NIELSEN: It used to be that the most frequently asked question I got was, “What size screen should I design for?” The answer to the question is “Whoever designs it should work on multiple sizes of screen.” But now the questions are how to get management to pay more attention to the user data, because there’s still a tendency for them to go by their own instincts. And the answer is… you’re going to throw away two thirds of your business if you don’t make it easy to use.
There’s an annoying use of pop-up windows. Pop-ups are multiplying, and they’re polluting my screen. People basically just kill them before they’ve even rendered, because they’ve seen them used so much in advertising.
Fashion should be there in terms of the content, not the design. If you follow fashion too much, you will change all the time, and you will continuously antagonize your users. Interactive design is interactive–people do things there. That’s why big changes feel so uncomfortable to users. Whereas in a magazine, for example, people don’t have to do anything; they just have to read. You can actually make dramatic changes in the layout of a magazine and people will immediately know how to use it.
They wouldn’t all be like Yahoo unless they happened to be directory sites. If each service is trying to achieve different things, that lends itself to different designs. But you’d still see the same underlying principles, which are simplicity and not too much superficial stuff.
Probably both. I believe that what constitutes a good site relates to the core basis of human nature and not to the technology, not to fashion. So in that sense it would be pretty close to constant. It’s sort of like a good book 50 years ago is a good book today. The downside is that we have not yet discovered enough of the principles of interactive design, because it’s still a fairly new field. Book design is like 500 years old. They discovered principles like page numbers and the idea of a table of contents. But when it comes to interactive design, I don’t think we have as much of that list as we have for books.
I think the question is, do you have content that lends itself well to an animated presentation? And often there is. Customer service would be a good example, if you’re showing someone how to repair some equipment. Unfortunately, this is theoretical. Right now, Flash is very rarely being used to actually communicate things. It’s more used for showing off.
CD-ROMs are a good example that just removing the bandwidth barrier does not mean great multimedia. Opening up for high bandwidth and opening up for multimedia in some ways just gives you more rope to hang yourself with.
If you ask me about WAP phones, I would say forget about it. They are so impoverished an environment that I don’t think you can ever make a really good [Web] service. But what you can do is make a service for a pocket-size screen. And I think that’s going to be very common maybe three years from now.
