Nielsen Norman GroupEvidence-Based User Experience Research, Training, and Consulting
Hidden features, reduced discoverability, cognitive overhead from dual environments, and reduced power from a single-window UI and low information density. Too bad.
Product quality has to be judged in the context of human tasks, and reviews should emphasize real use—not raw numbers.
Reasonably big monitors have finally become the most common class of desktop computer screen, dethroning the 1024×768 resolution that was long the target for web design.
'Chrome' is the user interface overhead that surrounds user data and web page content. Although chrome obesity can eat half of the available pixels, a reasonable amount enhances usability.
Inconsistent gestures, invisible commands, overlooked warnings, awkward dialog confirmations. But fun to play.
Usability suffers when users type in passwords and the only feedback they get is a row of bullets. Typically, masking passwords doesn't even increase security, but it does cost you business due to login failures.
A study of the benefits of big monitors fails on two accounts: it didn't test realistic tasks, and it didn't test realistic use. Productivity is a key argument for workplace usability, but you must measure it carefully.
Internet scams cannot be thwarted by placing the burden on users to defend themselves at all times. Beleaguered users need protection, and the technology must change to provide this.
The 6 remote controls required for a simple home theater illustrate the problems caused by complexity and inconsistency in user interfaces.
The IT industry is maturing. Hopefully, this maturity will result in a slower introduction of new features, which in turn will let companies focus their attention and resources on making existing technology work better for users.
Tiny text tyrannizes users by dramatically reducing task throughput. IE4 had a great UI that let users easily change font sizes; let's get this design back in the next generation of browsers.
PCs do not need to be commodities: a focus on quality can differentiate both products and services. Software has great potential for getting better, as shown by an under-appreciated feature in Windows XP that can save users $2,000 per year.
Guest column by Don Norman: Designers of DVDs have failed to profit from the lessons of previous media. DVD menu structures are baroque, less usable, less pleasurable, less effective. It is time to take DVD design as seriously as we do web design. The field needs discipline, attention, to the User Experience, and standardization of control and display formats.
Software bugs and system crashes result in huge productivity losses and undermine users' ability to form good models of how computers work. Website designers can help improve user confidence by prioritizing quality and robustness over features and the latest technology.
Mobile Internet access will free us from having to connect appliances to telephone jacks and will make smart devices much easier to install. In fact, they may not need a user interface at all, as exemplified by the Japanese i-pot.
A big lie of computer security is that security improves as password complexity increases. In reality, users simply write down difficult passwords, leaving the system vulnerable. Security is better increased by designing for how people actually behave.
Flash reduces usability for three reasons: it makes bad design more likely, it breaks the Web's fundamental interaction style, and it consumes resources that would be better spent enhancing a site's core value.
Microsoft's .NET strategy is a brilliant counter-move that reduces the Justice Department's proposed penalty to a victory in the previous war. Integrating the user experience at the network level opens the door to new and exciting services while diminishing the importance of traditional isolated websites.
Napster, IE 5 for the Mac, and Yahoo FinanceVision introduce specialized Internet UIs beyond the standard page viewing that had been unchanged since Mosaic.
The basic ideology of the Internet is bit transport; we need a utility-focused human-centered ideology for its fundamental architecture and protocols.
4% of users upgraded to a new version each month in 1998. By 2008, upgrade speeds were only 2%/month. It takes 3 years for 3/4 of users to embrace a new version.
Users continue to type and guess URLs and domain names, so Web usability can be improved by better URLs. In the long term this machine-level addressing scheme must be hidden.
iCab, a web browser introduced in 1999, uses the LINK tags from the page headers to provide additional navigation links to the users. This structural navigation provides a valuable alternative to users.
The Mac interface and its clones must die and be replaced by an Internet Desktop based on explicit quality ratings, micropayments, non-linear authoring, and a scriptable Web.
Advanced functionality requires Internet-enabled client-server software with optimized user interfaces that cannot be delivered in a Web browser. Reserve the Web for hypertext and content features.
Users' bandwidth grows by 50% per year (10% less than Moore's Law). The new law fits data from 1983 to 2010.
Users demand compliance with established design conventions. No site can stand out any more; all are part of a single interwoven user experience; the Web as a whole dictates design
The Java Ring, a piece of jewelry with 6 kilobytes of RAM, represented an early step towards computers that integrate into our physical environment.
Four years of progress in Web browsers have given us more fancy presentation but almost no improvements in helping users navigate the Web and getting the information they need.
CSS promotes site consistency and improved usability if linked (not embedded), centrally designed (not by page authors), and actively evangelized with example-rich style manuals. Respect user preferences.
The telephone is a better metaphor than television for thinking about the Web and its potential: the Web is a 1-to-1, narrowcast, low bandwidth medium that is user-driven and where everybody can publish content.
All usability studies show that fast response times are essential for Web usability: let's believe the data for once! Advice for speeding up sites despite the fact that bandwidth is going down, not up.
Analysis of the usability of WebTV, including user interface guidelines for designing cross-platform Web pages that are considerate of WebTV users
"Data phones" would be more widely adopted if they functioned more like a computer with voice communication, rather than a telephone with data memory.
The file system has been a trusted part of most computers for many years, and will likely continue as such in operating systems for many more. However, several emerging trends in user interfaces indicate that the basic file-system model is inadequate to fully satisfy the needs of new users, despite the flexibility of the underlying code and data structures. Originally published as: 145. Nielsen, J. (1996). The impending demise of file systems. IEEE Software 13, 2 (March).
In the long term we will need about a million times more bandwidth than a T1, as shown by the following list of requirements for the perfect user interface.
Many users of the World Wide Web are unaware of the rich history of the hypertext field, and those who do not understand history are often doomed to repeat it. Case in point, the release of the Java language and the HotJava browser will probably mimic the events that followed the introduction of Hypercard in 1987.
Chapter 8 from Jakob Nielsen's book, Multimedia and Hypertext: The Internet and Beyond, explores a variety of information retrieval strategies for dealing with the ever-increasing volume of information on the internet.
Excerpt from Jakob Nielsen's 1995 book, Multimedia and Hypertext: The Internet and Beyond, offers predictions for the short term (3 to 5 year) and medium term (5 to 10 year) and long term (10 to 20 year) future of hypertext and the internet.
Chapter 3 from Jakob Nielsen's book, Multimedia and Hypertext, describes the major milestones for hypertext, the internet, and the world wide web, including Vannevar Bush's Memex and Doug Engelbart's landmark demo of the online system (NLS.)
Hypertext systems include a Presentation level, a Hypertext Abstract Machine (HAM) level, and a Database level. The following sections describe each of the levels in further detail, starting at the bottom. (Chapter 5 from Jakob Nielsen's book, Multimedia and Hypertext.)
Several new user interface technologies and interaction principles seem to define a new generation of user interfaces that will move off the flat screen and into the physical world to some extent. Many of these next-generation interfaces will not have the user control the computer through commands, but will have the computer adapt the dialogue to the user's needs based on its inferences from observing the user. This article defines twelve dimensions across which future user interfaces may differ from the canonical window systems of today: User focus, the computer's role, interface control, syntax, object visibility, interaction stream, bandwidth, tracking feedback, interface locus, user programming, and software packaging. Nielsen, J. (1993). Noncommand user interfaces. Communications of the ACM 36, 4 (April), 83-99.
This excerpt from Jakob Nielsen's book Usability Engineering describes how users react to different response time delays.
A review of the Macintosh CD-ROM versions of The Manhole, the Time Table of History, and the Electronic Whole Earth Catalog with emphasis on their usability and their support of hypertext navigation. Based on the discussion of these hypertexts the following general principles are found to be useful for analyzing hypertext user interfaces: Navigational dimensions and their explicitness, directionality and literalness, landmarks, locational orientation, history lists, and backtrack mechanisms. Originally published as: Nielsen, J. (1990). Three medium-sized hypertexts on CD-ROM. ACM SIGIR Forum 24, 1, 2-10.