I think we're in violent agreement, except for on the single point of the offensiveness of Jakob Nielsen's advice.

Jakob has to be offensive/controversial to remain relevant. If we all ignored him, he would eventually go away. What fun would that be?

Kurt

Gerard wrote:

"The Government of Canada has enacted Common
Look and Feel (CLF) rules for all of its Web sites. Many of those rules pertain to Metadata, and some of them give strict definitions of the look of certain sections of any Web page"

There's a government in Canada? (Aw, I'm just a dumb red-stater) Seriously, don't miss the matinee show on Saturday.

That metadata thing rings a faint bell and as I've been ripping and burning some LEGALLY PURCHASED AND PERSONALLY OWNED CD's lately puts me in mind of a wsdb (web site database). I'm thinking (ouch) that a strict definition of look is certainly a bad (as opposed to good) idea, but maybe what Yah-koab and our neighbors in the great white north really want is a kind of standard web-site tag with all that hidden and obscure and dreadfully important information in it.

Yer fav-o-rite browser might then have a button/pane/window/sumpthin that would display all that stuff if you wanted it.

Or maybe you could just have big old database with all that stuff in it and make it available on mr. gore's wild internet.

Or wait, maybe ONE PERSON could just do everybody's site so we wouldn't have all this confusion. I think it works like:
www.drbronnersalloneworldsite.all/mysite/yoursite/anothersite...

Mmmmm. good times.

(this rambling post has no connection with any US government body of any kind)

Ralph:

Allain Vaillancourt wrote about the Government of Canada CLF rules, not me.

Note that these rules only apply to websites of the Canadian Government and it's various departments, not to all of Canada.

-Gerard

P.S. A dumb red-stater? Sorry to show my colours, but that's a contradiction in terms. :-)

-- Gerard Torenvliet
g.torenvliet at gmail.com

Original Message
From: Gerard Torenvliet
Sent: Tuesday, January 04, 2005 6:40 AM
To: discuss at ixdg.org
Subject: Re: [ID Discuss] You decide

snip
I have,
however, used sites where I couldn't easily link back to a home page. If my browser provided me the option to get around poor design (which abounds) that would be great.

~~~~

We've already got this tool in the browser: the address field.

Jakob speaks from a very narrow perspective: internet usability researcher. All of his points in the last Alert Box express desires from that user perspective. That's not to say anything about his ability to design or communicate - we should recognize that he's speaking as a specific, individual user, who just happens to have a very tall soapbox.

Cheers,
EB

I'm not arguing w/ Gerard in my next response here, just pointing out an interesting sentence:

"If an individual user doesn't understand that design of a site, no matter how good that design is, they use the functionality in their browser."

I would say that if an individual user doesn't understand then the design is not good.

Now it could be said that we will never be able to design to the individual level, but then again, neither can the browser.

Back to the beginning.

Again, I would say the browser is an enabler technology for designers to design w/in. Building in functionality for "home" for example assumes that what is inside the browser is a site ... Can we really say that this is a "standard" anymore? I haven't designed a website in 5 years, so this would be a complete distraction to me and my users.

-- dave

Jakob as "individual" ...
I think some people bear the brunt of their fame.
There are some people who are not allowed to speak for themselves unless they say they are speaking for themselves. When Jakob speaks in terms of generalizations, I do not think of him as one man speaking for himself. His job is to speak for others and I think it is fair to say that he is doing so now by generalizing off of himself in this case.

-- dave

Regarding the Canada thing.

This sounds like a single enterprise-wide guidelines. This is different than something like 508c (accessibility guidelines in the US) which tells vendors (not just internals) what they have to do to sell to the US gov't.

-- dave

Gerard wrote

"Allain Vaillancourt wrote about the Government of Canada CLF rules, not me.

Note that these rules only apply to websites of the Canadian Government and it's various departments, not to all of Canada."

Oops- Sorry Gerard! (and Allain)

And thanks for clarifying, I thought it was another socialist (did I type that out loud?) thing applying to the whole nation from sea to frozen sea.

RL

Ralph wrote:

another socialist

That would be "totalitarian". Totalitarianism can be either left-wing or right-wing economically, and has nothing to do with socialism.

Not that I want to get into a political discussion; I think it's inappropriate here. But I did want to clear up a misconception.

Elizabeth
—
Elizabeth Buie
Computer Sciences Corporation
Rockville, Maryland, USA
+1.301.921.3326

This is a PRIVATE message. If you are not the intended recipient, please delete without copying and kindly advise us by e-mail of the mistake in delivery. NOTE: Regardless of content, this e-mail shall not operate to bind CSC to any order or other contract unless pursuant to explicit written agreement or government initiative expressly permitting the use of e-mail for such purpose.

OK, now that we're sufficiently sober for the new year, let's forget the principle design notion of scalability and review the absurdity of hard-coding the web browser, you know that thing over half a BILLION people use DAILY to access the net.

I have, however, used sites where I couldn't easily link back to a home page. If my browser provided me the option to get around poor design (which abounds) that would be great.

If the home page is great how about a dedicated button for "Help System"? "Category Listings"?
"Archives"?
"Product Lists"?
"Feedback/Contact"?

I'm not the one who's making these up. But I also want dedicated buttons for

Sitemap
Terms of use
Webmaster's phone number
Corporate org chart
Branch offices

What's your favorite page, Glen? How about a nice little green button for the company physical stores, that would be handy, wouldn't it? Well, then, don't you always want to quickly get at their store hours? How about a shiny silver dedicated button with a clock icon on EVERY BROWSER HALF A BILLION PEOPLE USE DAILY TO ACCESS THE NET.

Now imagine using this magnificently bedecked browser with 128 dedicated buttons that so smoothly bypasses all 'badly' designed sites that, golly, you DON'T EVEN NEED DESIGNERS ANY LONGER. Press a button, you are there. No more "slavery"!

Nielsen merely suggests that:

Glen, I can't even begin to fathom what Nielsen might be suggesting. I've fallen down on my dedicated browser buttons and I can't get up.

"Users need no longer suffer under bad sites."

May I suggest taking this gem of a thought and applying it everywhere: universal rules of playbook efficiency, no more bad basketball teams. Unbreakable rules of culinary efficiency, no more bad meals for anyone. Ironclad rules of grammar, no more badly written books...

I missed the design fascism.

...while we're at it, let's get the trains to run on time and call it a day.

Ziya Nullius in Verba

I'm not the one who's making these up. But I also want dedicated buttons for Sitemap Terms of use Webmaster's phone number Corporate org chart Branch offices

Just wanted to point out that both Opera and Mozilla (NOT Firefox) already had this feature at some point. Probably still have. They used the information provided explicitly by webmasters in the link tags. Opera 7 had separate buttons for: Home, Index, Contents, Search, Glossary, Help, First, Previous, Next, Last, Up, Copyright and Author. Both called it (Site) Navigation Bar.

Marcin Wichary
e:\ mwichary at usability.pl
w:\ www.aci.com.pl/mwichary Attached
w:\ www.aci.com.pl/mwichary/gui Graphical User Interface gallery w:\ www.10yearsofbeingboring.com 10 years of Being Boring w:\ www.usability.pl Usability.pl

David Heller dave at ixdg.org a écrit :

Regarding the Canada thing. This sounds like a single enterprise-wide guidelines. This is different than something like 508c (accessibility guidelines in the US) which tells vendors (not just internals) what they have to do to sell to the US gov't. — dave

Exactly! The guidelines apply only to departments and agencies of the federal government, from sea to unfrozen sea. The Pacific does not freeze up, or at least not the parts on the shores of the inhabited areas of British Columbia. The Atlantic does not freeze up either but I have to admit there are some mighty big icebergs in it.

By the way, Jakob Nielsen praised the Common Look and Feel and everything else the Government of Canada's Treasury Board (they have functions similar to the OMB and the GAO in the US) did to implement the GOL (Government On Line) rules in his Alertbox column of June 2004:

http://www.useit.com/alertbox/20040621.html

Alain Vaillancourt

Lèche-vitrine ou lèche-écran ?
magasinage.yahoo.ca

Marcin Wichary:

information provided explicitly by webmasters

That sounds suspiciously like, gasp, a conscious act of design to me and should thus be thoroughly expunged forthwith. We can surely agree on 12 (64, 78 or 324 at most) buttons that would eliminate that most barbaric and unreliable thing call web navigation altogether. That level of global uniformity should make us all model citizens and efficient surfers to boot. Free the people!

Ziya Nullius in Verba

It seems to me that Jakob is merely arguing for giving Web users the tools to browse Web content using alternate mechanisms, if they so choose. Nowhere does he state that these alternate mechanisms should replace a site's custom UI; they merely supplement it. As a designer and a Web user, I wholeheartedly support this idea. Why not include navigation tags that enable users to map keyboard commands or toolbar buttons to commonly-used page types or information elements? I don't see how the addition of invisible hooks to the code of a Web page is in any way detrimental to whatever custom visual/interaction design a site chooses to adopt. On the contrary, these hooks could be very helpful to users who choose to employ them.

As an example of the success of presentation-independent structured information, look no futher than the ever more popular RSS. How many readers of this list use an RSS reader? Well, I do. And I see one of the primary advantages as the fact that I can dispense with whatever hare-brained navigation and layout scheme has been dreamed up by "creative" blog-masters with too much time on their hands.

Design, with a capital D, is about giving people tools that they can use, not about cramming the designer's fixed mental model down the throat of every user. Yes, of course, 80% (or more) of users will use whatever is the default (e.g. the links and buttons that show up when the page is rendered). But, why not give more control to those users who take the initiative?

d|b

I think a major part of the problem is that the "web" is so far-reaching in its scope... Of course, having a dedicated button that says "Product Listing" only works if the designer/coder/whatever executes whatever explicit code/method is needed to activate that button. But a bigger issue is... what if the site isn't selling products?

Ziya, your flair for drama in this case (128 buttons? Surely only 97 would do ; ) is really what gets at the point of the issue. On a news site, "Top Stories" as a dedicated button would be just as valid as "Discography" would be on a recording artist's site... but isn't that why we have different navigation schemes for different types of sites?

Independent of one's feelings about Nielsen, he has the exposure to get people talking about the issues/questions/concerns he raises. Look at this thread as a perfect example. And there's probably 2 dozen other similar threads on other lists going on right now about these same topics.

Sometimes has some decent ideas, sometimes he showboats some real clunkers - especially from a designer's perspective. Its unfortunate that he doesn't participate in any email lists (that I know of) to further explain his thoughts. I think there's been a lot of assumptions made about what he means by "good design" or "bad design" and he's not here to use winking smiley faces to let us know he's not really suggesting 128 dedicated buttons on a browser.

bill

Ok, best example I can think of as to why adding functionality like this to a web browser hurts experience design.
The back button!!!!

This is the arch nemesis of web-application design. It has no place in application design, yet we can't get rid of or disable the darn thing.

Any one of these new browser add-ons will have a similar effect of becoming ubiquitously relied upon.

The solution is demand good design (oh my G-d! I've become Ziya!) Ya don't like the design of X store, go to a store that works for you. This is what we do in real life.

How many times have you used a car (maybe you rented it, maybe you bought it) and a feature was just off or just right and you use that as new criteria when deciding whether or not to buy the next car. These subtleties are not show stoppers, but they are selling points. Technology should not make up for bad design, good design should. Stop using technology to do things it should just stay out of the way from.

There is nothing in HTML that should limit us from good design and even if that wasn't the case, add in Flash and Java and well, you can create everything you need to make a good web site/application. Bad design has no excuses in this day and age and while my stuff is far from perfect (shoot, I know it is flawed) I never blame the web browser for the bad designs. It's all my fault and well the constraints of life and business. ; )

-- dave

Dave beat me to the punch on this one. I wish I had a record of the amount of time and effort my company spent to get our applications to work with the back button.

This issue prompted another thought, for what it's worth. If a browser developer were to implement such site navigation functionality, the "good design" would be one in which the buttons would disappear/disable when the target page for the button didn't exist. This, of course, would then lead to further debate about the users' expectations for the existence of these pages: food for another Jakobox.

Jack

Ok, best example I can think of as to why adding functionality like this to a web browser hurts experience design. The back button!!!! This is the arch nemesis of web-application design. It has no place in application design, yet we can't get rid of or disable the darn thing. Any one of these new browser add-ons will have a similar effect of becoming ubiquitously relied upon.

Jack L. Moffett
Interaction Designer
inmedius
412.690.2360 x219
http://www.inmedius.com

Questions about whether design
is necessary or affordable
are quite beside the point:
design is inevitable.

The alternative to good design
is bad design, not no design at all.

- Douglas Martin

On Tue, 4 Jan 2005 17:01:38 -0500, David Heller dave at ixdg.org wrote: Ok, best example I can think of as to why adding functionality like this to a web browser hurts experience design. The back button!!!!

OK, if you don't want your Web application to support the "Home button, " then don't include the Home link in the code on your site. That ought to disable this hypothetical feature just fine.

The solution is demand good design (oh my G-d! I've become Ziya!) Ya don't like the design of X store, go to a store that works for you. This is what we do in real life.

Sure we do. But, I don't see any reason why the Web experience shouldn't be better than "real life." If I want the ketchup to be in the same exact place in every digital store that I enter, why shouldn't it be? All those ketchup bottles in various stores are just entries in databases, anyway. Yes, they are in different databases, but, if the standardized language (e.g. XML) of the Web can make those databases speak the same language so that my custom shopper application can present the ketchup bottles in the particular way that I want them, as a user, then why shouldn't we enable that? Most users will still go through the front door, and experience the store exactly as the designers had intended. Others, who are more interested in finding the cheapest ketchup than in listening to the store's custom-programmed Musak, can use powerful tools that enable standardized navigation, aggregation, and analysis of information.

d|b

d|b said:

Most users will still go through the front door, and experience the store exactly as the designers had intended. Others, who are more interested in finding the cheapest ketchup than in listening to the store's custom-programmed Musak, can use powerful tools that enable standardized navigation, aggregation, and analysis of information.

Fair enough, but I motivation behind the point Jacob is making is to help my mum find the ketchup, not an advanced user who wants to access powerful tools and such. Adding crap to browsers that will help advanced users to do some powerful stuff, is pretty much the opposite of adding standard buttons to help everyday users do simple stuff.

Nathan

David Heller:

The solution is demand good design

Sweet magnolia! That wasn't so hard, was it?! :-)

How do we save the village? Burn it.
How do we protect our freedom of speech? Silence the dissenters. How do we create good designers? License them.
How do we tame unruly design? Standardize it.

This notion of design 'efficiency' often comes in the disguise of 'standards.' Needless to say not all promotion of standards is evil. This one comes really close.

Ziya Nullius in Verba

d|b:

It seems to me that Jakob is merely arguing for giving Web users the tools to browse Web content using alternate mechanisms, if they so choose.

Jakob may or may not understand design but he never "merely argues". He first advances notions based on pseudo-scientific observations. Then he argues for them to become standards, rules, best practices, etc. Finally, he issues his "99% bad" fatvas to pressure companies into reading his books, attending his seminars and purchasing his consultancy services, etc. to get in line with what were once "mere suggestions."

I'm not amused.

Ziya Nullius in Verba

On 4 Jan 2005, at 22:01, David Heller wrote:
Ok, best example I can think of as to why adding functionality like this to a web browser hurts experience design. The back button!!!! This is the arch nemesis of web-application design. It has no place in application design, yet we can't get rid of or disable the darn thing.

No, it's the other way round! The best reason why you shouldn't use a browser as an application platform is the back button. The browser was designed as a document reader - and in that context the back button makes total sense.

The problem is not the back button, it's shoe-horning applications into a browser. We need a more appropriate platform for networked apps that is separate from the browser. As app complexity increases this is more and more important. There are very strong UI and engineering reasons why browsers are not appropriate for this. UI richness (the widgets available, active elements), and server and network efficiency are just a few of the reasons.

So what I'd suggest is the browser should split into two apps, one for documentation, and one for functionality. They'd probably reference each other a great deal, but they should be separated.

The best thing about doing this is it would free design to be more appropriate in each domain. You would be free of the back button as an app designer, and you'd have more flexibility is how you display/update and so forth.

--Pete

Peace and friendship with all mankind is our wisest policy, and I wish we may be permitted to pursue it.
- Thomas Jefferson, 1743 - 1826

Peter Bagnall - http://people.surfaceeffect.com/pete/

Peter Bagnall wrote:

The problem is not the back button, it's shoe-horning applications into a browser. We need a more appropriate platform for networked apps that is separate from the browser.

We've had an appropriate platform for many years already... it's called a desktop application.

Now why the "desktop application" got a bad rap (it needed to be installed, was too complex to code from scratch, IT couldn't keep multiple machines and installations in sync, no way to remote log-in, etc etc etc) is an entirely different matter, but let's not kid ourselves... The proper platform has always been there. It's whether you had the right set of designers and engineers around who could make applications do what it needed to do, which these days means needing a networking component that many preferred not to write themselves.

So what I'd suggest is the browser should split into two apps, one for documentation, and one for functionality. They'd probably reference each other a great deal, but they should be separated.

Once you make that mental leap, you'll slowly work yourself back into the idea that it's actually ok to have multiple applications to do different major tasks. There's no need for uber-apps that try and do it all at some level.

Hey! It's 1980 all over again! Except this time we now have the network infrastructure in place, more processing power and more experience in app design.

iTunes only works as well as it does because Apple designed the right app for the right set of tasks. And since it does what I need, I now use it for all my music related stuff. As a user, I'm perfectly ok with that. In fact, I only use a browser when forced to, not because I like to.

It's like your kitchen. You have many different appliances to cook and prepare food. Why on earth should we expect to have uber-apps that try and do it all only to do it all in a crap way? It makes no sense, and has made little sense to me for some time now.

Andrei

Andrei Herasimchuk:

We've had an appropriate platform for many years already... it's called a desktop application.

Like the web browser? :-)

Ziya Nullius in Verba

I will second this. I've seen this in action when I worked at Excite at Home.

Nielsen wrote a critique that liberally wounded the @Home ClickVideo product. The PM's and execs were up in arms wondering who this Jakob Nielsen person was and if they should bring NN Group aka Nielsen in as consultants or issue press releases to counter Jakob Nielsen's fatva regarding the bad usability of the video product.

I laughed when they asked me who he was and if they should be worried. I said to get a UI designer to work on it and quit worrying about Nielsen.

-Wendy

Ziya quoted:
"Jakob may or may not understand design but he never "merely argues". He first advances notions based on pseudo-scientific observations. Then he argues for them to become standards, rules, best practices, etc. Finally, he issues his "99% bad" fatvas to pressure companies into reading his books, attending his seminars and purchasing his consultancy services, etc. to get in line with what were once "mere suggestions.""

Listera wrote:

Like the web browser? :-)

I know you're being coy, but for the sake of discussion:

Do this mental exercise: Open your refrigerator, and now ask yourself why the meats drawer doesn't also have a microwave oven built into it, and why the egg container doesn't boil my eggs with a timed setting I can enter the night before, or why my freezer doesn't have an auto-thawer and meat cleaver to chop up my steaks based on knowing what my dinner menu is going to be stir-fry for the week.

Everyone has a refrigerator, right? Why isn't everything I do in my kitchen attached to the frig? It's the perfect entry point into people's homes. Everything you design and build for the kitchen should be intricately linked and attached to the refrigerator, right?

If the refrigerator was designed by most web companies, they'd spend a lot of time and money trying to make the refrigerator do a bunch of stuff for which it was not designed, instead of attacking the root problem: the tasks are sufficiently different that they require different appliances.

Combined, all those appliance make up your kitchen. Well designed appliances that take their environment into context make a great kitchen. But they are separate appliances.

Companies need to invest in building the right applications to solve the right tasks. One can even make the argument that good design requires ending attempts at making the web browser do things for which it was not designed.

Stop building email clients inside a web browser, Ziya. It's a waste of time. Especially when I have plenty of robust desktop clients that already solve that problem more than sufficiently for me.

Andrei

So what I'd suggest is the browser should split into two apps, one for documentation, and one for functionality. They'd probably reference each other a great deal, but they should be separated.

Isn't this one of the many benes Firefox (and for that matter any XUL engine) affords?

Example: the Mozilla Amazon Browser
http://tinyurl.com/5be5f

Example: Mozilla Calendar
http://tinyurl.com/2oold

XUL is amazing and it would be great if we could rely on it as a deployment option. The staying power of the browser as a web app platform can be reduced to one thing: ubiquity. It is one of those tired terms that stopped being buzzy awhile ago, but is still an issue. Web apps need some ubiquitous tool to launch them at the very least. Maybe I am a pessimist, but we are going to be stuck with them for some time.

IMO, adding XUL support to IE would probably be a much better option than the people at Microsoft reinventing the wheel with XAML. Oh well.

-Clay

Andrei said:

Stop building email clients inside a web browser, Ziya. It's a waste of time. Especially when I have plenty of robust desktop clients that already solve that problem more than sufficiently for me.

Andrei

Sorry, I think somebody beat Ziya to the punch...

Introducing Lazslo Mail....

http://www.laszlosystems.com/products/modules/mail.php

Laszlo Mail* provides a breakthrough Web email user experience, delivering the functionality and responsiveness of desktop email without requiring any client software install. Laszlo Mail enables mail service providers to deploy a scalable, standards-based rich Internet application that runs in virtually any Web browser across Windows, Mac and Linux while leveraging existing IT infrastructure.

-Wendy

On 4 Jan 2005, at 23:29, Andrei Herasimchuk wrote: Peter Bagnall wrote: The problem is not the back button, it's shoe-horning applications into a browser. We need a more appropriate platform for networked apps that is separate from the browser. We've had an appropriate platform for many years already... it's called a desktop application.

For the most part, but I'd like to see support for auto-updates and code portability. If you're going to deploy things like banking apps over the net then you need to make sure that everyone will be able to use them and preferably not have to write one for each platform. The Web did well because it delivered this. Windows doesn't offer this quite yet, although .NET is heading that way.

Mac's offer this through Java Web Start (which has been around for years now), which is a great solution, since it does auto-updates and portability very well, but it's nowhere near critical mass.

Isn't this one of the many benes Firefox (and for that matter any XUL engine) affords?

XUL looks like a really good thing. It's been needed for some time. It's not really part of the browser though as I understand it. It's just a UI description language which makes building your UI simpler. That there are XUL engines for various platforms from the Mozilla effort is great, and could easily be part of the solution I'm looking for.

Adding it to IE wouldn't help I don't think. Adding it to Windows would though. I'm still trying to reduce the role of the browser to the things it was really designed for - ie reading stuff.

But XUL doesn't of itself solve the configuration management problem though. That why it's only part of the answer. And you won't dislodge the browser until you convince IT departments that there is a better way of solving the configuration problem.

--Pete
Manners are a sensitive awareness of the feelings of others. If you have that awareness, you have good manners, no matter what fork you use.
- Emily Post

Peter Bagnall - http://people.surfaceeffect.com/pete/

Wendy Fischer wrote:

Sorry, I think somebody beat Ziya to the punch...

Woo hoo! Yet another email client inside a web browser that does what I've been able to do with a "real" app since I started using email back in 1991.

(I love that their website uses a Flash demo to showcase the product offering, and that many of their product offerings use Flash exclusively, only using the browser as a means to get networking functionality and a container window for the UI.)

Andrei

Andrei Herasimchuk:

If the refrigerator was designed by most web companies, they'd spend a lot of time and money trying to make the refrigerator do a bunch of stuff for which it was not designed, instead of attacking the root problem: the tasks are sufficiently different that they require different appliances.

I guess you just haven't heard about 'smart refrigerators' like the Electrolux one that can take a picture of its contents from a remote location (the supermarket?) with cell phones with MMS. It comes with a webcam to capture images of all the items inside, plus of course, various sensors, web access, TV, email, you know, all the kitchen essentials. :-)

Stop building email clients inside a web browser, Ziya.

Look, how else Hotmail and GMail developers are supposed to buy their Ferraris, huh? :-)

Especially when I have plenty of robust desktop clients that already solve that problem more than sufficiently for me.

You are preaching to the wrong congregation here (me). Like I said, I was doing desktop apps long before web came around. I love'em.

My issues with your argument are narrow and two-fold:

A. Web (as in DHTML/HTTP) is not dead. No reason to kill it either.

B. I don't want to relive the OS-wars again. Web has been a powerful ecumenical force, I don't want OS-specific binaries and dependencies to kill it off.

Of course, I don't care what the client is (desktop/web/RIA/C-S) as long as there's access to the data-stream. But I'm not naïve enough to kid myself that there are certain companies who are not interested in lock-in through desktop dependencies.

Ziya Nullius in Verba

Peter Bagnall wrote:

For the most part, but I'd like to see support for auto-updates and code portability. If you're going to deploy things like banking apps over the net then you need to make sure that everyone will be able to use them and preferably not have to write one for each platform.

Nearly every new modern app these days is doing this now, especially considering that the major OS also rely on this to keep desktops current.

Windows doesn't offer this quite yet,

Windows has been doing the auto update thing for some time now. The issue is that MS has a longer lag time to check for QA, but the OS has been doing auto-updates for almost five years or so. I have no idea what you mean here.

Mac's offer this through Java Web Start (which has been around for years now), which is a great solution, since it does auto-updates and portability very well, but it's nowhere near critical mass.

You've lost me. Mac OS has been doing auto-updates for some time now, and has deep penetration. I constantly get updates to my machine as they come in and have for at least 3 or 4 years now. For not just the OS, but iTunes, iPod, Calendar, Mail, iMovie, iChat... the whole lot.

Andrei

Andrei Herasimchuk:

I love that their website uses a Flash demo to showcase the product offering, and that many of their product offerings use Flash exclusively

It couldn't be otherwise, Lazslo runtime currently is based on the Flash 5+ player .

Ziya Nullius in Verba

Listera wrote:

I guess you just haven't heard about 'smart refrigerators' like the Electrolux one that can take a picture of its contents from a remote location (the supermarket?) with cell phones with MMS. It comes with a webcam to capture images of all the items inside, plus of course, various sensors, web access, TV, email, you know, all the kitchen essentials. :-)

I have.

I picked my specific examples for a reason. They are tasks not suited for refrigerators in that they have little to do with the refrigerator's main purpose: storing food.

The example you cite is at least in relation to that purpose, so adding more functionality in the ways a refrigerator can store food or help you to store more food can be somewhat useful.

I'm not opposed to stretching boundaries, but at some point, it becomes a bit ridiculous to expect one, or two or even three appliances to do everything you need to do in the Kitchen.

My issues with your argument are narrow and two-fold: A. Web (as in DHTML/HTTP) is not dead. No reason to kill it either.

I never claimed it was, nor did I ever claim it needed to be killed. But given an offering of DHTML/HTTP versus a robust desktop client app, I'll take the thing that works better any day of the week. All things being equal, and with a good designer behind both system, the client app will always be able to do more and operate more robustly than the DHTML/HTTP solution, due to inherent limitations of DHTML/HTTP.

B. I don't want to relive the OS-wars again. Web has been a powerful ecumenical force, I don't want OS-specific binaries and dependencies to kill it off.

The web has? By what? Reducing Microsoft's dominance to 93% instead of 96%? By getting 90% of the tech companies out there to not designed products almost specifically for Windows? By creating coding and development standards that work for multiple platforms consistently?

Please pass the pipe, I want whatever you are smoking. The world I live is nothing like what you speak of at all. (And I live Apple Valley, the heart of the other 2% on the planet.)

In fact,you can make the argument that the "web" has done nothing but re-enforce Microsoft's power. Look at Windows Media Player or Internet Explorer. How many companies now design for Windows and/or IE only after the equalizing force of the "web"?

Andrei

No, it's the other way round! The best reason why you shouldn't use a browser as an application platform is the back button. The browser was designed as a document reader - and in that context the back button makes total sense. <snip So what I'd suggest is the browser should split into two apps, one for documentation, and one for functionality. They'd probably reference each other a great deal, but they should be separated.

Halleluja ... Got an environment I can work w/ that is installed on every desktop in the world, runs a distributed GUI interface with the same secruity as the browser and ya got a deal. Till then, I'm stuck. :(

Cant' even use Flash in the x-enterprise app environment b/c well, can't install Active X controls so to update to Flash MX 2004 can't be done. :(

But we digress.

-- dave

Andrei Herasimchuk:

I picked my specific examples for a reason. They are tasks not suited for refrigerators in that they have little to do with the refrigerator's main purpose: storing food.

I don't want to belabor this narrow example but I don't mind if the refrigerator's main purpose drastically changed. I'm not married to the notion of refrigerator-as-dumb-cold-storage. If the new combo-appliance works, great.

I never claimed it was, nor did I ever claim it needed to be killed.

Another point of agreement then.

In fact,you can make the argument that the "web" has done nothing but re-enforce Microsoft's power.

We can open up that argument in much greater depth but this isn't the forum. You'll have to wait for our sit-down for it. :-)

Look at Windows Media Player or Internet Explorer. How many companies now design for Windows and/or IE only after the equalizing force of the "web"?

There are many, many, many apps out there that I am convinced would never ever been made available to non-Windows platforms had there been no way to do them in HTML/HTTP on the web.

Ziya Nullius in Verba

The real history behind Lazslo team is that made of a lot of people from the Excite at Home TV settop team.

They were doing funky things with Flash way back in the day and building custom dev tools around the Flash player at Excite at Home in order to have the set top UI built on flash. My personal opinion is that Lazslo technology is a descendent of the technology from Excite at Home.

I worked on messaging products at Excite at Home. The team was already extolling the virtues of email in Flash, except the Flash technology wasn't quite ready for it. It still isn't ready though...

-Wendy

Wow! This thread has gone from the superb to the sublime.

Couple of hopefully moderate throughts:

No technology is where we need it to be.
Technology is not a solution for bad design. Technology will just be used as part of the bad design but in a different way.
Design is the solution to bad design.

Usability is a real problem in the world as design is not a science and no matter how many times you test an solution you are still going to have a user that is not satisfied. Shit, I bet you can put a driver in a Mercedes-Benz and they'll find something "wrong" w/ it.

Usability testing, and HCI research are useful tools in the world and very informative to help craft a good final solution through design methods.

To me this discussion happens often on this list and it seems to always start to spiral into some tit-for-tat type arguments by people who generally agree, but start nit-pickin' on the details.

How can we push this discussion into a more productive level?

Things I've noticed. People tend to argue from the position of their experience + the current problems they are facing. Not everyone is ever on the same exact page based on that equation. I've also noticed that people from specific backgrounds tend to take the comments from others to be absolutist and then argue with a full pendulum swing instead of a more corrective fashion.

Issues that I know I'm facing related to this discussion:

1. The need for a platform that is OS independent, that doesn't require an "install" by the end user. That is to mean that the user doesn't need to be an administrator, or the install of such items is not considered a security risk by the "owner"/administrator of the computer itself.

I don't see this changing any time soon and I only see solutions coming through the OS Level + runtime engines that are part of those OSes, but the conflict's of interest and upgrade rates of OSes get in the way even further.

2. As an organizer in the UX community I'm really struggling w/ this us vs. them dialog going on. On the one hand I get it. We do different things. On the otherhand, we are teammates trying to solve the same issues. We just have different areas of expertise and the overlap I guess is what is killing us. I really want to get past this.

-- dave

Wendy Fischer:

The real history behind Lazslo team is that made of a lot of people from the Excite at Home TV settop team.

Any insight into why they have open sourced Lazslo? (Other than the usual reasons.)

Ziya Nullius in Verba

It is absolutely possible to disable the back button but honestly if you're working in a full-blown web-application (as opposed to web site) and you're finding that your users are using the back button as opposed to focusing their attention on internal controls to resolve their issue then there's probably something lacking in the design.

Further, most web-apps have a limited, focused audience. They should have some training in the web-app before being put in front of it in the first place.

Additionally, given the limited audience, you'll find that the web-app can and is likely designed and built to work within a specific browser/os setting. That gives you even more opportunity to strip out whatever you want from the browser.

Original Message
From: discuss-interactiondesigners.com-bounces at lists.interactiondesigners.com [mailto:discuss-interactiondesigners.com-bounces at lists.interactiondesign ers.com]On Behalf Of David Heller
Sent: Tuesday, January 04, 2005 5:02 PM
To: discuss-interactiondesigners.com at lists.interactiondesigners.com Subject: RE: [ID Discuss] You decide

Ok, best example I can think of as to why adding functionality like this to a web browser hurts experience design.
The back button!!!!

This is the arch nemesis of web-application design. It has no place in application design, yet we can't get rid of or disable the darn thing.

Andrei wrote:

"In fact,you can make the argument that the "web" has done nothing but re-enforce Microsoft's power. Look at Windows Media Player or Internet Explorer. How many companies now design for Windows and/or IE only after the equalizing force of the "web"?"

I'd say you're correct Andrei... if this was still 2000. Versions of Flash also an issue (often times moreso than os/browser) and that helps take away some of MS's stranglehold. Additionally — and this is purely anecdotal so take it as you will — more and more designers and builders taking into account other browsers now more so than even during the 90s browser wars. I'm delighted to see bugs so up that cite safari or firefox. I think part of this also has to do with increased reliance on CSS and xhtml standards and other similar impulses that suffer more in IE than in other browsers.

On 5 Jan 2005, at 00:25, Andrei Herasimchuk wrote: Peter Bagnall wrote: For the most part, but I'd like to see support for auto-updates and code portability. If you're going to deploy things like banking apps over the net then you need to make sure that everyone will be able to use them and preferably not have to write one for each platform. Nearly every new modern app these days is doing this now, especially considering that the major OS also rely on this to keep desktops current. Windows doesn't offer this quite yet, Windows has been doing the auto update thing for some time [trim]

For the OS, sure. But I mean the OS should offer services which help applications update themselves. MacOS provides this for Apple's apps but I've yet to see and 3rd party apps use it. Windows likewise doesn't offer this as a service for 3rd party apps. At the moment, while many apps to auto-update they each do it differently which means no solution is being tested as deeply as it should be. I'm not talking about user testing here, but testing with regard to security for example.

As a user I want one place where I can update everything (and I want it to take care of itself), I don't want to have each app doing it it's own way.

Linux can do this, but the mainstream OS's can't to the best of my knowledge.

--Pete

How much trouble he avoids who does not look to see what his neighbour says or does or thinks, but only to what he does himself, that it may be just and pure. - Marcus Aurelius, 121 - 180

Peter Bagnall - http://people.surfaceeffect.com/pete/

Peter Bagnall:

As a user I want one place where I can update everything (and I want it to take care of itself), I don't want to have each app doing it it's own way.

There are certain technical and legal barriers.

There's no amount of contractual cover the OS vendor can have third parties sign that could mitigate the adverse reaction towards the OS vendor that users will inevitably have should problems arise as a result of auto-updates. As the sole conduit, the OS vendor will ultimately be seen as the responsible party (by users). To protect against abuse or negligence by its partners, the OS vendor would have to institute OS-wide DRM-like measures/digital signatures/managed code to maintain the integrity of the whole process. There's also the issue of updating/overwriting shared libraries/resources, forced rebooting, kernel-level stability, timely patch tracking/management, etc for literally thousands of third parties. It's a lot of headaches.

Ziya Nullius in Verba

I believe Nielsen is entirely inaccurate when he says, in effect: "adding explicit site structure in the browser would free users from bad sites and that Opera already has this feature."

I have two things to say to this. One, it's currently not possible to implement this feature in today's browser as he implies it. Two, Opera doesn't have a feature that frees users from "bad sites".

With so much discussion on the usefulness of this feature, it surprises me that no one noticed this little implementation detail. Marcin Wichary came close but not far enough to join the dots. Perhaps because the Navigation bar in Opera is a little used. I believe most users would have it disabled in their browser to increase browsing space and because also it's rarely of any use.

Anyway, my point is this - it's not possible for the browser to understand site structure unless the designer wants it to. In Opera, for example, the button leading to a site's homepage, help system and other pages only work if the designer has added link tags for these pages inside the header of each page. If no such tags are present the buttons do not work even if the pages are explicitly named and titled say, as "Home" or "Help".

Nielsen is wrong when he says explicit structure representation is implemented in Opera. "Bad sites" remain bad even in Opera. If a designer does add link tags, I'd call him/her an exceptionally aware designer. I'd not expect his site to be poorly designed. Only a miniscule percentage of designers use link tags. It's not consistently implemented even on nngroup.com. Only one of the 13 buttons remain active only on some of the pages. Even on Useit.com 6 of the 13 buttons do not work including search, glossary and help.

Nielsen is wrong again when he implies that such a representation is possible to implement in today's browsers. For this to be possible without help from the designer, the browser would have to decide the site structure on its own. Perhaps much like a search engine - from directory structure, labels, page titles and keywords. Links at at the bottom of the page? Are they always there? Are they correctly labelled? What if there are two dozen of them? Remember we are talking about "bad sites" here which, by definition do not follow standards. Even well designed sites often have unique ways of doing things.

Take directory structure. How should the browser decide, for example, whether the homepage for http://subdomain.domain.com/section/page.html is http://subdomain.domain.com/ or http://domain.com/? Or that when the user clicks the home button on the location
http://kinja.com/favorites/guys he wants to go to http://kinja.com/user/guys and not http://kinja.com/ ? What about student homepages on university sites such as http://mrl.nyu.edu/~alex/ and geocities homepages such as
http://www.geocities.com/Nashville/6555/ ?

The 13 Opera buttons are based on the "link element" as defined by the W3C. This is perfect example of a bad standard. The different link types described clearly indicate where they originated and how inapplicable they are on the web. These are: Start, Next, Prev, Contents, Index, Glossary, Copyright, Chapter, Section, Subsection, Appendix, Help, Bookmark. The thirteen Opera buttons are: Home, Index, Contents, Search, Glossary, Help, First, Previous, Next, Last, Up, Copyright and Author.

Contents? Where should that lead... to sitemap? Do "bad sites" have those? What about index? And Last? Previous and Next? Do individual webpages have previous/next pages? What's next if you're reading about shipping costs on a shopping site? And whose previous/next page do they mean...the designer's or the user's?

In view of all the above, the question whether even well labelled buttons if implemented, will be deemed useful by a user remains a purely hypothetical one. Unless one can demonstrate how such buttons would be implemented in a browser, to be of any use on a "bad site".

Also want to add that despite this, overall I found Nielsen's piece to be pretty good. Although much of the criticism that we heap upon him is justified as well, I think most of us cling on to it and ignore everything else.

And oh, my theory why his own site is so poorly designed, even when nngroup.com fares far better — I believe it is intended to be visually offensive [though only so long as it doesn't affect usability]. It's an individual expression of his revolt against those who put aesthetics above everything else. Remember the graphic designers who ruled "web design" from 1996-99. They came with background in print advertising and thought knew exactly what design was.

Manu Sharma
http://orangehues.com/blog/

Manu wrote:

Anyway, my point is this - it's not possible for the browser to understand site structure unless the designer wants it to. In Opera, for example, the button leading to a site's homepage, help system and other pages only work if the designer has added link tags for these pages inside the header of each page.

Well put. I think it's safe to say Jakobs ideas are too far removed from the reality of designing large websites that even if there was a effort to put his ideas into effect only a couple could be implimented.

In short adding buttons to a web browser will not make an usable site usable. It will never free people from bad design but could hinder good design. It adds another level to the process and leads to a fragmented user experience - which is ultimately bad. After all when we design sites we design them as if the back button was missing, or at least I find myself thinking that way (note it needs to still work!).

Stew Dean

If no such tags are present the
buttons do not work even if the pages are explicitly named and titled say, as "Home" or "Help". Nielsen is wrong when he says explicit structure representation is implemented in Opera. "Bad sites" remain bad even in Opera. If a designer does add link tags, I'd call him/her an exceptionally aware designer. I'd not expect his site to be poorly designed. Only a miniscule percentage of designers use link tags. It's not consistently implemented even on nngroup.com. Only one of the 13 buttons remain active only on some of the pages. Even on Useit.com 6 of the 13 buttons [trim]

Andrei writes:

<<How many companies now design for Windows and/or IE only after the equalizing force of the "web"?

Far and away too many. :-(

Elizabeth
—
Elizabeth Buie
Computer Sciences Corporation
Rockville, Maryland, USA
+1.301.921.3326

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David Heller writes:

Design is the solution to bad design.

May I rephrase that?

"Good design is the solution to bad design."

For some odd reason, I get the impression that "designers" think that all design they do is good design.

Elizabeth

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Computer Sciences Corporation
Rockville, Maryland, USA
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Elizabeth

"For some odd reason, I get the impression that "designers" think that all design they do is good design."

No you have it all wrong! Us designers think that our work is bad but other designs are worse ; ) —Coryndon Original Message From: "Elizabeth Buie" ebuie at csc.com Subject: Re: [ID Discuss] You decide Sent: 05 Jan 2005 14:20:54 David Heller writes: Design is the solution to bad design. May I rephrase that? "Good design is the solution to bad design." For some odd reason, I get the impression that "designers" think that all design they do is good design. Elizabeth — Elizabeth Buie Computer Sciences Corporation Rockville, Maryland, USA +1.301.921.3326 This is a PRIVATE message. [trim]

Coryndon writes:

Us designers think that our work is bad but other designs are worse ; )

Ah, is that it...

That explains a lot. :-)

Elizabeth, enlightened
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Any insight into why they have open sourced Lazslo? (Other than the usual reasons.)

I suspect it was a combination of factors. Macromedia has been throwing a significant amount of their weight behind Flex, at essentially the same pricepoint as the Laszlo product.

We were evaluating Flex, Laszlo and ULC as rich client technologies, and when it came down to Flex vs Laszlo, they were more or less equivalent, despite the slight variations in technology (despite the fact that Laszlo renders to Flash 5 which they considered a plus, but IMO is a big minus for a numer of reasons.)

The question for me came down to whether or not we would want to put our eggs into the basket of a small company devoting much of their resources to their consultation practice, or that of a public company with a lot to lose if their technology fails. I didn't personally want to wager on that. I imagine equivalent dialogs were happening at any company investigating rich client alternatives. I don't know if that qualifies as one of the "usual reasons."

At the time of our evaluation, I was convinced that the best thing that could happen to Laszlo was open sourcing. I think it was a brilliant move, and hopefully will result in a really positive evolution of their technology. I am especially excited about their roadmap item: "Alternative Runtimes." From the openlaszlo.org site: "Client runtimes under active consideration are the JVM virtual machine and the .NET CLR."

-Clay

Quoth Manu Sharma:
"[...] it's not possible for the browser to understand site structure unless the designer wants it to. [...] we are talking about "bad sites" here which, by definition do not follow standards."

This is the heart of the matter, and cleanly illustrates the fundamental flaw in Jakob's "solution." I find these types of blanket proposals deeply troubling on many levels, not the least of which is the blind credence afforded to Mr. Neilsen's every proclamation by much of the general usability community. (Not to say he doesn't have good ideas, however.)

The Web browser, by it's very nature as a container, should impose as few restrictions on its contents as possible. Sure, it wasn't originally intended to host dynamic content and rich, state-dependent applications. Neither were telephone lines intended to transmit data, microwave energy to cook food, or lasers to read binary data from a plastic disk. The current limitations of the browser shouldn't simply be accepted, and should be by no means augmented. It should be our job as designers to continually push our technology beyond it's limitations -- and usability should foster innovation, not impede it. My days consist of design, usability, and development. These functions do not need to be in conflict unless we allow them to be. The Great Design/Usability Divide, as is evident in many of these debates, is the enemy of innovation and, in the end, the enemy of The User.

"free users from slavery to individual site designs?" Statements like these coming from a Usability Guru should make all of us - designers and usability specialists alike - run away screaming like little girls.

Manu Sharma:
"And oh, my theory why his own site is so poorly designed, even when nngroup.com fares far better — I believe it is intended to be visually offensive [though only so long as it doesn't affect usability]. It's an individual expression of his revolt against those who put aesthetics above everything else."

Hm... Sounds like cutting off one's nose to spite one's face, eh?

-- Sylvania

"All generalisations are false." — H.D. Thoreau

Clay Newton:

I am especially excited about their roadmap item: "Alternative Runtimes." From the openlaszlo.org site: "Client runtimes under active consideration are the JVM virtual machine and the .NET CLR."

Yes, as you may know, Macromedia is saying exactly the same thing.

Ziya Nullius in Verba

Sylvania:
"The Web browser, by it's very nature as a container, should impose as few restrictions on its contents as possible. Sure, it wasn't originally intended to host dynamic content and rich, state-dependent applications. Neither were telephone lines intended to transmit data, microwave energy to cook food, or lasers to read binary data from a plastic disk. The current limitations of the browser shouldn't simply be accepted, and should be by no means augmented."

Well said. Although all metaphors are limiting but I'd rather view the browser as a gateway than a container. If you must think of it as a container then consider it the kitchen instead of an appliance. There you have the meats drawer, the microwave, the egg container, an egg boiler with a timed setting you can enter the night before, you have the freezer AND the auto-thawer, the meat cleaver to chop up your steaks based on knowing that your dinner menu is going to be stir-fry for the week.

Basically everything you need to do in the Kitchen. This may not be a reality yet but there are all indications it might soon be. Hey, Joel even talked about the possibility of seeing Photoshop inside Firefox!

http://www.salon.com/tech /feature /2004 /12 /09 /spolsky /index4.html

Me: "It's an individual expression of his revolt against those who put aesthetics above everything else."

Sylvania:
"Hm... Sounds like cutting off one's nose to spite one's face, eh?"

Well, I'd say more like swinging the pendulum to the other extreme.

Manu. http://orangehues.com/blog/

On Jan 5, 2005, at 1:41 PM, Manu Sharma wrote:

Well said. Although all metaphors are limiting but I'd rather view the browser as a gateway than a container. If you must think of it as a container then consider it the kitchen instead of an appliance. There you have the meats drawer, the microwave, the egg container, an egg boiler with a timed setting you can enter the night before, you have the freezer AND the auto-thawer, the meat cleaver to chop up your steaks based on knowing that your dinner menu is going to be stir-fry for the week. Basically everything you need to do in the [trim]

Even if you could pull that off, which seems to me to be somewhat of a pointless exercise, why on earth would would want to basically re-invent the wheel? By the time you finally do get a browser to be able to pull these feats of fancy, guess what? You'd have basically re-invented everything you would need with an OS. Wait! We already have operating systems that we can build applications with and have had for more than a few decades now.

The logic in this sort of statement or thinking with regard to software and application design simply confounds me. I remember someone telling me they could write Photoshop with HTML and web technologies back in 1998. I simply keep asking myself, why on earth would you waste the time even bothering?

To follow through on my metaphor, the browser is not the kitchen. At best, it's an appliance in the kitchen. To think otherwise is simply impractical.

Andrei

Manu Sharma:

Well, I'd say more like swinging the pendulum to the other extreme.

Or like swinging a guillotine and standing in its way.

I have yet to meet a client who'd want to design their site just like Nielsen's.

Oh, but he's not a designer, you might say.

'Nuff said.

Ziya Nullius in Verba

Ziya: I have yet to meet a client who'd want to design their site just like Nielsen's.

Of course, no one would. But won't it be fair to say his site design hasn't hampered his popularity with your clients? Clients, who are more likely to visit his corporate site than pore through his alertbox pronouncements.

Nngroup.com shows that he is not averse to websites that look nice and follow conventions.

Just like those designer websites with their artistic expressions that serve no purpose and are horrible to use, Useit.com is perhaps Nielsen's personal statement on design [in the visual sense] for the sake of it.

But I'm only guessing. There was something in his book Designing Web Usability that sparked this thought. Can't remember now what it was.

Manu Sharma
http://orangehues.com/blog

[Sorry, but I couldn't trim my own response.]

Nathan

On Jan 5, 2005, at 3:27 PM, Manu Sharma wrote:

Nngroup.com shows that he is not averse to websites that look nice and follow conventions.

You just lost me.

Andrei

On Jan 5, 2005, at 3:27 PM, Manu Sharma wrote: Nngroup.com shows that he is not averse to websites that look nice

and
follow conventions. You just lost me. Andrei

Useit.com doesn't follow popular navigation conventions. It's also been called an "ugly" site. My point was, Nielsen's corporate website isn't anything like his personal site. So there's perhaps a reason why Useit.com is still designed the way it is.

Manu.

Manu Sharma:

But won't it be fair to say his site design hasn't hampered his popularity with your clients?

People who are satisfied with his design direction usually aren't my clients. In fact, some of my clients have been those who were left wanting after having tried the Usability McNugget approach. As I have said before, what I resent is having to clean up those McNuggets after the Usability party is over.

Do people actually hire him for design these days?

Ziya Nullius in Verba

Andrei Herasimchuk:

Nngroup.com shows that he is not averse to websites that look nice and follow conventions. You just lost me.

What, were you expecting pretty pictures, zany
animations, attractive color schemes, innovative
functionalities, and expansive modalities?

Ziya Nullius in Verba

Nngroup.com shows that he is not averse to websites that look nice and follow conventions. You just lost me.

I also am lost. http://www.nngroup.com/ doesn't follow conventions, doesn't look good, and is poorly coded.

Try this fun excercise:
Go to http://www.nngroup.com/ and click on each of the top tabs. Watch in amazement as the font sizes change, layout changes, page title styles change, etc. How many of Jakob's edicts does his own site violate?

If you see this and still want to hire NN/G, go ahead and click "Contact Us" in the standard location.

Nathan Vincent Nathan_Vincent at infosys.com a écrit :

- The hands-down, nuttiest thing that Dr. Jac wrote about, was screen

sizes. Exactly why are screen sizes gonna get sooo huge in the future? Magazine sizes generally fall within a pretty standard range, and haven't changed significantly over a bunch of years. Why will computer monitors balloon uncontrollably, Violet Beauregard-style, until they are sooo big that we can just about see the entire internet on them if we squint? Where are these huge screens gonna sit? In the future, is Average Joe gonna come home from a hard day at the office, using Microsoft Word on his 27" monitor to file his TPS Reports? Or is there actually a practical limit to the size of the screen that people need to work with?
Nathan

Magazines are small, yes, hardcover books are smaller, paperback books are smaller still. But all of them have a higher resolution than the best mass market monitor. And printed maps are way bigger than all of them put together while still having superior high resolution. All of these sizes are practical in society becasue they have created their own niches over the centuries, and at first people will be asking for equivalent formats in digital displays of equal resolution.

It's both a question of resolution and size, with boundaries set by ergonomics and by existing culture limitations like architectural customs and automative construction practices.

The first books printed in the 16th century were monster things based on newspaper sized broadsheet printing. Our present hardback book formats were dictated by the size of saddlebags in the 17th century. Our present paperbacks have a format set by the size of men's biggest pockets at the end of the 19th century. The capacity to cast and use finer print also was important.

We are going towards bigger and bigger monitors with higher resolution but we are also going, at the same time, towards small displays with high resolution. The biggest monitor sizes will be determined by the average wall space available in offices and homes, just like the current range of whiteboard sizes or digital plotter paper sizes are determined by spaces available on cubicle wals or meeting room walls.

The interesting question to ask is what are the limits to the smallest monitor sizes, and what new small size formats are going to become popular?

Think you have problems designing Web pages that work equally well for 800 by 600 pixel settings and 1600 by 1200 pixel settings?

Just wait till OLED screens the size of whiteboards (several ranges of sizes mind you!) come onto the market while at the same time newer, high resolution, but slightly smaller slate computers fill every backpack and attache case and appear on the seatbacks of every SUV and minivan.

Alain Vaillancourt

Lèche-vitrine ou lèche-écran ?
magasinage.yahoo.ca

Alain Vaillancourt said:
It's both a question of resolution and size, with boundaries set by ergonomics and by existing culture limitations like architectural customs and automative construction practices...

Think you have problems designing Web pages that work equally well for 800 by 600 pixel settings and 1600 by 1200 pixel settings?

High resolution screens may make it easier to read from a screen, but there will always be a limit to the size of screen that I can be expected to either hold or put in front me on a desk. The larger the screen, the further away from it I must be to take it all in (at least until screens stop emiting so much light light I certainly don't want to be surrounded by a large screen: the headaches!)

I doubt very much that the average office user will ever have a screen larger than 21 inches sitting on his desk. What will change is the resolution of that screen, and web designers will need to shift from pixel measurements to proportional measurements.

The problem is not that you need a design to work well for 800x600 and 1600x1200 but that we are still thinking in pixels. Hopefully SVG will one day be more widespread and "scalable" wed designs with vector graphics will rule a world of high resolution screens.

Jachin Sheehy

Jonathan Grubb:

If you see this and still want to hire NN/G, go ahead and click "Contact Us" in the standard location.

First, if you don't have their phone number tattooed to your forehead, you're neither worthy nor a potential client.

Second, to "free users from slavery to individual site designs, " especially such "bad designs, " just use your "Contact Us" dedicated browser button.

Ziya Nullius in Verba

Magazine sizes generally fall within a pretty standard range, and haven't changed significantly over a bunch of years. Why will computer monitors balloon uncontrollably (...)

But they do, don't they? I'd like to see some data/charts myself, but, as an example, the original Macintosh from 1984 had a 9" screen (and before that, people worked with Osbornes and their stamp-sized 5" displays), the first iMac from 1998 had a 15-incher, and the current offerings sport 17" or 20" LCDs, without any obvious intentions to stop growing.

Marcin Wichary
e:\ mwichary at usability.pl
w:\ www.aci.com.pl/mwichary Attached
w:\ www.aci.com.pl/mwichary/gui Graphical User Interface gallery w:\ www.10yearsofbeingboring.com 10 years of Being Boring w:\ www.usability.pl Usability.pl

Elizabeth Buie ebuie at csc.com wrote:
David Heller writes: Design is the solution to bad design. May I rephrase that? "Good design is the solution to bad design." For some odd reason, I get the impression that "designers" think that all design they do is good design.

Had they known it already that its bad, they wouldnt have done it... Everyone tries to do his/her best. So I'd still support David on : " Design is the solution to Bad Design " , which means a redo, and then evaluate, if its bad then loop back by following the same rule. -- Abhishek Thakkar
The Last of the giants

Abhishek Thakkar:

Had they known it already that its bad, they wouldnt have done it...

Isn't that why God created "Usability Professionals"?

Ziya Nullius in Verba

Marcin Wichary mwichary at aci.com.pl a écrit :

as an example, the original Macintosh from 1984 had a 9" screen (and before that, people worked with Osbornes and their stamp-sized 5" displays), the first iMac from 1998 had a 15-incher, and the current offerings sport 17" or 20" LCDs, without any obvious intentions to stop growing.

Right! And there is also a nearly perfect constant growth in the resolution and number of pixels available, and the resolution and number of pixels actually set by users. The resolution used and actually available are two different things. Both are slowly but constantly growing.

However there has been a slight decrease (as somebody else has pointed out) in the average of diagonal screen size measurement, probably due to the introduction of LCD monitors and their different framing calculation for the same number of pixels. Once this transition is over the mean diagonal size will go on increasing till there is no more room to hang a monitor (or multiple monitors)underneath a cubicle's overhead bins (for the smaller ones) or no bare inch left on the remaining meeting room walls.

I wish I could be as optimistic as Jachin Sheehy about Scalable Vector Graphics, or about those scalable icons from Apple (and quite a few others) that are in "the vanguard" as somebody else pointed out.

But while objects or sections in a window or screen can be made scalable, there is no guarantee that the interactive experience of the whole can be automatically scalable up and/or down. I am afraid that each time a bigger (or smaller) format is rolled out we will have to turn to temperemental designers like Ziya (wink, wink) to fine tune things once again, or even start form scratch.

Alain Vaillancourt

Lèche-vitrine ou lèche-écran ?
magasinage.yahoo.ca

Nielsen:
"...free users from slavery to individual site designs?"

Manu Sharma:
"And oh, my theory why his own site is so poorly designed... I believe it is intended to be visually offensive [though only so long as it doesn't affect usability]. It's an individual expression of his revolt against those who put aesthetics above everything else."

From Monty Python's Life of Brian:

JPF Member: "We will fight the oppressors for your right to have babies, brother, er, sister!"
Reg: "What's the point?!"
JPF Member: "Eh?"
Reg: "What's the point of fighting for his right to have babies when he can't have babies?!"
JPF Member: "It's symbolic of our struggle against oppression." Reg: (aside) "It's symbolic of his struggle against reality"

Oddly enough, the Life of Brian seems often relevant to our field.

I recently made a mistake calling a branch of SIGCHI CHISIG or vice versa and was severely chastised by the local group.

What a surreal Monty Python start to the year.

Carl

Does it go something like this?

BRIAN:
Are you the Judean People's Front?
REG: Judean People's Front.
JUDITH:
Splitters
REG: Judean People's Front. We're the People's Front of Judea! Judean People's Front.

Carl: Are you SIGCHI local branch?

Person X:
SIGCHI. Splitters!

Carl: What?

Person X:
SIGCHI. We're the CHISIG!
Original Message
From: discuss-interactiondesigners.com-bounces at lists.interactiondesigners.com [mailto:discuss-interactiondesigners.com-bounces at lists.interactiondesigners. com] On Behalf Of Ben Hunt
Sent: 06 January 2005 15:53
To: 'IxD'
Subject: RE: [ID Discuss] You decide

Nielsen:
"...free users from slavery to individual site designs?"

Manu Sharma:
"And oh, my theory why his own site is so poorly designed... I believe it is intended to be visually offensive [though only so long as it doesn't affect usability]. It's an individual expression of his revolt against those who put aesthetics above everything else."

From Monty Python's Life of Brian:

JPF Member: "We will fight the oppressors for your right to have babies, brother, er, sister!"
Reg: "What's the point?!"
JPF Member: "Eh?"
Reg: "What's the point of fighting for his right to have babies when he can't have babies?!"
JPF Member: "It's symbolic of our struggle against oppression." Reg: (aside) "It's symbolic of his struggle against reality"

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Alain D. M. G. Vaillancourt:

about those scalable icons from Apple

As gorgeous as they are to look at, those icons from Apple are anything but scalable: they are still bitmaps albeit smoothly scaled down from a max of 128x128 px by the OS automatically.

Now, Apple has the technology and the relevant patents to offer a scalable UI on OS X, but being able to scale OS widgets is not the same as having the entire user experience scalable smoothly. Two cheers for wavelets? Perhaps not yet.

Ziya Nullius in Verba

As gorgeous as they are to look at, those icons from Apple are anything but scalable: they are still bitmaps albeit smoothly scaled down from a max of 128x128 px by the OS automatically. Now, Apple has the technology and the relevant patents to offer a scalable UI on OS X, but being able to scale OS widgets is not the same as having the entire user experience scalable smoothly.

What if the resolution of the icons and widgets was 256x256 (as it's rumoured to be in both Longhorn and Tiger)? 512x512? 4096x4096...? Wouldn't icons with good enough granularity constitute a UI that is (perceived) scalable? After all, there are practical limits to both resolution of the display and maximum size of widgets.

Or maybe I still can't get over those awful vector icons in SGI Irix. : )

Marcin Wichary
e:\ mwichary at usability.pl
w:\ www.aci.com.pl/mwichary Attached
w:\ www.aci.com.pl/mwichary/gui Graphical User Interface gallery w:\ www.10yearsofbeingboring.com 10 years of Being Boring w:\ www.usability.pl Usability.pl

Marcin Wichary:

Wouldn't icons with good enough granularity constitute a UI that is (perceived) scalable? After all, there are practical limits to both resolution of the display and maximum size of widgets.

Two immediate issues:

How do you practically make 4K icons in bitmaps?

One of the implicit advantages in 'scalable' UIs is that you can zoom into them. While a 512x512 px icon may look fine on even the largest monitors we have today, what happens when you start arbitrarily zooming into the UI?

Also remember a typical monitor screen today contains not just icons and other OS widgets, but also bitmap images and artifacts which won't be scalable.

(But then again I might be pondering issues above my pay grade, in the restricted domain of Usability Professionals.)

Ziya Nullius in Verba

On Thu, 06 Jan 2005 14:18:40 -0500, Listera listera at rcn.com wrote: How do you practically make 4K icons in bitmaps?

I'm not sure about icons, but I suspect that some, if not all, of Apple's UI widgets are already vector art, which could be rendered handily at any scale. I suspect this, because I've seen the high-res versions of their software that Apple provides for print production. For example:

http://www.apple.com/pr/products/macosx/macosx.html

Either Apple re-creates their UI as a higher-resolution image, just for press purposes, or they're just generating a new image file from vectors. Anyone on the list have inside information?

d|b

How do you practically make 4K icons in bitmaps?

I'll leave it to progress. Might throw in some mitmapping for good measure.

One of the implicit advantages in 'scalable' UIs is that you can zoom into them. While a 512x512 px icon may look fine on even the largest monitors we have today, what happens when you start arbitrarily zooming into the UI?

True, but I see one issue here: the vector icons also have finite quality. Once zoomed in, they might look just as bad as interpolated bitmaps. I've seen some vector "masters" of Windows XP icons. They weren't particularly attractive after zooming to full screen.

Also remember a typical monitor screen today contains not just icons and other OS widgets, but also bitmap images and artifacts which won't be scalable.

Not sure if I understand it correctly, but I see it more as an argument against zooming than anything else. You'll always have bitmaps in the GUI anyway (photos, movies, etc.).

Anyone knows if Apple's upcoming GUI resolution-independent scaling feature is going to be based purely on bitmaps?

Marcin Wichary
e:\ mwichary at usability.pl
w:\ www.aci.com.pl/mwichary Attached
w:\ www.aci.com.pl/mwichary/gui Graphical User Interface gallery w:\ www.10yearsofbeingboring.com 10 years of Being Boring w:\ www.usability.pl Usability.pl

I'm not sure about icons, but I suspect that some, if not all, of Apple's UI widgets are already vector art, which could be rendered handily at any scale.

My best educated guess is that these are all vectors in-house at Apple (I've seen these print screenshots, and also icons zoomed way past 128x128... for example at Steve's keynotes), but invariably end up as bitmaps on our computers. Actually, it's pretty scary how many Apple applications have their widgets embedded as bitmaps in the resources, instead of relying on system to draw them. (That's why, for example, I have blue buttons in Safari, even though I use the Graphite colour scheme.)

Either Apple re-creates their UI as a higher-resolution image, just for press purposes, or they're just generating a new image file from vectors. Anyone on the list have inside information?

I can only guess (again), but they might be using an experimental version of the GUI scaling feature, fed with vectors or higher resolution bitmaps. Either that or I feel pity for all those interns. : )

Marcin Wichary
e:\ mwichary at usability.pl
w:\ www.aci.com.pl/mwichary Attached
w:\ www.aci.com.pl/mwichary/gui Graphical User Interface gallery w:\ www.10yearsofbeingboring.com 10 years of Being Boring w:\ www.usability.pl Usability.pl

Marcin Wichary:

True, but I see one issue here: the vector icons also have finite quality.

Not sure what you mean here.

Once zoomed in, they might look just as bad as interpolated bitmaps.

That's aesthetical preference. They may look crappy but not because of over-sampling pixelation; they should be smoothly rendered.

The real design problem is: how do you design an icon that looks good both at 40x40 px and at 4,000x4,000 px, bitmap or vector. Likely, you'll be doing many different versions.

I've seen some vector "masters" of Windows XP icons.

'Nuff said.:-)

Ziya Nullius in Verba

Ok I am tired. Can we switch topics!!
There seems to be some threads spawning from this
thread. So lets give those their own subject name, RSS, etc.

Secondly the whole debate about designers versus
usability professionals is a semantic black hole. Its seems that everyone has an experience with one side of the other that was less then satisfactory.

From where I sit I think Steven has been railing on "visual design" of websites where the behavior model and delivery of the content may have been less
considered then it could be. I do not think many of us have qualms with aiding users find information or
builing useful websites.

I like usability research, enjoy understanding paterns of behavior and looking for repeatable best practices. I like this so this information can inform what I am working on as I work on the design of an application. If I have time and budget the we can test. If I don't I depend sometimes on tried and true. If its
something new then we protoype and test with users.

This list for me is about the behavior of software and the design of those behaviors. Some times we do it to make it highly useful, sometimes not.

Usability is in of its self not an end all. At the risk of being sexist I will quote one of my design professors, Gianni Petena who said, "It does not matter if you are sitting on a bed of nails if you are sitting next to the most beautiful woman in the
world". His point was being made in a debate on wether the most important aspect of designing a chair was function and comfort or its eliciting a
visceral/emotional reaction in the mind of the user. There is no right answer to the debate as it depends on context, intention, and many other factors.

Hyperbole from both sides does not aid the discussion!

greg

Gregory Petroff

gpetroff at vizrt.com
+1 212 560 0708 tel
+1 212 560 0709 fax
+1 646 387 2841 mobile

True, but I see one issue here: the vector icons also have finite quality. Not sure what you mean here. Once zoomed in, they might look just as bad as interpolated bitmaps. That's aesthetical preference. They may look crappy but not because of over-sampling pixelation; they should be smoothly rendered.

What I meant is that vector icons have a certain amount of detail, which might be quite low if the default output is 128x128 pixels. Once zoomed in, you might see not-so-smooth fillings, visible joints, coarse curves, lack of detail. What looked from distance like a nice pen is now just a collection of loose shapes, what seemed a 3D ball is just a big red circle, etc. This is not how real-life objects behave when you look at them closer and closer. : )

Marcin Wichary
e:\ mwichary at usability.pl
w:\ www.aci.com.pl/mwichary Attached
w:\ www.aci.com.pl/mwichary/gui Graphical User Interface gallery w:\ www.10yearsofbeingboring.com 10 years of Being Boring w:\ www.usability.pl Usability.pl

Marcin Wichary:

Once zoomed in, you might see not-so-smooth fillings, visible joints, coarse curves, lack of detail.

Yes, that's why type or icon design is so difficult. The designer is essentially working on the look of several scales simultaneously. You can't just work on the largest scale (say, 4K) and hope that it scales well down to 40x40, or vice versa. That's why, given the monitor sizes and resoluton densities we have, I'm not so hopeful of scalable UIs yet.

Ziya Nullius in Verba

b0b d0n:

Abhishek Thakkar: Had they known it already that its bad, they wouldnt have done it... Ziya: Isn't that why God created "Usability Professionals"? How come God missed out on the Microsoft masterpiece's ;-) ??

"But even as we have been approved by God to be entrusted with the Good News, so we speak; not as pleasing men, but God, who tests our hearts."

Ziya Nullius in Verba