Version F

By Jakob Nielsen, May 1995

This design introduced the use of a coffee cup as the cover illustration for our cover story about HotJava. The page layout was chosen to enable us to replace the cover story every month and just plug in a new lead paragraph and a new cover illustration without having to change the user interface or the main interaction elements on the page.

To make the page look simpler, we got rid of the explicit button boxes around the three secondary stories under What's happening, and it turned out that the use of the bullets and the blue keywords was sufficient to indicate hypertext clickability to the users. Unfortunately, users now did not understand that they could click on "What's happening" itself to get to a longer list of news items.

The main goal of this design iteration was to try out ways of making the design look simpler, more unified, and more approachable. We were running on a very tight development schedule with user tests every second day, so we did not have time to redesign the icons for this iteration. We did try a new globe icon for "Sun on the Net" but it did not work very well. We finally decided that a globe had to be round!