I hate his excessive use of bold. It's like he's encouraging skimming and he doesn't even want people to read carefully. I always feel like a chump when my eyes wander.
I was going to say that his site seems surprisingly badly designed for a usability expert. The jittery typography makes it exhausting to read. And yet maybe it does appeal to some people. Or rather, work on them. There may be a reason all those sites with PROVEN techniques for generating a six figure income all look so similar.
I love the design of useit.com. To me its one of the best designed websites out there. By far. I hate most websites. I also like Hacker News. So im surprised to see you disliking useit. Jittery typography? What would be better? One giant block of uniform text?
See the way essays are presented on paulgraham.com. The limited line width makes it very readable -- if useit.com was reformatted this way, the enormous amount of text would be overwhelming. The main problem with useit is that the way it is presented encourages you to not actually read it. To me, this indicates that there is something wrong with the information, or at least it should be a lot shorter.
He's writing to two audiences at the same time but favoring one over the other. The bold, etc makes it hard for readers to read, but since they are readers, they'll read anyway. If they can't read it, at least they'll skim.
He's writing for the skimmers, which happen to be some very large percentage of web users. But these articles are mainly just loss leaders for his books, full reports, and conferences, which are all media where people give full attention by design.
No, he KNOWS people skim and he puts the bold in to acknowledge it. All of Jakob Nielsen's recommendations are based on testing and measuring those changes that increase client ROI. That's how he defines "useable". He'd rather you skim the bolded parts of the article than just hit the back button because it looked like too much reading.
What the site needs is a de-boldify button that takes the bold away. Only veteran users would ever find such a thing, but those are the users that are most likely to want to read every single word of Nielsen's peerless prose, anyway.
Looks like it's a simple matter of adding:
.maintext strong {
font-weight: normal;
}
to the page CSS. Any Greasemonkey hackers in the house?
Of course, once you press the button you are committing to actually reading the whole article. Don't blame me if you find that you unconsciously preferred the skimmable version.
"If you're a mainstream business site (including government and non-profit sites), your user experience needs are very different than those of the few hot sites that attract all the attention."
This is a great point... If your audience is mainstream, you need to keep it simple. I worked at a job/employment site recently which was doing some cool-ass AJAX UI for the consumer part of the site. The entire product team LOVED it. Usability tests were a disaster. Users were confused and frustrated. The time saved with AJAX was lost when the user had to actually THINK about what to do on the page.
"For website usability, the problem is not whether a specific operation takes 1 second or 10 seconds; people typically perform each operation only once or twice. The problem for websites is the 5-10 minutes users lose when they do something wrong because the site is too complicated. (After such an experience, they usually leave -- and you lose the business.) Simplicity is more important than efficiency for done-once actions."
Of course, if your audience is geeky, go nuts! :-)
While he makes some good points, he also makes some hasty generalizations. You could just as easily have a complicated, poorly designed interface with or without AJAX being involved.
From the article: "Unlike some older technologies (notably, Flash and PDF), Web 2.0 ideas are not inherently bad for users. They can be highly effective; we sometimes see examples of usability-enhancing Web 2.0 designs in our studies."
