Interview - Jakob Nielsen, Ph.D.

Upon the release of LIFT - Nielsen Norman Group edition (full review here), Mr. Usability himself, Jakob Nielsen agreed to sit down and answer some of the SitePoint Community's burning questions about Web usability.

SP: Where did usability herald from? What are its origins? When did you become involved in the arena? What were you doing before you moved into the field of Usability?

Usability started during World War II, when the Air Force suddenly got a lot of new pilots and noticed that many of its planes crashed because they were too difficult to fly. During the 1950s, Bell Labs pioneered civilian applications. Usability research is the reason Manhattan has area code 212: this was one of the fastest numbers to dial on a rotary phone.

In the 1970s, IBM did some usability work on mainframes, though the leading usability effort in that decade was at Xerox PARC, where many studies were conducted on early versions of the graphical user interface. Apple had a very active usability program in the early 1980s, running frequent user tests on designs for the Apple II, the Lisa, and the Mac.

I personally started working full-time on usability in 1983, though I had been interested in the field for a few years before then, when I was a graduate student. Usability was my first real job, though I had some interesting student jobs -- for example, I was an intern at CERN in 1980, ten years before they invented the Web.

Microsoft didn't start its usability group until 1988, so the initial versions of Word and Excel and even Windows 1 and 2 were designed without usability input. We are still suffering today from some of the bad design decisions made back then. This should be a lesson for anybody who thinks that they can skip usability for the early versions of their designs and add it later.

SP: Some people refer to you as the Father of Usability. Others --designers, in particular -- seem to see you as their arch nemesis. How do you feel about these descriptions -- and about being so controversial?

As usability started before I was born, I can't truly be its Father according to normal biology. I might be the Father of the more narrow fields of Web usability and intranet usability, and I've certainly been heavily engaged in moving the entire field beyond the lab and into the public eye as a driver of the future of technology.

Fighting for humans' rights to be the masters of their own technology might be controversial, but I am not going to give up. When a Website violates usability guidelines, visitors simply leave, so the company has wasted its investment in the design. That's unfortunate, but what's really bad is that every inconsistent user interface element undermines users' ability to form a robust conceptual model that will increase their mastery of the Web as a whole and the other Websites they will visit. Every Website that's difficult to use increases the average person's feeling of being alienated by computers and not in control of their own tools.

Some usability professionals have adopted a truly defeatist attitude of appeasement, saying in effect that "yes, we know that simplicity is best for users but designers should still feel free to ignore known usability principles." Many of the usability books that were published the last two years made a cheap play for popularity by giving up fighting for what's right. I will never surrender. And I don't need to, because usability is winning when seen over the long term. Every year, more Websites comply with a few more percent of the usability guidelines for the simple reason that they work.

SP: How do you think usability has been adopted and implemented? Is the Web, on the whole, more or less usable now than it was a few years ago?

The uptake of usability has been remarkable from any realistic perspective. Less than ten years ago, the predominant approach to Web design was "killer sites" and huge design agencies with weird names got million-dollar contracts to build sites that nobody could use. Today, most Internet executives worry about usability and most of the surviving design agencies do some amount of usability.

On the other hand, we are not nearly where we should be. I avoid driving my wife's new BMW 745i because the controls are too difficult to operate. Most Websites still don't answer users' key questions in simple language up front. And let's not get started on intranets, which are a complete mess in most companies.

It's all a matter of perspective. It annoys me on a personal level to see big Websites from rich companies violate usability principles that have been known since my first studies of Web usability in 1994. Considering that the return on investment from usability is usually around a thousand percent (the gains are ten times the expense), it simply doesn't make sense that so many designs still ship without any user testing, and that so many companies still have no usability staff. I am impatient because I know that things could be so much better and I don't see why people should continue to suffer frustrations from difficult design. But one simply doesn't change the world in ten years, so I really ought to be happy about the substantial progress that has in fact been made.