WebProNews » Jakob Nielsen

Bad Content Equals Bad Sales

WebProNews Staff — Wed, 16 Apr 2008 18:07:38 +0000

What I like about Jakob Nielsen’s posts most is the grumpy-old-man-ness in the underlying tone. It makes me almost think he’s family. But along with the why-doesn’t-anybody-ever-listen-to-me attitude comes some sage-like advice. This time it’s about how bad content trumps other design flaws in terms of what’s bad for business.

But before that, it’s about elevator buttons:

The curse of working with Don Norman is that half the elevator buttons I see make me angry: Why can’t these guys do what Don told them to do 20 years ago?

Then again, Web designers don’t do what I told them to do 13 years ago, so why am I surprised?

Hmmm. Yes, very Eeyore with a touch of Rabbit.

I have no idea what he’s talking about in terms of elevator buttons, but the gist seems to be that some things have a simple fix. Though the New York Times‘ proclivity toward ambiguous information scents* wafting about its linked invitations was irksome, and a couple of other sites had issues with navigation and category pages, what drew Nielsen’s steely stare the most was general lack of information about a jazz concert.

Lincoln Center’s calendar of events mentioned just the artists, the date, a couple of tools, and a weak call to action. "That’s it. No player biographies, no description of the type of jazz they play, no quotations from reviews, no links to independent reviews, no audio clips so you could actually hear the band," said Rabbit.

Er, Nielsen. The biggest problem is that most likely only jazz-lovers who are already fans of the listed musicians will bother themselves to buy tickets. He predicts Lincoln Center could sell five to ten times as many tickets to casual listeners if only there were a little more information to go on to entice them.

So here, though I’ve teased him, is where we find Nielsen’s strength in providing a concrete example to go along with that now age-old maxim "content is king." Likely, some hear or read that maxim and skirt the edge of it with a vague understanding, and find eventually the trap of creating content for content’s sake—or worse, scraping content from elsewhere—without any real strategic purpose or sense of how exactly they are to produce great content.

Not everybody is Shakespeare, for crying out loud. Nor should they be. On the web, it’s usually not about art anyway, but about digestible, usable information.

But both Nielsen’s Lincoln Center and New York Times examples show how to expand basic content in order to make it more useful to the site visitor. For Lincoln Center, the devil is in the details, or lack thereof. By adding in-depth information about the jazz band and examples of their work, the site designer provides an opportunity for the end-user to be persuaded. But there’s also something subtler at work. If the jazz band (event, product, etc.) you are promoting is worth the time to create in-depth information about, it sends a signal to the visitor that what is promoted is worth checking out.

The same subtlety is at work in creating a good information scent for links. Rather than word the link generically, i.e., "More Products," the user can be coaxed into clicking the link more by providing a clear, concise message. Instead of the next random product, the designer invites the visitor to explore "How to Romance a Cactus" or "Grumpy Old Man Relief."

Get a mention of that last one on Oprah and you won’t need a website. The point is even link text counts as content. Even better, Nielsen has the numbers to back up the idea that content that is lacking can hurt sales.

"Our user testing of product pages shows that people are much more likely to buy when a page answers their questions about its offerings…," he writes. "My guess is that, by adding more information, the site could sell at least 5 times as many tickets to non-fans. In studying the ROI of usability improvements, we sometimes find a sales increase of 1,000% or more. So, adding meaningful content might even make this page a tenbagger for non-fanatical customers."

Anyway, as Eeyore would say, thanks for noticing me.

^{_{*"Information scent" refers to the anchor text used for a link that gives a reader an understanding of where the link will lead them. The New York Times’ anchor text of "Next Article in Business" or "More Articles in Business" didn’t cut it, in Nielsen’s view.}}

Search in the Third Dimension

Gord Hotchkiss — Sat, 12 Jan 2008 17:58:47 +0000

The quote on the home page of SpaceTime is intriguing:

"I think I’ve found a product that makes the Google interface look like it was designed by Apple."
Rob Enderle, Enderle Group.

Now, those are two pretty big names to throw around. But you know what? Based on an initial test drive, SpaceTime just might be up to the challenge. This is a paradigm shift in browsing behavior. When I interviewed Jakob Nielsen last summer, he took Ask to task for calling their interface 3D.

Gord: Like Ask is experimenting with right now with their 3D search. They’re actually breaking it up into 3 columns, and using the right rail and the left rail to show non-web based results.

Jakob: Exactly, except I really want to say that it’s 2 dimensional, it’s not 3 dimensional.

Gord: But that’s what they’re calling it.

Jakob: Yes I know, but that’s a stupid word. I don’t want to give them any credit for that. It’s 2 dimensional. It’s evolutionary in the sense that search results have been 1 dimensional, which is linear, just scroll down the page, and so potentially 2 dimensional (they can call it three but it is two) that is the big step.

Well, SpaceTime attempts to jump the gap to the 3rd dimension by giving web browsing depth as well as heighth and width. Is it successful? Yes and no. But there’s enough "yes" here to significantly change your browsing experience, especially when it comes to searching, and to entice you with what the possibilities might be.

(I tried to get more screenshots, but SpaceTime is a bit of a memory hog, and I didn’t have enough to run SnagIt and SpaceTime as the same time without them both crashing)

Lately I’ve been spending a lot of time writing and talking about how search helps us make decisions where we have to gather and compare alternatives, as in researching an upcoming purchase. This is called satisficing, and search is built to be a natural extension of our working memory. But one of the drawbacks is searches fairly rigid interface. We can usually only see one page at a time. Even the introduction of tabbed browsing, while a step in the right direction, still feels rigid and linear. We pogostick back and forth between pages and the search results. And as I’ve said before, linear is not how humans operate. We’re used to dealing in random ways in 3 dimensional environments. The 20th century squeezed us into a linear, 2 dimension, sequential mode, just because we didn’t have any choice, but the 21st century will be one of navigating within 3 dimensions (and probably 4, as technology allows us the shift timelines to suit our purposes more often) and picking our own random paths through them, berry picking our content. SpaceTime (notice the inclusion of the 4 dimensions in the name) is an interface built to allow this to happen.

Don’t Worry, Be Crappy

Guy Kawasaki always says, when you have something revolutionary, don’t worry, ship it even if it’s crappy. It worked for the Mac. Let’s hope it works for SpaceTime.

Now, to be fair, the SpaceTime interface is far from crappy, it’s a prettty polished piece of work. But if we’re moving into a 3d environment, I want to be able to interact with it in an intuitive way. SpaceTime doesn’t quite allow me to do this yet. I can’t grab and manipulate items in the 3d space. I have to use the buttons and controls SpaceTime provides to go from page to page. But the advantages SpaceTime offers, allowing me to quickly flip from page to page, all the time keeping a visual history of my browsing in a bottom timeline, more than makes up for the pain. This turns pogo sticking into an experience more like spreading options on a table in front of you, allowing you to spot the things that appear to be what you’re looking for. And that’s a big shift from what we’re used to.

In the test drive, I also found that auto loading videos and other rich streaming media seemed to give the SpaceTime interface some hiccups (interrupting the SpaceTime continuum — sorry, couldn’t resist) but I’m sure that’s being worked on. This is version 1.0, after all. Generally, it performed pretty well. In fact, one of my favorite uses was browsing through videos in SpaceTime.

But if we look forward into where things are going, with multitouch displays and surface computing, SpaceTime is the step that’s needed into a much more natural user experience. I’m sure the grab and manipulate options I’m looking for are just a version or two away, waiting for more access to the underlying OS to integrate these features in. But Microsoft or Apple has to let this happen. In fact, once you get used to operating in SpaceTime, going back to 2 dimensions just seems clunky. I’d be amazed if one of the two doesn’t snap SpaceTime up soon. Of course, it could also be that SpaceTime just got out first and there’s something in the Apple or MS labs very similar. I’d love to see a mobile version of SpaceTime on the iPhone!

And this is the cloud on SpaceTime’s horizon. While it’s revolutionary, it can’t survive as a stand alone app. This is something screaming to be incorporated into our online experience, and much as I like it, I probably won’t use it again. It’s great for searching, but rather pointless for standard browsing. Where it shines is when you need to consider a number of alternatives, as in search. It’ll linger at the bottom of my programs list, out of sight and out of mind. I’m too used to my current browsing experience, and the paradigm shift required to use it as my new browser is too great. Without being adopted by a major player, the proverbial 800 pound gorilla, TimeSpace may die on the far side of the Chasm. And that would be too bad, because SpaceTime is all kinds of cool. Let’s hope either it shows up on a MS or Mac interface, or finds a niche it can survive in. Perhaps it’s the next Google acquisition.

Check out SpaceTime. Just one word of advice for them. Dump the autoplay video. It irritates the hell out of me. And is it just me, or does CEO Eddie Bakhash look like Danny Bonaduce?

But I digress.

Comments

Web 2.0 Could Be Bad For Business

WebProNews Staff — Tue, 18 Dec 2007 15:52:19 +0000

Usability expert Jakob Nielsen warns against believing all the Web 2.0 hype when designing with the end-user in mind. While some 2.0 features can help, the majority of sites should focus on mastering the 1.0 aspects that users know and love.

The problem, as Nielsen sees it, is that companies follow too much what the hot trends are, and as a result create sites that are unnecessarily complicated or offer little benefit to the average user.

An Ajax shopping cart, for example, may be abandoned because users don’t know how to work it, which can be "deadly for e-commerce sites."

The general crux of Nielsen’s argument seems to be that the average open-Internet user either isn’t that bright (well, sophisticated might be a better word) or at least has less incentive to appear bright.

Though a couple of sites, like Amazon, have made community features work for them via consumer reviews, Nielsen argues that communities work better for company intranets in general, where there is shared interest, no anonymity, more accountability, and less participation inequality (where only a few contribute while the majority do not).

And then there’s this gem: "Employees are pre-vetted: they’ve been hired and thus presumably have a minimum quality level. In contrast, on the Web, most people are bozos and not worth listening to."

In short, the masses are asses, a law passed down since the days of Aristotle. But he might have a point.

Nielsen also warns against making changes to a business site based on the success of "atypical" Web 2.0 sites. Adding Facebook features, for example, may do little to help the bottom line. "[M]ost of [Facebook's] features are worthless for a B2B site that, say, is trying to sell forklift trucks to 50-year-old warehouse managers."

He recommends, then, focusing on the user-focused basics like clear pricing, product photos, and detailed specs, among others.

This Article Is Too Long

WebProNews Staff — Tue, 13 Nov 2007 20:57:43 +0000

To make a long story short, people naturally prefer short, easy-to-digest articles over long, comprehensive articles, but to get the best literary diet, readers often mix the two and so should you.

If you want to more about this, keep reading. If that’s all you wanted to know, then you’ve already clicked off to some other article.
TLDR (Too Long Didn’t Read) isn’t just a trend, it’s a modern human mantra akin to TFDC (too fast, didn’t chase). Where possible, humans (and all animals, really) remain lazy to conserve energy.

And there being so much content out there, surfers are very selective about what articles in which to invest themselves. Hence the proclivities toward lists and bullet points. To be kind, you would say it’s a protective mechanism against information overload.

Usability expert Jakob Nielsen is much more in-depth about the topic, complete with charts and graphs, mathematical equations, and dietary metaphors. After careful cost/benefit ratio analysis, Nielsen concludes with this:

On the Web, you can offer both short and long treatments within a single hyperspace. Start with overviews and short, simplified pages. Then link to long, in-depth coverage on other pages.

With this approach, you can serve both types of users (or the same user in different stages of the buying process).

And I can serve you by shutting up now and letting you link over to Nielsen’s more complicated explanation.

Say Goodbye To Ye Olde Editorial Process

WebProNews Staff — Tue, 23 Oct 2007 20:54:13 +0000

There may always be a place for paper. This isn’t about that – the likelihood that print is on the verge of extinction – but rather how a new generation of editors and writers present the news in a digital world. The new format for news – there must always be a standard eventually – is evolving, as dinosaurs wheeze and choke.

Say Goodbye To Ye Olde Editorial Process

What’s Formatting?

In print journalism, things are done a certain way, have been for decades. Editors and writers haggle over what’s important, choose an order and a placement for the stories. The Associated Press publishes a book’s worth of guidelines, dictating everything frm abbreviations to punctuation to how numbers are to be presented.

Never begin a sentence with a numeral, spell it out; spell out numbers less than 10.

The structure of an article is also crucial, born from the logistics of wire services and the method by which people read the newspaper.

The most important information goes first; details are filled in later.

This is called the inverted news pyramid. It works on paper because people tend to skim the headlines and the leads (ledes). The rules of writing for print are so numerous that no self-respecting editor, unless he’s memorized the whole of the tradition, is caught without a copy of the AP Stylebook on his desk.

I have a copy – in storage. I work on the Internet, where the rules are changing, and they’re changing because the needs and habits of the audience are changing.

Nobody Ever Asks About The Language — Stephen King

Some rules will be the same, though usability expert Jakob Nielsen acknowledges what all writers have to learn: passive voice sucks. It’s too slow and confusing. Writers should use active voice as often as possible so the reader can run through without tripping.

Following in the crotchety footsteps of William Strunk, Nielsen says:

[I]t’s usually better to write a positive statement ("do X") than a negative statement ("avoid Y"), and it’s almost always horrible to use double negatives ("avoid not doing X").

Nielsen also says beginning a sentence with a numeral is not only acceptable, but preferable to online readers scanning the page. But then he refers to something much more interesting: the information scent.

Information scent refers to the extent to which users can predict what they will find if they pursue a certain path through a website.

The scent is caught within the first 2 to 3 words (the first two to three words), as readers scan information in an F-shaped pattern. It is because of the information scent that Nielsen reverses himself:

Active voice is best for most Web content, but using passive voice can let you front-load important keywords in headings, blurbs, and lead sentences. This enhances scannability and thus SEO effectiveness.

Traditional editors reading this may ask, "For what kind of effectiveness?" This may be a matter judgment, though, and not necessarily a hard and fast rule, but passive voice can help readers find the information scent in the search results, where titles and blurbs or ledes appear.

It depends on the situation, of course. Maybe your initial headline reads "Reindeer mauls Santa Claus," but if you want the information scent to begin with Santa – if optimizing for "Santa" in the SERPs – you might want to rearrange to "Santa Claus mauled by reindeer."

The most important words – "Santa," "Claus," and "mauled" come to the foreground.

Move Over Editors, The Readers Want Your Jobs

It’s not only the language that’s changing, but also the editorial process. Dave Winer, the one who brought us RSS and, arguably, blogging, has been tinkering with the New York Times RSS feed to develop what he calls the New York Times "river."

Winer hasn’t settled yet on the best way to deliver, either by keyword, outline, or chronology, but what he’s developing is definitely a way around the traditional editor’s choice of what’s important. The "river" displays article headlines and blurbs from the Times in text only, organized by the reader’s preference.

Salon co-founder Scott Rosenberg notes how Winer’s river takes the editorial process and ordering right out of the equation:

The reader who looks at Times River and says “this is how I want my news” is a reader who is saying to the Times editors, “Don’t waste all that time figuring out what to tell me you think is important.”

As Winer put it, “They [editors] have a very powerful internal gravity driven by a philosophy that their job is to arrange our thinking.”

At the University of Kentucky’s College of Communications and Information Studies, we often said, "The media doesn’t tell you what to think, just what to think about." This seems to be what Winer is bent on fixing.

There’s a lot more to this, but this is a Web article and most stopped reading 500 words ago. Too bad for them. They’ll miss a link to my Essentials of Font Philosophy article, a bit of a dirge for the serif fonts. (Hint: Only use sans-serif online; it reads faster.)

Hey, Shakespeare! Nobody Cares; Web Writing Tips

WebProNews Staff — Mon, 01 Oct 2007 17:32:42 +0000

Writing for the Web is tricky business because there is no audience more diverse. Writers, especially purist writers (I’m pointing at myself both accusatorily and guiltily), are stubborn, especially ones honed in a print world where the appropriate audience finds you or rejects in distant silence, and writers (secretly) want you to bask in their brilliance.

So why is nobody basking already?

Well, if you made it through my needlessly wordy intro, congratulations, you have more patience than the majority of web readers. The library requires patience; the Web demands speed.

Aye, there’s the rub.

It’s the same for marketers. Like writers, marketers sell ideas with words, but all too often their would-be patrons miss the message for fear of wallowing in a bed of fluff. It’s soft and cushy, but not necessarily productive.

Back in 1997, usability expert Jakob Nielsen’s answer to "How Users Read on the Web" was simply:

"They don’t."

Then why bother writing for it? Well, it’s not so much user don’t read, it’s that they don’t want to, and I’m breaking every rule of web writing as we speak just to illustrate a point that should have been in the first paragraph:

Keep it simple; keep it short; keep it direct.

Nielsen updates this morning, ten years to the day of the revelation that Web readers don’t read, with some advice on introductory text on Web pages, or what he calls "blah-blah text."

When writing that first impression paragraph, writers often focus either too much on dazzling the visitor with prose or providing too much information in an intimidating chunk of text that is likely to be skipped anyway as the user homes in on what they came in search of in the first place.

Those intros, true, serve a specific function in SEO – often what searchers will see in the search results as a description of the contents found on the site. Even then, sorry to disappoint you, they are scanning the words rather quickly.

"Kill the welcome mat and cut to the chase," says Nielsen, curt as always.

That doesn’t mean there shouldn’t be some introductory text, or that it shouldn’t be well written, only that it should be pruned until it’s neatly shaped and says only what it needs to say to be clear – at a glance – what is to follow. If it’s 45 words of fluff, cut it to 25 words of meat.

Include only, says Nielsen:

· What? (What will users find on this page — i.e., what’s its function?)
· Why? (Why should they care — i.e., what’s in it for them?)

And as for me, I’ll go back to my love of words and place them where I dare; I write words for those that love them as much as I do.

If It Looks Like An Ad They Ignore It

WebProNews Staff — Tue, 04 Sep 2007 17:15:25 +0000

If you were specifically looking for the population of the United States, you’d notice the big red numbers in the upper right corner of the US Census Bureau homepage right? Not so fast. A recent eye-tracking study suggests you’ve been trained to ignore things like that.

If It Looks Like An Ad They Ignore It

Editor’s Note: Studies are great and all, but sometimes real-world examples are more powerful. Have you recently redesigned your site and seen drastic results? Let us know how you did that in the comments section.

Usability expert Jakob Nielsen, who’s been studying how people interact with webpages since there were webpages to interact with, follows up on previous explorations to show once again that people not only ignore content that looks like advertising, but need things plainly spelled out for them.

The task was simple enough: find the country’s current population. Nielsen even gave them the website to use. But 86 percent of users failed to find the answer even though it was displayed in large red letters in plain sight.

"Users tend to ignore heavily formatted areas because they look like advertisements. Thus, about 1/3 of users never even saw the Population Clock. However, most people did fixate on this area because it’s not as overly formatted as most promotional features. So, most users saw the Population Clock; they just didn’t use it, even though it contained the exact information they were looking for."

Okay, so a third doesn’t exactly make up 86 percent. Why did the others fail when, in my grandmother’s language, if it was a snake it woulda bit them? There are many reasons, but a large chunk of it, says Nielsen, lies in the language.

Most users scanned the big red number U.S. 302, 781, 150, as of today, but only made it to 302 before skipping off to the search box labeled "Population Finder" or some other area. (Or in one case, a man after my own heart, frustrated with poor site search, said "forget it, I’m going to Google.")

The big red number was labeled "Population Clocks," which isn’t exactly an intuitive label. It sounds more related to time than it does to number of people. It’s a classic case of leveraging core competencies rather than using your strengths. As users didn’t automatically grasp what a population clock was, they skipped it.

The suggestion here then is that a simpler label of "Current US Population" would have worked much better, giving the user what the user expects, which is the end goal.

Andy Beal, editor and Internet marketing consultant for MarketingPilgrim.com has another take on it, which might make sense to you. Users may have taught themselves not just the look and feel of advertising, but also the location of advertising.

"The study demonstrates that it’s not just paid ads users are filtering from web sites, but areas that might contain ads. Web users are conditioned to focus on the main area of a web site, when looking for meaningful information.

"They’ve been taught that the areas to the left or right are typically reserved for navigation or advertisements. As Neilsen suggests, it’s important to make sure important information is located in the area of the web page users expect to find it."

If It Looks Like An Ad, They’re Not Looking At It

WebProNews Staff — Tue, 21 Aug 2007 17:55:35 +0000

Usability expert Jakob Nielsen dropped a few bombshells in his latest Alert Box usability report. Banner blindness isn’t exactly a new topic – everybody knows by now it exists – but the results of this study suggest that ad network placements aren’t worth a warm pitcher of spit.

If It Looks Like An Ad, They’re Not Looking At It

"[Y]ou should bid less for network ads than for customized ads that you place yourself," Nielsen concludes, as nobody’s looking at the advertising network ads anyway.

This was among other conclusions, as well as an admission of secret knowledge – the "if this falls into the wrong hands" type Nielsen’s kept under wraps since 1997 for ethical reasons.

His exposition generate from an eye-tracking study that shows fairly conclusively that Internet users have learned to completely ignore ads on webpage and even real content that looks like an ad.

Nielsen provides video from the study as well, both in 19-seconds of real time and one minute of slow motion – pick the slow-mo one, as the normal speed one is impossible to follow.

In that video, the subject ignored ads altogether, automatically judging them as an impediment to completing the task.

"If users are looking for a quick fact," he writes, "they want to get done and aren’t diverted by banners; and if users are engrossed in a story, they’re not going to look away from the content."

Therefore, advertisers have three options when designing their advertisements, three techniques nearly guaranteed to earn a look in the ad’s direction. (Actually, there are four, but the fourth one is for those lacking some scruples. We’ll get to that later.)

The three most effective ad design elements are:

·    Plain text
·    Faces
·    Cleavage and other "private" body parts

Apply to affected area, as appropriate.

The study mirrors other studies done on the subject, even ones dating back to 1997, which showed, Nielsen begrudgingly admits, that banner ads that mimic computer dialog boxes – with fake exit buttons that take you to the advertiser’s website – were clicked often by users.

Make no mistake though, this creates a negative association with your brand name, as this deceptive method is in the top 3 of the most-hated advertising tricks.

Nielsen didn’t want to tell us, but figured the word would get out eventually. However, he does manage to turn that knowledge into practical advice that stops short of crossing ethical boundaries.

The key takeaway from that is a reversal of the notion that if users don’t fixate on content that looks like advertising, they will give a gander at advertising that looks like content.

Of course, this is fraught for potential for abuse, and violates traditional publisher "church and state" separation of ads and content. And reputable outfits don’t allow ad insertions that match their templates.

"But, to maximize fixations, that’s exactly what you should do in a Web ad." Judging whether a particular ad crosses the ethical line may one day decided by a tribunal like the one that decides on human experiments, but until then, it may remain a gray area.

Given the blindness to things that look like ads, though, Nielsen recommends away from building ad networks.

Will The SERP Be Reinvented?

WebProNews Staff — Mon, 16 Jul 2007 21:21:45 +0000

The search engine results page (SERP) has been largely the same for the past decade. But Google’s foray into Universal Search and Ask.com’s recent unleashing of 3D search have people wondering if we’re in for a new era, a new look.

Enquiro’s Gord Hotchkiss chatted with usability guru Jakob Nielsen about this very topic and the result is a long, doubtful, and somewhat dry exposition on the future of the SERP. I’ve suffered through it just for you to find the highlights. You can thank me later.

Just a little kidding, there.

Nielsen is famous for his preference for simplicity and leaving well-enough alone, arguing that it serves the end-user better. So asking him about how much a Web interface will or should change, seems a bit, well, counterproductive. Forecasting requires a little optimism, even wild idealism at times, neither of which seem to be Nielsen’s strong suit.

Regardless, he has a lot to say on the matter, and I think he may be right about much of it, especially since Gord’s questions centered on what happens within the next three years. Nielsen think reinventing the SERP is like reinventing the wheel.

A Behavioral Shift

In the past decade, SERPs have switched from "an information retrieval oriented relevance ranking" to "a popularity relevance ranking," with a strong dependency on the number of links a source gets.

"I think there is a tendency now for a lot of not very useful results to be dredged up that happen to be very popular, like Wikipedia and various blogs," he said and, in my imagination, wiped his eye with his middle finger.

"…. So I think that with counting links and all of that, there may be a change and we may go into a more behavioral judgment as to which sites actually solve people’s problems, and they will tend to be more highly ranked."

Personal Problems

Many have said that personalization will solve relevancy problems in the future, with each individual user dictating what kind of results he or she wants to a learning machine. Nielsen doesn’t think that will happen within this decade, or even the next.

"All this stuff..all this talk about personalization, that is incredibly hard to do. Partly because it’s not just personalization, based on a user model, which is hard enough already. You have to guess that this person prefers this style of content and so on. But furthermore, you have to guess as to what this person’s “in this minute” interest is and that is almost impossible to do. I’m not too optimistic on the ability to do that.

And as for relying on people to tweak an engine to their preferences to make them better, Nielsen harkens back to sliders and other modifiers of search engine past that required too much work on the user side.

"So people are inherently lazy and don’t want to exert themselves. Picking from a set of choices is one of the least effortful interaction styles, which is why this point and click interaction in general seems to work very well."

Agreed. People are lazy, selfish little monkeys. (The above is taken a little out of context, so be sure, if you’re interested, in reading all of Nielsen’s statement about evolutionary development and the role of laziness in it.)

Navigating the Obstacle Course

One of the favorite difference people like to cite for Google’s success is its clean, simple interface. Text advertisements are a testament to this as well, as the problem of "banner blindness" was largely eradicated in the SERPs.

Hotchkiss mentions Marissa Mayer’s rather spooky avoidance of the question about whether banner ads would be reinstituted at Google. But we’ll be optimistic and assume that won’t happen.

But we wonder, if images and videos and news and clutter start showing up on Google’s clean interface, will another instance of banner blindness occur. Only if they’re deemed irrelevant, says Nielsen.

"Images turn out to be repelling if people start feeling like they are irrelevant. It’s a similar effect to banner blindness. If there’s any type of design element that people start perceiving as being irrelevant to their needs, then they will start to avoid that design element."

Jakob Nielsen Hates Blog Posts, Comments

WebProNews Staff — Mon, 09 Jul 2007 18:59:32 +0000

Little quick-hit blog posts (should we call them blosts?) and comments left on other blogs don’t do enough to attract truly desirable customers to sites.

While usability expert Nielsen sees blogs as being fine for websites with cheap products for sale, entrepreneurs with serious aspirations should aim for writing longer, higher-quality articles.

He contended that blog posts or comments exist as a commodity, as they are limited in the value they can provide. It is better to write articles of depth and substance, which help attract paying customers.

Those are the people who a business can “own” with relationships that a search engine cannot. Nielsen has decried search for taking value away from content. Google and others can’t take away a relationship.

Nielsen’s observations indicate a way of playing with the perceptions of visitors. Fatter content, preferably of quality, imparts authoritativeness on the site publisher. People think it’s more valuable if the articles span a few paragraphs consistently.

I found it interesting to contrast Nielsen’s position with a content creator who has built a fortune with minimal content, and an eye on human nature. Dilbert creator Scott Adams has mentioned his interest and training in hypnosis several times over the years, and he just wrote a lengthy blog post about it.

Adams noted how he once ran an ad where he offered to hypnotize people into “remembering” their past lives for $20. “We learned you should charge for your service because it makes you more credible and makes the hypnosis easier,” he said.

That seems to be Nielsen’s position as well. Giving away short blog posts and comments may be as ineffective an approach as offering free hypnosis sessions. Maybe that is a good reason to decry blogging and commenting with little depth.