Interview - Jakob Nielsen, Ph.D.

SP: Do you think good design needs to be sacrificed so that a site is usable? Should the designers even care about the site looking good -- should they concentrate solely on usability like your own personal site (useit.com)?

The overall design of a Website involves at least five different levels of design:

1. Feature design
2. Information architecture (structure design)
3. Interaction design
4. Appearance design (visual design)
5. Content design (writing and sometimes multimedia)

The problem comes when project managers emphasize one type of design to the exclusion of others, or when they drive an approach to design that violates what we know about user needs. Bad usability can come from horribly complex features, bloated graphics, incomprehensible writing, and many other types of design mistakes.

For several years in the late 1990s, I had a major battle on my hands with the dominant style of Web design that emphasized frivolous graphics, content-free writing, features that didn't support users' needs, and an information architecture that mirrored the company's org chart. These Websites didn't even have interaction design in the formal sense, because they followed a television metaphor, trying to make the Internet into a one-way medium, in complete contradiction of its nature.

The distinction between a user-empowering Web and the one-way metaphor was too complicated for some people to understand, so they grasped on to the simpler message of avoiding bloated graphics. Well, bloated graphics are bad, but that doesn't mean that there should be no images or no graphic design -- just that the design should be subservient to users' needs and to the established usability principles that govern the ability of average humans to use the site.

SP: What happens when usability and accessibility collide? Do they both use the same techniques to make the Internet available to all?

The two concepts are highly aligned. The first guideline for accessibility is simplicity, which increases usability for all users. Most of the other accessibility guidelines also help other users, even though some of the things that are essential for a blind user might only be a small improvement for a sighted user. Of course, there are some differences as well, and it is important to recognize that usability is the ultimate goal, also for users with disabilities.

For example, consider the Website for the Federal Government conference called Interagency Disability Educational Awareness Showcase (IDEAS). The conference Website uses the following ALT text for the logo: "Link to home page using the IDEAS logo: two swooshes surround ideas and a sun is rising in the background."

Now what possible benefit would a blind user get from knowing the number of swooshes in the logo? A design with such overly long ALT texts is using the wrong model of accessibility, where the highest priority is to communicate every last bit of information to all users, even when it will diminish their ability to use the site. My approach would be to increase the usability for blind users by writing shorter ALT text that helps them do the things they actually want to do on the site and doesn't get in their way with confusing blather.

SP: What is your view on the current usability of the Internet when accessed by new devices such as PDAs, cell phones, game consoles and Internet Access Devices?

Extremely poor. The New York Times Website, which I otherwise like, takes 18 screenfulls to get to the top headline on my new Danger PDA. Compare with MSNBC: it has a special design that's optimized for mobile and shows the top headline on the very first screenfull. Even this design is not perfect: for example, it spends two lines on wasteful category header that explains that the headlines are "News." Better to simply show more headlines in the tiny space available on the PDA screen.

We need completely new designs for mobile devices, and I haven't seen many good ones yet.