haha I still have "creating killer websites" in my bookshelf. It was a quick buy, never thought of it to become a classic. Nevertheless - it was such an experience to see websites designed the way the book shows. But, not practical INHO. In my eyes, it was just a replication of print media. If one remembers how coldfusion worked at that time, or, dreamweaver -> some things are clearly borrowed from quark express (DTP software). Like to remember the times, though. And never went the road of designing sites.
Indeed, your statement may be unpopular, but I would laugh this off in a similar manner. After spending reasonable amount of time in my life creating websites, designs (for print and web) with every technology you can imagine - from REX BBS scripts to ES6, SVG and WebGL these days, I can boldly state that these people had absolutely no clue what they been doing on the WEB. Perhaps they were the top designers for print, which was commendable, but web is not print.
They did not understand this new medium, the screen, and the fact you don't have to put all the information on the same page. It was not until 2010 perhaps, when things started to flatten and simplify again, that people actually started doing reasonable web design. Usability was a new thing even in 2005, and Apple with their K-12 interfaces did not help this much, even though certain design decisions on System OSs make a lot of sense. But this was not the web.
Most of what these books teach is how to get the illustrator/coreldaw/quarkr approach and slap it on top of a webpage. How very little people experimented with the widgets already available to them such as pages, buttons, etc, the fact that it can show little, but be navigated. This is the same for cartography, btw, where things move even slower, and we still getting maps overloaded with information like its 1834.
IMHO, and this may be super unpopular, but game designers and game UI designers served as much more substantial inspiration for the web, rather than these early over-hyped designers, which otherwise did great job for posters and print. Some games are so forward-thinking, and so beautiful in the simplicity of their interfaces, that we can really argue most of the world got where gamers (and demosceners!) already have been for years.
There are elements of truth in your comment, but it just seems weirdly derisive. The way the web evolved to where it is now happened in a similar fashion to games, through gradual improvement of the underlying platform and people try to do anything and everything with it before it was formally capable of doing it in a standardized way.
> Most of what these books teach is how to get the illustrator/coreldaw/quarkr approach and slap it on top of a webpage. How very little people experimented with the widgets already available to them such as pages, buttons, etc, the fact that it can show little, but be navigated.
People experimented plenty, but print was the start and ultimately those were the tools available at the time, and they were ahead of what the web was actually capable of. At a certain point, pushing the limits meant figuring out how to make rounded corners without rounded corner support or css, how to load images optimally, or debug. Game devs and porn industry absolutely pushed it past those limits, but also hardware got better, standards evolved. Many barely distinguishable bits of underlying primitive tech powers this website, and many others power YouTube, and Zoom, Gmail. It pretty much took until now to come up with decent design tools that sufficiently deal with designing for the complexity of the web.
I never said it didnt take time to mature, neither did I say standards were okay from day one. but actually some were.
Tables and buttons were working from day one, and there was a lot one could do images also, spacer.gif including, should you understand design enough and the new medium. JS sizing of elements was available very early on, even before CSS was a thing for all I remember. The widgets and controls were more than enough for many apps.
Sorry, didnt want to sound derisive, but these people cited with the books did design without using the medium's potential, because for them all it was - a sceen. And many people have recognized this lack of underrstanding, not only myself. The sad part is these guys who had no clue about the programming side of the web were touted the gurus, while some early web/dev/ux guys were not given air time for not having enough design elements.
Even with all the vaporwave nostalgia, we have to admit many, if not the majority of 90s pages, were over-designed, over-complicated, and overloading the user cognitively. A classmate once blatantly stated - the web is too colorful to me, I get easily lost.
Man, I have ADHD and get easily lost, but am used to all this, but man, was he prepared for it - not at all. Many of these old pages were not even aesthetically nice, due to this over-complexity, and those guys contributed to this initial notion of having to over-complicate the web.
ASCII text clutter on the terminals pales in comparison.
I’m today years old, realizing that Jeffrey Zeldman was 40+ in 1997. I always thought he was kinda just a few years older than us in the early 2000s.
“View Source” of their websites was an educational time well spent. Warning: In some regions, “View Source” may be illegal. Please use it at your own discretion.
Starting my career in the early 2000s, and my design and other Flash Works were on the Internet - Zeldman, Siegel, and a lot of others were the heroes. Nielsen was the villain. By the mid-2000s, I had done extensive work for clinics and physicians, delving into accessibility, HIPAA compliance, and other related areas. By then, Nielsen and the likes became the heroes. :-)
Heh - I have been in many corporate and government environments where the desktop browsers are locked down via centralized policies, and not only is "View Source" disabled/removed, but so are the "Developer tools"...
Another seminal book for me, was Web Pages That Suck. They actually used to throw shade on Creating Killer Web Sites. Lots of big egos, back then.
I learned quite a bit from that book. I think Flanders may still have a site. I was on his mailing list, but I haven’t heard anything for the last decade or so.
Nowadays everything is so optimized and efficient, I've become nostalgic for the days when webpages sometimes sucked. At least they had personality, even if they were hard to use. It's like cars, I like looking at super old old cars in museums and wondering what all those pedals and levers do, even if I'm happy to not drive them.
That book was seminal for me too and is the genesis for where I am today. Flanders' accurate criticism of "mystery meat navigation" was incredibly influential for me and still reverberates in my mind when I think about usability issues.
I remember thinking that “The Google” was onto something, when my friends told me that they were replacing AltaVista with it, as their main search engine.
right, but they could have polluted the google.com page with endless garbage based off of the popularity of search....but they didn't
for example...they could have dropped some links below the search bar to some homegrown sports site they set up...and that would have become the most popular sports site...its hard for most people to resist that
Google's simplicity and clarity became part of the brand. No one else was doing that at the time. Even "efficient" designs were maximalist, so extreme minimalism with a splash of colour was a real innovation.
When AltaVista first appeared its landing page was much sparser than that. Even a year earlier [0] its homepage was pretty sparse and simple. Unfortunately AltaVista got hit with the web portal bug and the site got more bloated. Unfortunately the search also got worse as spammers figured out how to game its search algorithms.
This article put Nielsen in the corner of "technically correct", but the influence he had on me at least was a strong focus on "empirically correct". i.e. doing actual tests (with humans) on what kind of things work to convey information. He did this to the detriment of "looking good", which is why his stuff ended up looking "hopelessly outdated", but I think he was on the right side of the fight.
He did a book ("Designing Web Usability" I think) with an unconventional layout and it clearly hadn't been user-tested as it had a flaw (text too close to the binding) that made it ironically hard to use.
I think he was on point with a lot of stuff, but I've been a bit jaded ever since!
I thought the same thing of his website when he first hit the scene. Great info, but the design was so bad it made it difficult to read. It was quick though, and today’s reader view would have fixed that issue. Being usable doesn’t mean zero design; everything needs to work together.
Yes, to be fair, Nielsen essentially has had the last laugh. Simple navigation, consistency, fast loading times, and ruthless minimalism, and the full Flash intro page is a relic.
The full flash intro page is only a relic because Apple dropped support for Flash. Now, so many designers have a full page video that play, and prevent text from loading until every bit of bloated JavaScript finishing downloading and executing.
My biggest pet peeve these days is a Nav Bar that takes up too much vertical space and follows when I scroll. Usually these are mobile-first designs, but especially on phone when I rotate to view more horizontal content using iPhone 13 I’ve got like two text lines visible!
"Simple navigation, consistency, fast loading times, and ruthless minimalism"
Modern websites have none of those. It's all pop ups asking you to subscribe and/or give feedback before you have even had a chance to read anything, content that jumps around as images (ads) load, and huge blobs of JavaScript. I feel like the web has regressed massively in the last few years
I think most practical designers saw the value of what Nielsen was showing but hated how he completely eschewed aesthetics. Fortunately the advent of CSS and the need for responsive mobile design forced everyone to learn how to integrate functionality with aesthetics.
In the long run, Flash was a blip on the web. 2004-2010 tops.
NNGroup "best practices" have been obsolete for at least 15 years, because the purpose of a website is no longer about displaying free information. Websites have become a fully commercial enterprise focused on conversion, so every trick in the book is used:
- Infinite scroll and autoplaying video on social media and blogspam sites
- Layouts shifting after content load because of the Javascript ad delay
- "Other Articles you might like" blocks in the middle of an article
- "Subscribe to our email newsletter" popups/modals everywhere
Certain designers may have hated Nielsen, but their users hated them, and they have more users hating them than Nielsen has designers hating him, and users matter much more than designers, so I think he came out way ahead.
Bruce Tognazzini is the OG GUI Guru of 80's user interface design!
Tog not just invented and implemented, but also deeply rationalized and documented a lot of great user interface techniques, like the "mile high menu bar", which partially exploits Fitts' Law (in the "up" direction), but made more sense on the original single small Mac screens. (While pie menus more fully exploit Fitts' law (in "all" directions") and they work great on large screens, giving you even more "leverage".)
>When the Macintosh was new, Bruce “Tog” Tognazzini wrote a column in Apple’s developer magazine on UI. In his column, people wrote in with lots of interesting UI design problems, which he discussed. These columns continue to this day on his web site. They’ve also been collected and embellished in a couple of great books, like Tog on Software Design, which is a lot of fun and a great introduction to UI design. (Tog on Interface was even better, but it’s out of print.)
>Tog invented the concept of the mile high menu bar to explain why the menu bar on the Macintosh, which is always glued to the top of the physical screen, is so much easier to use than menu bars on Windows, which appear inside each application window. When you want to point to the File menu on Windows, you have a target about half an inch wide and a quarter of an inch high to acquire. You must move and position the mouse fairly precisely in both the vertical and the horizontal dimensions.
>But on a Macintosh, you can slam the mouse up to the top of the screen, without regard to how high you slam it, and it will stop at the physical edge of the screen – the correct vertical position for using the menu. So, effectively, you have a target that is still half an inch wide, but a mile high. Now you only need to worry about positioning the cursor horizontally, not vertically, so the task of clicking on a menu item is that much easier.
>Based on this principle, Tog has a pop quiz: what are the five spots on the screen that are easiest to acquire (point to) with the mouse? The answer: all four corners of the screen (where you can literally slam the mouse over there in one fell swoop without any pointing at all), plus, the current position of the mouse, because it’s already there.
>The principle of the mile-high menu bar is fairly well known, but it must not be entirely obvious, because the Windows 95 team missed the point completely with the Start push button, sitting almost in the bottom left corner of the screen, but not exactly. In fact, it’s about 2 pixels away from the bottom and 2 pixels from the left of the screen. So, for the sake of a couple of pixels, Microsoft literally “snatches defeat from the jaws of victory”, Tog writes, and makes it that much harder to acquire the start button. It could have been a mile square, absolutely trivial to hit with the mouse. For the sake of something, I don’t know what, it’s not. God help us.
Another great technique he documented in the original Apple Human Interface Guidelines was the "drag delay" of popping up "pull right" submenus, to mitigate a problem that linear menus have, but pie menus don't. People keep forgetting and re-inventing it in sometimes better, sometimes worse ways, but he invented and implemented it for the original Mac,...
I don’t think designers hated Nielsen. I was doing web design at the time, and the general sentiment seemed to be: “Sure, he’s probably right—but the client wants it done their way instead, so…”
Still, his bite-sized advice stuck around and continues to shape the conversation. That’s where everyone learned about Fitts’ Law, Hick’s Law, optimal text column widths, the value of usability testing with just a few users, and the deep shame you should feel for making text hard to read. He may not have invented those ideas, but his articles popularized them. And because he was one of the few doing serious usability research and publishing it online, his authoritative voice gave those ideas real weight that designers could leverage to make the case to their bosses and clients.
Several of the designers I worked with liked him, in as much as he gave them research to back them in their arguments with clients that the site should actually be usable.
It is still one of the high points of my career that I was part of a team that shipped an internet banking application that worked well in the then-current major browsers of IE 6 and Navigator 4, but also worked in Lynx and on a Palm Pilot browser.
We've now degenerated to the point that "engineers" demand Chrome everywhere.
Same. A pretty button is useless if it's not where you expect to find it. You can always make it "less dated" later by changing colors and stuff, but the usability is the most important part.
The Flash 2 screenshot in the article looks dated. But the experience of using it wouldn't change a bit even if it got less 90-sy buttons and looked "modern".
Nielsen was mostly concerned with labeling himself a “guru” to boost his consultancy firm. The idea of user-driven design goes all the way back to the late 60s with the rise of Participatory Design.
Fully agree. And we all know beautiful but totally broken UIs and UX, and "ugly" but extremely functional UIs and UXs, that actually make them beautiful
And UIs that are neither beautiful nor function (looking at you Salesforce, Oracle, SAP, and many other "Enterprise" applications).
If any of these were functional, most users wouldn't care about the visual appeal. NN were correct, but apparently their message didn't reach that particular sphere of web application developers.
If an 'Enterprise' applications website were functional people would be able to navigate to assistance when using the app. Therefore costing money in competent support techs or improving the product itself, neither of which are as easy as just being anti-competitive and monopolistic
I was referring to the web applications themselves, rather than the marketing, documentation, or support websites. In large vendors, those tend to come from a different part of the organisation, so are often superior to the products themselves.
The productivity drain of a poor UI is largely felt by the customers' employees, while the vendor benefits from sales of professional services and premium support contracts.
Back then, it felt like he was one of the rare few people who was actually focused on serving the needs of the user. Those were the days when too many sites thought it was a good idea to show a Flash splash screen before entering a site, and designers seemed to have a grudge against text that was big enough for a normal person to read.
I remember vividly when Windows (XP I think?) introduced a new kind of font smoothing that messed with the look of those fonts. In hindsight, I feel like that moment was part of the catalyst toward Web 2.0-style designs. Screens started to get bigger, sites became higher resolution as bandwidth increased, and the tiny pixel font started to be both less relevant (you could fit more, larger text onscreen) and less beautiful (it rendered differently with font smoothing).
IIRC this shift also coincided with the shift toward Wordpress, including a more homogeneous set of pre-packaged "themes", and away from custom CMSes (or no CMS at all), the OG blogging "scripts" like Greymatter and b2.
Yep! I'm guilty of continuing to use the double-colon separators to this very day. Just shipped an internal app for my company a few months ago that utilizes them in page titles.
> IIRC this shift also coincided with the shift toward Wordpress, including a more homogeneous set of pre-packaged "themes", and away from custom CMSes (or no CMS at all), the OG blogging "scripts" like Greymatter and b2.
Shout-out to Geeklog, Textpattern, and the monstrosity that was PHPNuke.
It seems the next battle we'll have to fight is for fonts that actually present enough information to the user to disambiguate "Weird Al" from "Weird AI". Seems like we used to have these things called "serifs" but modern design knows nothing of such heresies.
Most splash screens had a "skip" button though. If you were visiting the website frequently, you as the user could always bookmark the internal page that the intro screen pointed to.
Yeah, strong agree here. Nielsen brought a certain weight of rigor to the debate back in those days which made sense to the way I wanted to think about web design as an engineer. I don't really think there's a "winner" or "most right" person amongst the trio, but Nielsen's ethos appealed to me more than the others mentioned.
I always had more respect for Nielsen’s lineage of human-computer interaction than I did for Nielsen himself. At the time I remember thinking how neither designers nor classic HCI people (or programmers) really got the web. Nielsen was at least focused on the web, but the problem is that he was fixated on user expectations for a brand new medium without recognizing that it was early days and would inevitably evolve. He would say stuff like “hyperlinks should always be blue and underlined” because that’s what users expect, without realizing that at that point in time we were still so early in the adoption of the web that it made no sense to apply such rigid rules.
Seriously, while he was the first to use blue for links in HyperTIES, there was a historical context (like the IBM PC's color palette), and he never meant it in a "640k ought to be enough for anybody" way. His reasons for recommending blue are based on empirical studies, measuring visibility, comprehension, retention, etc.
Blue is good not just because users recognize it (they didn't in 1983), but for how it stands out, because of how the human visual system works. He was originally a fan of cyan aka "light blue".
Ben Shneiderman wrote:
>"Red highlighting made the links more visible, but reduced the user’s capacity to read and retain the content of the text… blue was visible, on both white and black backgrounds and didn’t interfere with retention,"
>"We conducted approximately 20 empirical studies of many design variables which were reported at the Hypertext 1987 conference and in array of journals and books. Issues such as the use of light blue highlighting as the default color for links, the inclusion of a history stack, easy access to a BACK button, article length, and global string search were all studied empirically.”
>"My students conducted more than a dozen experiments (unpublished) on different ways of highlighting and selection using current screens, e.g. green screens only permitted, bold, underscore, blinking, and I think italic(???). When we had a color screen we tried different color highlighted links. While red made the links easier to spot, user comprehension and recollection of the content declined. We chose the light blue, which Tim adopted."
Honestly, I believe that the Web would have been better had we stuck to those expectations more diligently and evolved more slowly and thoughtfully. That one can does not imply that one should.
Blue links and purple visited links were fine. And now on most sites there is no differentiation, and it’s sometimes difficult to tell what is a link, and a lot of sites don’t even bother linking. This is not an improvement!
I don't disagree with the opinion, but what individual experts think does not factor in much when you have a groundswell of adoption like the web did. At that point people are going to hack whatever they can on top of it, and there are too many varied interests to have any central control, and so things just evolve well beyond the intent or control of any individual mind or architect.
For me, usability mattered a lot and I saw how a lot of the web design experimentation was falling short, but Nielsen was just too backwards looking. We needed forward thinking UX rooted specifically in web culture, and that's what we got through the Zeldmans, Veens, and 37signals of the era.
Blue and purple links wouldn't be visible on any website that chose to use those as background colors (or any range of background colors where the contrast would have been too low to be visible).
The web at the time was an "anything goes" multimedia format, not a dry digital paperback or textbook where all the content had to fit within the publisher's specifications to limit printing, weight and distribution costs.
Nowadays, most browsers have a "reading mode" that can flatten the content into something that satisfies those Nielsen conditions though.
> He would say stuff like “hyperlinks should always be blue and underlined” because that’s what users expect, without realizing that at that point in time we were still so early in the adoption of the web that it made no sense to apply such rigid rules.
I always remember recommendations from Nielsen as (a) backed by some testing with real users, (b) temporal, i.e. “at this time users expect…” and ( c) only focused on usability, that is, in practice there are other things to consider like design, performance, etc.
I will say that most of this nuance gets rounded to a Boolean like most advice.
In creating documents with hyperlinks for training students, I have found blue underlined still catches the most fish, for example some do not realize that accordion-style content can be clicked to reveal more content if it is not blue underlined. Have tested icons, highlighting, different colors of underlining.
I think part of the issue is that early users of the internet were more tech-savvy, and now internet users are simply "anyone with a phone"—in a sense we're going backwards because a higher percentage of users are not learning/adapting to attempts at new approaches/standards.
I read it more as "blue and underlined" because if we all do that users have a chance at learning what to expect. With an implied: Once they are confident we can be much more flexable.
1. People were creating quirky, whimsical, odd corners of the internet for nobody but themselves. Art.
2. Entrepreneurs were starting to build sophisticated web applications for other people, i.e. customers.
Nielsen's dogma was excellent for the latter, and disastrous for the former.
History has been kind to Nielsen in the way that the modern web has lost most/all of its charm for the sake of answering the question "but how does it make money?"
I didn't believe that Discount Usability Engineering was useful until we tried it. I was absolutely blown away by the results and have continued the practice for every design and re-design. Thank you Mr. Nielsen.
On the web, the user is rarely a monolith. For a lot of websites (as compared to, say, business software or automobiles), the user could be everyone and anyone. They may all have different mental models, expectations, abilities, etc.
This is important to keep in mind when focusing on user centered design for a general purpose website. You need a testing pool representative of your users (or who you want your user to be), you need to figure out what to do if there are conflicts among users, during testing, etc. It might be obvious, and you can probably still fit in into a framework, but what I'm getting at is that it is less empirical than it might seem at first pass. There is still an art to user centered design, and if you have this in mind, your designs don't have to look hopelessly outdated.
Usability folks have understood this for decades. Alan Cooper was writing about defining multiple separate personas [1] to represent different cohorts of your userbase in the 90s.
> what I'm getting at is that it is less empirical than it might seem at first pass.
I would argue that it is still exactly as empirical. You just have to be careful how you aggregate your data and don't try to reduce things to too few clusters. Otherwise you end up making the classic mistake of offering a single T-shirt size at your conference that mostly only fits men because they are the majority of attendees.
> There is still an art to user centered design,
Agreed. No amount of analysis will do your synthesis for you. You still have to make.
Great books. One of the authors looks like now is a climate denier, so I wonder myself about the existance of technical approach detached from the scientific one
Zeldman is dead*, and Nielsen is still running NNG. I don't think he's interested in getting into politics. Enough people hate on him, just for being the skunk at the graphic design picnic.
Not that I have anything against pizza menus, though -- they do have their place. But we both agree to hate hamburger menus passionately. ("Hate the menu, not the burger.")
PizzaTool: How I accidentally ordered my first pizza over the internet:
Seriously though, I've always been a huge fan of Jakob Nielsen, especially for his empirical approach, and he has even said some nice things about pie menus.
>Some new stuff was presented such as the pie menus studied by Callahan, Hopkins, Weiser, and Shneiderman from the University of Maryland. When used as pop-up menus, pies have the advantage that any menu item can be selected by equally small movements of the mouse and the study did indeed show that users performed about 15% faster using a pie menu than using a linear menu. Pie menus also have some potential disadvantages, especially when used with many menu items or in cases that call for hierarchical pop-ups.
>In spite of this and some other novelty items, the main feel of CHI'88 was that of improvements of earlier stuff rather than revolutionary new discoveries. Every year, I am able to summarize the main theme of a CHI conference and this year I am not in doubt that the theme was that we are currently slowed down to steady, evolutionary progress in the user interface field.
This is the paper we presented at CHI'88 that he was referring to (which is why I appreciate his empirical approach to actually measuring usability and performance and error rates):
>On October 25, 1988, I gave Steve Jobs a demo of pie menus, NeWS, UniPress Emacs and HyperTIES at the Educom conference in Washington DC. His reaction was to jump up and down, point at the screen, and yell “That sucks! That sucks! Wow, that’s neat! That sucks!”
Don Norman, on the other hand, has never been a big fan of pie menus, and went even further than Jobs just yelling "That sucks!" to explain that was because of all the disasters, pollution, and urban sprawl he thought they could cause, and he even unfairly blamed pie menus for a nuclear meltdown, when a linear menu actually caused it! ;)
You're choosing to deflect and patronize, but not provide any further credibility to your unwarranted comparison. That speaks for itself.
> Don't you have some NFTs to shill at Denny's Applebee's Max?
You have no idea who I am or what I support, not everyone is a little caricature in your mind. This kind of negative attitude has no place in this forum.
You haven't taken the opportunity to prove you're not full of shit by contributing anything constructive to this conversation. Go reply to my other comments or other people's comments if you disagree with anything I've said or have something to add, but nobody wants to hear financial advice or blockchain evangelism from you, so please stop obsessing about that, because it's not relevant or interesting or credible.
More deflection and moving goalposts, and now ad hominem. Still nothing substantial, and certainly nothing constructive. Just one argumentative fallacy after another.
There is no value in speaking with you any further, your entire demeanor is toxic and ignorant. Take a hike.
You're so close to getting that nobody wants to hear financial advice or blockchain evangelism from you, but you still think the problem is with them, not you. Would you be so persistent and angry about it if your obsession was denying climate change instead of evangelizing fraudulent get-rich-quick pyramid schemes and rug pulls and ponzi schemes and Web 3.0 NFT scams and TRUMP coins, when nobody was remotely interested in discussing it, everyone has heard it all before, and is totally sick of hearing about it, and doesn't want to be your next biggest idiot, and it had absolutely nothing to do with the conversation? Nothing you've said has any relevance to the goalposts of discussing "Gurus of 90s Web Design: Zeldman, Siegel, Nielsen" whatsoever, yet here you are, still throwing a tantrum about nothing interesting.
> Nothing you've said has any relevance to the goalposts of discussing "Gurus of 90s Web Design: Zeldman, Siegel, Nielsen" whatsoever
Projection. You're the one who brought up this irrelevant tangent about blockchain. This flags your entire argument as disingenuous.
Its your comment which got flagged and killed. Think about why that is. You are projecting so much right now, and it just looks sad. There is no need to continue this conversation, goodbye.
I have posted several highly upvoted informative comments relevant to this discussion, while you've posted absolutely nothing useful or relevant whatsoever, your own comment was flagged and killed, and you're projecting your own failure and irrelevance on me right now.
And my guess that the foaming at the mouth climate change denier was also into blockchain was 100% correct.
You already said you weren't going to speak to me again, yet here you are back again for more.
You're letting one thing leak into another too much. This is why I never bother paying attention to political leanings of the actors and musicians that I love. I simply don't care, unless they're out there kicking puppies for fun I don't really care.
I enjoyed Zeldman's A List Apart, and had no idea that he was so old at a time that we were all in our mid-twenties, I thought he was our cohort :D
Nielsen I can honestly leave, maybe he did help millions of people have easier to use sites, but I found him rigid and boring; especially rigid with his prescriptive approach to sites - "the home page should have these links". I think Philip Greenspun skewered him at some point.
I understand why a lot of this was like this, as people wanted answers and direction, and were prepared to pay a lot of money for it, and he was a consultant doing consultancy. People have always wanted answers and direction, and will pay for it, but in a rapidly-changing world, the answers have a short shelf-life. Maybe that's why he took his site down a long time ago, aware that his maps were getting very out-of-date.
That early 2000s CSS/design blogosphere was such an interesting place; I was just in high school at the time but loved following Dave Shea, Andy Budd, Doug Bowman, Shaun Inman, Mike Davidson, and probably a whole bunch more I'm forgetting now.
There was also this guy, don't remember his name, whom you could email your questions/issues etc, reply with great detail and post the discussion on his website for others to learn from. Like a one on one precursor to stackoverflow.
I remember email him and asking about why my photo gallery didn't work when I tried to save the "currently selected image" as a cookie. He replied and explained to me that cookies contain string values and that you can't save a reference to a DOM element as a cookie. So, cookie = document.getElementById('image0') will not work, but cookie = 'image0' will :)
A group who never seem to be mentioned in these threads are Jason Arber, Richard May and Rina Cheung. Pixelsurgeon was enormously influential in its day.
All those guys. Also, the daily visits to lnkedup.com k10k.net, designiskinky.com, newstoday.com were so influential and informative to me (wow, just did an archive.org lookup of some of those and got a nostalgic chill - https://web.archive.org/web/20050303092717if_/http://www.lin...).
The users were also different back then. It was not only about putting it all on one page, but even about putting it all above the fold, based on the today astonishing fact that many users did not scroll down. Because they did not know they could, with later experiments observing a tipping point when scrolling became normal.
Think about that, what a different environment the sites had to work in. Not only technically, but also socially. Completely normal that details like that don't carry over into today.
I'm not sure that realization was great, given how often I have to scroll and scroll and scroll to find information on a business web site that should be front and center -- things like location, phone number, hours, etc.
As I recall, Greenspun skewered Siegel. Siegel advocated a two- or three-stage "entry portal" to your site in one version of his "Killer" books, and Greenspun thought that was daft.
I appreciate Nielsen's approach quite a lot. We could do a lot worse than a return to "usability" on the Web. We've gone to a lot of effort to recreate a substantial subset of what Flash brought to the table, but do you really want your photos and text blocks flying in as you scroll? It's cool the first time you see it, but after that? Does anybody ever say "man, this site has great information, I just wish it would bounce around my screen like a Jack Russell terrier."
> Does anybody ever say "man, this site has great information, I just wish it would bounce around my screen like a Jack Russell terrier."
I always find myself thinking "man if only this website would hijack my native browser scrolling...but terribly". Websites that don't hijack scrolling are just too useful and easy to use. Even better is when paragraphs fade-in as I scroll! Oh man I just love seeing shit jump around as I'm trying to read. It's so calming and doesn't induce seasickness at all!
Maybe the people implementing such things never accidentally saw off their fingertips. /s
Wow - just visited A List Apart for the first time in some years and it looks vastly different. Also, there is a post on the home page from a year ago tomorrow that has a new tag on it. Times have changed I guess.
I used to run a usability testing service way back in the day and had the same feelings about Nielsen - way too rigid and pedantic for my tastes and the reality of the tests I was running every day.
The colour choices in the image with caption beginning "Jeffrey Zeldman's homepage, March 1997" are hard on my eyes. However, the point might have been to show folks how to exert control over colours and fonts, as opposed to actually communicating. The 90s were quite a different thing than whatever we call the present decade.
A big annoyance of the early web was all the stupid blinking text and pointless little animations. Luckily we've moved past them. Of course, today it's all about ads, which is the tip of a spear that is quite unpleasant.
While black on yellow isn't necessarily the best combination, you have to take into account the medium of the times.
On the typical 15" CRT with its high dot pitch and relatively dark tube that garish yellow would be far less garish. The black, by virtue of the display, would also not be as black and more a very deep grey. The text contrast would also be somewhat comfortable as it would get an anti-aliased effect even though the OS at the time didn't have good font smoothing at the time.
> Note that the typical display size at the time was 800x600 pixels, so this and other websites would likely have been designed for those dimensions.
This was before responsive design existed. First we designed for 640×480, then we designed for 800×600, then we designed for 1024×768. Bad developers would design for wider viewports and leave people with smaller screens to scroll horizontally to see everything. Slightly better designers would design for the narrower viewports and leave huge gutters down either the right side or both sides for people with wider screens. Best practice was “fluid design”, where you would define widths in percentages to adapt to the screen width, but it was difficult to get designers on board.
> But if the web was a “consumer playground” now, it was still one with many constraints. As Zeldman told budding web designers, “the accepted wisdom is to use as few images as possible, and make them as small as you can (small in file size, though not necessarily in height or width).”
It wasn’t just file size. The early web was limited in terms of colours too. There were 216 “web safe” colours.
> the book advocated for “hacks” to HTML in order to make websites more visually appealing. The primary hacks were using invisible tables and single-pixel GIFs to help control layout.
There were a lot of weird hacks. One was to put many <title> elements in your document, and Netscape 2 would flip between them in the window’s title bar to make a crude animation. The title bar because browsers didn’t have tabs back then.
> CSS support from the two main browsers at the start of 1997 was patchy at best. Internet Explorer 3.0 was the closest to supporting the W3C standard for CSS, but it was buggy and inconsistent.
It was basically nonexistent apart from very minor things. Internet Explorer 3 didn’t even understand the em unit and just treated it as pixels, so if you set something to font-size: 1.5em, it wasn’t 50% larger than the parent element’s text, it was invisibly small.
> As for Netscape, its 3.0 browser had poor CSS support. In fact, the company even tried to create an alternative to CSS, with a JavaScript-powered styling mechanism called JavaScript-Based Style Sheets (JSSS).
Netscape 4 transcoded CSS to JSSS on the fly, which had the side-effect that when you disabled JavaScript, it also disabled CSS.
> For all their differences, CSS and Flash did have similar goals: both aimed to expand the state of web design on the web.
Before web fonts were supported by browsers, one fairly common technique was sIFR, which looked for specially marked up text on the page and replaced the text with Flash applets rendering the text in an embedded font. It was pretty ugly loading and caused bunch of problems, but the designers didn’t mind as long as it let them use custom fonts.
It was a pretty hellish time to be a web developer, but exciting as well. The browser bugs and incompatibilities were a thousand times worse than they are today and could really ruin multiple days at a time on the most trivial stuff, but it was also a period of great inventiveness and variety.
I'd love to see this sort of design history, but for old terminal/text-mode GUIs (TUIs?). I'm too young to have experienced it outside of the odd DOS cash desk at a grocery store. Does any book/website exist about these? VT220 library systems etc...
Usually though it was a direct display of the program state for a given task, which was part of what made it so efficient --- the task needed to be simplified down into chunks which would fit on/make sense when viewed as text on a text screen viewport.
Now David Siegel has changed his opinion on climate change. He created a website with independent climate research: https://www.cuttingthroughthenoise.net
It looks pretty nice and it's well written and I won't delve deep into the flaws, I'm sure others will.
However one big thing that climate change skeptics/deniers keep missing or handwaving about renewables is that they've never listened to Wayne Gretzky. None of them are skating to where the puck will be. Living in the past is worse for everyone.
I think it was more than three, I don’t recall the reference of 3 horsemen being used. Lynda Weinman and Seth Godin were influential (Godin from a marketing and SEO perspective). Also Krug and Allsop.
I yearn for the early days when I could just "View Source" to see how something neat on a page worked.
Now there's rarely anything neat, and when there is you can poke around with the inspector but it's likely buried deep in some obfuscated JS you'll never decipher.
I liked Zeldman's designs and writing style the best of these 3 guys. Imagine my shock a few years ago when I visited his site again and saw a hideous Wordpress default theme on it. The article mentions that there'll be a new design coming soon, but I can't help but feel Automattic forced him to use their in-house design when he started working there.
The irony that web art history (design, ux, &c.) is so much more difficult to study and appreciate—compared to traditional forms—when it should be the easiest, always surprises me.
I try not to profess in mixed company that young designers should know the history of the web (it’s so young after all!), lest I be pegged an old man yelling at clouds. However, there was a time when there was a really interesting intersection of print designers coming to work on the nascent web, asking for the moon, and web developers teasing out compromises because the platform was so limited. Now that the platform is so capable that it could accomplish those designs, we don’t have designers capable of imagining it.
I’d love for a designer to ask me to do something different for a change of pace. There have been many neat APIs that have slowly made their way to CSS over the years sitting unused.
> I'd argue that his pragmatic approach to web design — combining web standards with design flair — was what won out during the 90s and early 2000s. Certainly, of the three web design gurus in 1997, Zeldman’s website back then was by far the most interesting and exotic.
--
I really looked to him at that time. I would sneak away during lunch my senior year of high school to read his new Web Standards book. I still regularly check A list Apart, albeit its seldom updated these days. But his approach melded nicely with the other things from XML land I had been reading at the time.
> Useit didn't change its design over the years. By the Web 2.0 period, it was seen my most in the web design profession as being hopelessly outdated.
Oddly enough, I much prefer it to the corporate NNGroup site. And that last version reminds me a bit of HN itself. Simple, clean and usable — really simple, really clean and really usable, not mindlessly aping a trend (and getting it wrong) but intelligently setting its own trend.
Such nostalgia — in the seconf half of the 90s I was 15-18 years old, and I was reading these books trying to become a kick-ass "Web Designer/Developer". I quickly realized "Web Designer" is not for me, I have no sense for pixels, I need to focus on the "Web Developer" side. Learn "DHTML" and how to make things work on both IE and Netscape! IE back then had JScript, which was not exactly Javascript, or EcmaScript, which is what you said if you wanted to flex :)
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[ 4.5 ms ] story [ 273 ms ] threadThey did not understand this new medium, the screen, and the fact you don't have to put all the information on the same page. It was not until 2010 perhaps, when things started to flatten and simplify again, that people actually started doing reasonable web design. Usability was a new thing even in 2005, and Apple with their K-12 interfaces did not help this much, even though certain design decisions on System OSs make a lot of sense. But this was not the web.
Most of what these books teach is how to get the illustrator/coreldaw/quarkr approach and slap it on top of a webpage. How very little people experimented with the widgets already available to them such as pages, buttons, etc, the fact that it can show little, but be navigated. This is the same for cartography, btw, where things move even slower, and we still getting maps overloaded with information like its 1834.
IMHO, and this may be super unpopular, but game designers and game UI designers served as much more substantial inspiration for the web, rather than these early over-hyped designers, which otherwise did great job for posters and print. Some games are so forward-thinking, and so beautiful in the simplicity of their interfaces, that we can really argue most of the world got where gamers (and demosceners!) already have been for years.
> Most of what these books teach is how to get the illustrator/coreldaw/quarkr approach and slap it on top of a webpage. How very little people experimented with the widgets already available to them such as pages, buttons, etc, the fact that it can show little, but be navigated.
People experimented plenty, but print was the start and ultimately those were the tools available at the time, and they were ahead of what the web was actually capable of. At a certain point, pushing the limits meant figuring out how to make rounded corners without rounded corner support or css, how to load images optimally, or debug. Game devs and porn industry absolutely pushed it past those limits, but also hardware got better, standards evolved. Many barely distinguishable bits of underlying primitive tech powers this website, and many others power YouTube, and Zoom, Gmail. It pretty much took until now to come up with decent design tools that sufficiently deal with designing for the complexity of the web.
Tables and buttons were working from day one, and there was a lot one could do images also, spacer.gif including, should you understand design enough and the new medium. JS sizing of elements was available very early on, even before CSS was a thing for all I remember. The widgets and controls were more than enough for many apps.
Sorry, didnt want to sound derisive, but these people cited with the books did design without using the medium's potential, because for them all it was - a sceen. And many people have recognized this lack of underrstanding, not only myself. The sad part is these guys who had no clue about the programming side of the web were touted the gurus, while some early web/dev/ux guys were not given air time for not having enough design elements.
Even with all the vaporwave nostalgia, we have to admit many, if not the majority of 90s pages, were over-designed, over-complicated, and overloading the user cognitively. A classmate once blatantly stated - the web is too colorful to me, I get easily lost.
Man, I have ADHD and get easily lost, but am used to all this, but man, was he prepared for it - not at all. Many of these old pages were not even aesthetically nice, due to this over-complexity, and those guys contributed to this initial notion of having to over-complicate the web.
ASCII text clutter on the terminals pales in comparison.
I got star struck one day when Zeldman emailed me asking for an enhancement to a WordPress plugin I had created. Felt like I’d come full circle.
I’m today years old, realizing that Jeffrey Zeldman was 40+ in 1997. I always thought he was kinda just a few years older than us in the early 2000s.
“View Source” of their websites was an educational time well spent. Warning: In some regions, “View Source” may be illegal. Please use it at your own discretion.
Starting my career in the early 2000s, and my design and other Flash Works were on the Internet - Zeldman, Siegel, and a lot of others were the heroes. Nielsen was the villain. By the mid-2000s, I had done extensive work for clinics and physicians, delving into accessibility, HIPAA compliance, and other related areas. By then, Nielsen and the likes became the heroes. :-)
Where is "View Souce" illegal?
https://www.malwarebytes.com/blog/news/2022/02/journalist-wo...
https://thedailywtf.com/articles/website-hacker
But he was!
I learned quite a bit from that book. I think Flanders may still have a site. I was on his mailing list, but I haven’t heard anything for the last decade or so.
Nowadays everything is so optimized and efficient, I've become nostalgic for the days when webpages sometimes sucked. At least they had personality, even if they were hard to use. It's like cars, I like looking at super old old cars in museums and wondering what all those pedals and levers do, even if I'm happy to not drive them.
people now don't seem to appreciate how much Google's radically simple homepage changed the web
look at web design right before Google took off - it was always about adding more to the page, and most sites were a mess
Larry and Sergey showed that radical simplicity was literally worth a trillion dollars
for example...they could have dropped some links below the search bar to some homegrown sports site they set up...and that would have become the most popular sports site...its hard for most people to resist that
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AltaVista
Google's simplicity and clarity became part of the brand. No one else was doing that at the time. Even "efficient" designs were maximalist, so extreme minimalism with a splash of colour was a real innovation.
[0] https://web.archive.org/web/19980423064646/http://altavista....
I think he was on point with a lot of stuff, but I've been a bit jaded ever since!
It taught me great respect for usability.
Designers hated Nielsen.
It's a different package, but it's the same junk.
Makes connecting from bad cells a royal pain.
But some of the dependency libraries can be almost as bad.
I don't like 1MB pages, so a button can be animated.
Modern websites have none of those. It's all pop ups asking you to subscribe and/or give feedback before you have even had a chance to read anything, content that jumps around as images (ads) load, and huge blobs of JavaScript. I feel like the web has regressed massively in the last few years
NNGroup "best practices" have been obsolete for at least 15 years, because the purpose of a website is no longer about displaying free information. Websites have become a fully commercial enterprise focused on conversion, so every trick in the book is used:
- Infinite scroll and autoplaying video on social media and blogspam sites
- Layouts shifting after content load because of the Javascript ad delay
- "Other Articles you might like" blocks in the middle of an article
- "Subscribe to our email newsletter" popups/modals everywhere
- "You are reading 1 of x free articles" dickbars
and that's just scratching the surface.
Bruce Tognazzini is the OG GUI Guru of 80's user interface design!
https://asktog.com/atc/about-bruce-tognazzini/
Tog not just invented and implemented, but also deeply rationalized and documented a lot of great user interface techniques, like the "mile high menu bar", which partially exploits Fitts' Law (in the "up" direction), but made more sense on the original single small Mac screens. (While pie menus more fully exploit Fitts' law (in "all" directions") and they work great on large screens, giving you even more "leverage".)
https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/04/27/designing-for-peop...
>When the Macintosh was new, Bruce “Tog” Tognazzini wrote a column in Apple’s developer magazine on UI. In his column, people wrote in with lots of interesting UI design problems, which he discussed. These columns continue to this day on his web site. They’ve also been collected and embellished in a couple of great books, like Tog on Software Design, which is a lot of fun and a great introduction to UI design. (Tog on Interface was even better, but it’s out of print.)
>Tog invented the concept of the mile high menu bar to explain why the menu bar on the Macintosh, which is always glued to the top of the physical screen, is so much easier to use than menu bars on Windows, which appear inside each application window. When you want to point to the File menu on Windows, you have a target about half an inch wide and a quarter of an inch high to acquire. You must move and position the mouse fairly precisely in both the vertical and the horizontal dimensions.
>But on a Macintosh, you can slam the mouse up to the top of the screen, without regard to how high you slam it, and it will stop at the physical edge of the screen – the correct vertical position for using the menu. So, effectively, you have a target that is still half an inch wide, but a mile high. Now you only need to worry about positioning the cursor horizontally, not vertically, so the task of clicking on a menu item is that much easier.
>Based on this principle, Tog has a pop quiz: what are the five spots on the screen that are easiest to acquire (point to) with the mouse? The answer: all four corners of the screen (where you can literally slam the mouse over there in one fell swoop without any pointing at all), plus, the current position of the mouse, because it’s already there.
>The principle of the mile-high menu bar is fairly well known, but it must not be entirely obvious, because the Windows 95 team missed the point completely with the Start push button, sitting almost in the bottom left corner of the screen, but not exactly. In fact, it’s about 2 pixels away from the bottom and 2 pixels from the left of the screen. So, for the sake of a couple of pixels, Microsoft literally “snatches defeat from the jaws of victory”, Tog writes, and makes it that much harder to acquire the start button. It could have been a mile square, absolutely trivial to hit with the mouse. For the sake of something, I don’t know what, it’s not. God help us.
Another great technique he documented in the original Apple Human Interface Guidelines was the "drag delay" of popping up "pull right" submenus, to mitigate a problem that linear menus have, but pie menus don't. People keep forgetting and re-inventing it in sometimes better, sometimes worse ways, but he invented and implemented it for the original Mac,...
Funny enough, this was actually removed in the early versions of OS X: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/1999/12/macos-x-dp2/#:~:text...
But today it seems to be back.
Still, his bite-sized advice stuck around and continues to shape the conversation. That’s where everyone learned about Fitts’ Law, Hick’s Law, optimal text column widths, the value of usability testing with just a few users, and the deep shame you should feel for making text hard to read. He may not have invented those ideas, but his articles popularized them. And because he was one of the few doing serious usability research and publishing it online, his authoritative voice gave those ideas real weight that designers could leverage to make the case to their bosses and clients.
Several of the designers I worked with liked him, in as much as he gave them research to back them in their arguments with clients that the site should actually be usable.
It is still one of the high points of my career that I was part of a team that shipped an internet banking application that worked well in the then-current major browsers of IE 6 and Navigator 4, but also worked in Lynx and on a Palm Pilot browser.
We've now degenerated to the point that "engineers" demand Chrome everywhere.
The Flash 2 screenshot in the article looks dated. But the experience of using it wouldn't change a bit even if it got less 90-sy buttons and looked "modern".
If any of these were functional, most users wouldn't care about the visual appeal. NN were correct, but apparently their message didn't reach that particular sphere of web application developers.
The productivity drain of a poor UI is largely felt by the customers' employees, while the vendor benefits from sales of professional services and premium support contracts.
Who am I kidding I still think it's awesome.
I remember vividly when Windows (XP I think?) introduced a new kind of font smoothing that messed with the look of those fonts. In hindsight, I feel like that moment was part of the catalyst toward Web 2.0-style designs. Screens started to get bigger, sites became higher resolution as bandwidth increased, and the tiny pixel font started to be both less relevant (you could fit more, larger text onscreen) and less beautiful (it rendered differently with font smoothing).
IIRC this shift also coincided with the shift toward Wordpress, including a more homogeneous set of pre-packaged "themes", and away from custom CMSes (or no CMS at all), the OG blogging "scripts" like Greymatter and b2.
So good it is bug when it 8pt Tahoma looks off: https://github.com/jdan/98.css/issues/10
Shout-out to Geeklog, Textpattern, and the monstrosity that was PHPNuke.
I miss it too.
E.g., "Why You Only Need to Test with 5 Users":
* https://www.nngroup.com/articles/why-you-only-need-to-test-w...
It’s also probably the only one that would still look new, or current, if it was released today
https://blog.mozilla.org/en/internet-culture/why-are-hyperli...
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29897811
Seriously, while he was the first to use blue for links in HyperTIES, there was a historical context (like the IBM PC's color palette), and he never meant it in a "640k ought to be enough for anybody" way. His reasons for recommending blue are based on empirical studies, measuring visibility, comprehension, retention, etc.
Blue is good not just because users recognize it (they didn't in 1983), but for how it stands out, because of how the human visual system works. He was originally a fan of cyan aka "light blue".
Ben Shneiderman wrote:
>"Red highlighting made the links more visible, but reduced the user’s capacity to read and retain the content of the text… blue was visible, on both white and black backgrounds and didn’t interfere with retention,"
>"We conducted approximately 20 empirical studies of many design variables which were reported at the Hypertext 1987 conference and in array of journals and books. Issues such as the use of light blue highlighting as the default color for links, the inclusion of a history stack, easy access to a BACK button, article length, and global string search were all studied empirically.”
>"My students conducted more than a dozen experiments (unpublished) on different ways of highlighting and selection using current screens, e.g. green screens only permitted, bold, underscore, blinking, and I think italic(???). When we had a color screen we tried different color highlighted links. While red made the links easier to spot, user comprehension and recollection of the content declined. We chose the light blue, which Tim adopted."
HyperTIES Discussions from Hacker News:
https://donhopkins.medium.com/hyperties-discussions-from-hac...
Blue links and purple visited links were fine. And now on most sites there is no differentiation, and it’s sometimes difficult to tell what is a link, and a lot of sites don’t even bother linking. This is not an improvement!
For me, usability mattered a lot and I saw how a lot of the web design experimentation was falling short, but Nielsen was just too backwards looking. We needed forward thinking UX rooted specifically in web culture, and that's what we got through the Zeldmans, Veens, and 37signals of the era.
The web at the time was an "anything goes" multimedia format, not a dry digital paperback or textbook where all the content had to fit within the publisher's specifications to limit printing, weight and distribution costs.
Nowadays, most browsers have a "reading mode" that can flatten the content into something that satisfies those Nielsen conditions though.
Backgrounds should only be #808080
Red when active
this honestly make life so much easier...
> he was saying that each browser should define how headers would be displayed to their users.
And let the user define the color and underline style?
I always remember recommendations from Nielsen as (a) backed by some testing with real users, (b) temporal, i.e. “at this time users expect…” and ( c) only focused on usability, that is, in practice there are other things to consider like design, performance, etc.
I will say that most of this nuance gets rounded to a Boolean like most advice.
I think part of the issue is that early users of the internet were more tech-savvy, and now internet users are simply "anyone with a phone"—in a sense we're going backwards because a higher percentage of users are not learning/adapting to attempts at new approaches/standards.
In the Nielsen days, two things were happening:
1. People were creating quirky, whimsical, odd corners of the internet for nobody but themselves. Art.
2. Entrepreneurs were starting to build sophisticated web applications for other people, i.e. customers.
Nielsen's dogma was excellent for the latter, and disastrous for the former.
History has been kind to Nielsen in the way that the modern web has lost most/all of its charm for the sake of answering the question "but how does it make money?"
The old UseIt.com https://web.archive.org/web/19990125092506/http://useit.com/ will forever live rent-free in my brain.
This is important to keep in mind when focusing on user centered design for a general purpose website. You need a testing pool representative of your users (or who you want your user to be), you need to figure out what to do if there are conflicts among users, during testing, etc. It might be obvious, and you can probably still fit in into a framework, but what I'm getting at is that it is less empirical than it might seem at first pass. There is still an art to user centered design, and if you have this in mind, your designs don't have to look hopelessly outdated.
Usability folks have understood this for decades. Alan Cooper was writing about defining multiple separate personas [1] to represent different cohorts of your userbase in the 90s.
> what I'm getting at is that it is less empirical than it might seem at first pass.
I would argue that it is still exactly as empirical. You just have to be careful how you aggregate your data and don't try to reduce things to too few clusters. Otherwise you end up making the classic mistake of offering a single T-shirt size at your conference that mostly only fits men because they are the majority of attendees.
> There is still an art to user centered design,
Agreed. No amount of analysis will do your synthesis for you. You still have to make.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Persona_(user_experience)
*[EDIT] I’m wrong.
Glad to be wrong.
'E's not dead. 'E's pining.
https://zeldman.com/
I would have sworn there was a big deal about his passing on this site, not long ago.
Happy to be wrong.
[EDIT] Yup. I’m wrong.
Glad to be.
https://www.nngroup.com/articles/hamburger-menu-vs-pizza/
Not that I have anything against pizza menus, though -- they do have their place. But we both agree to hate hamburger menus passionately. ("Hate the menu, not the burger.")
PizzaTool: How I accidentally ordered my first pizza over the internet:
https://donhopkins.medium.com/the-story-of-sun-microsystems-...
Seriously though, I've always been a huge fan of Jakob Nielsen, especially for his empirical approach, and he has even said some nice things about pie menus.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29930500
https://www.nngroup.com/articles/trip-report-chi-88/
>Some new stuff was presented such as the pie menus studied by Callahan, Hopkins, Weiser, and Shneiderman from the University of Maryland. When used as pop-up menus, pies have the advantage that any menu item can be selected by equally small movements of the mouse and the study did indeed show that users performed about 15% faster using a pie menu than using a linear menu. Pie menus also have some potential disadvantages, especially when used with many menu items or in cases that call for hierarchical pop-ups.
>In spite of this and some other novelty items, the main feel of CHI'88 was that of improvements of earlier stuff rather than revolutionary new discoveries. Every year, I am able to summarize the main theme of a CHI conference and this year I am not in doubt that the theme was that we are currently slowed down to steady, evolutionary progress in the user interface field.
This is the paper we presented at CHI'88 that he was referring to (which is why I appreciate his empirical approach to actually measuring usability and performance and error rates):
An Empirical Comparison of Pie vs. Linear Menus:
https://donhopkins.medium.com/an-empirical-comparison-of-pie...
Pie Menus: A 30 Year Retrospective:
https://donhopkins.medium.com/pie-menus-936fed383ff1
>Steve Jobs Thought Pie Menus Sucked
>On October 25, 1988, I gave Steve Jobs a demo of pie menus, NeWS, UniPress Emacs and HyperTIES at the Educom conference in Washington DC. His reaction was to jump up and down, point at the screen, and yell “That sucks! That sucks! Wow, that’s neat! That sucks!”
Don Norman, on the other hand, has never been a big fan of pie menus, and went even further than Jobs just yelling "That sucks!" to explain that was because of all the disasters, pollution, and urban sprawl he thought they could cause, and he even unfairly blamed pie menus for a nuclear meltdown, when a linear menu actually caused it! ;)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37907449
X11 SimCity Demo:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jvi98wVUmQA
Don Hopkins and Donald Norman at IBM Almaden's "New Paradigms for Using Computers" workshop:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5GCPQxJttf0
Norman: "And then when we saw SimCity, we...
Don't bother with Nielsen today, he's been rambling about how working on accessibility won't matter because AI will create custom UIs for every user.
You're choosing to deflect and patronize, but not provide any further credibility to your unwarranted comparison. That speaks for itself.
> Don't you have some NFTs to shill at Denny's Applebee's Max?
You have no idea who I am or what I support, not everyone is a little caricature in your mind. This kind of negative attitude has no place in this forum.
There is no value in speaking with you any further, your entire demeanor is toxic and ignorant. Take a hike.
Projection. You're the one who brought up this irrelevant tangent about blockchain. This flags your entire argument as disingenuous.
Its your comment which got flagged and killed. Think about why that is. You are projecting so much right now, and it just looks sad. There is no need to continue this conversation, goodbye.
And my guess that the foaming at the mouth climate change denier was also into blockchain was 100% correct.
You already said you weren't going to speak to me again, yet here you are back again for more.
Touch some grass, crypto shill.
Nielsen I can honestly leave, maybe he did help millions of people have easier to use sites, but I found him rigid and boring; especially rigid with his prescriptive approach to sites - "the home page should have these links". I think Philip Greenspun skewered him at some point.
I understand why a lot of this was like this, as people wanted answers and direction, and were prepared to pay a lot of money for it, and he was a consultant doing consultancy. People have always wanted answers and direction, and will pay for it, but in a rapidly-changing world, the answers have a short shelf-life. Maybe that's why he took his site down a long time ago, aware that his maps were getting very out-of-date.
Still, fun times, what a great age it was.
I remember email him and asking about why my photo gallery didn't work when I tried to save the "currently selected image" as a cookie. He replied and explained to me that cookies contain string values and that you can't save a reference to a DOM element as a cookie. So, cookie = document.getElementById('image0') will not work, but cookie = 'image0' will :)
Made a friend on k10k back in, maybe 2001, still friends. Texted her a few days ago. Never met yet.
Think about that, what a different environment the sites had to work in. Not only technically, but also socially. Completely normal that details like that don't carry over into today.
I appreciate Nielsen's approach quite a lot. We could do a lot worse than a return to "usability" on the Web. We've gone to a lot of effort to recreate a substantial subset of what Flash brought to the table, but do you really want your photos and text blocks flying in as you scroll? It's cool the first time you see it, but after that? Does anybody ever say "man, this site has great information, I just wish it would bounce around my screen like a Jack Russell terrier."
I always find myself thinking "man if only this website would hijack my native browser scrolling...but terribly". Websites that don't hijack scrolling are just too useful and easy to use. Even better is when paragraphs fade-in as I scroll! Oh man I just love seeing shit jump around as I'm trying to read. It's so calming and doesn't induce seasickness at all!
Maybe the people implementing such things never accidentally saw off their fingertips. /s
A big annoyance of the early web was all the stupid blinking text and pointless little animations. Luckily we've moved past them. Of course, today it's all about ads, which is the tip of a spear that is quite unpleasant.
Plus ça change.
On the typical 15" CRT with its high dot pitch and relatively dark tube that garish yellow would be far less garish. The black, by virtue of the display, would also not be as black and more a very deep grey. The text contrast would also be somewhat comfortable as it would get an anti-aliased effect even though the OS at the time didn't have good font smoothing at the time.
> Note that the typical display size at the time was 800x600 pixels, so this and other websites would likely have been designed for those dimensions.
This was before responsive design existed. First we designed for 640×480, then we designed for 800×600, then we designed for 1024×768. Bad developers would design for wider viewports and leave people with smaller screens to scroll horizontally to see everything. Slightly better designers would design for the narrower viewports and leave huge gutters down either the right side or both sides for people with wider screens. Best practice was “fluid design”, where you would define widths in percentages to adapt to the screen width, but it was difficult to get designers on board.
> But if the web was a “consumer playground” now, it was still one with many constraints. As Zeldman told budding web designers, “the accepted wisdom is to use as few images as possible, and make them as small as you can (small in file size, though not necessarily in height or width).”
It wasn’t just file size. The early web was limited in terms of colours too. There were 216 “web safe” colours.
> the book advocated for “hacks” to HTML in order to make websites more visually appealing. The primary hacks were using invisible tables and single-pixel GIFs to help control layout.
There were a lot of weird hacks. One was to put many <title> elements in your document, and Netscape 2 would flip between them in the window’s title bar to make a crude animation. The title bar because browsers didn’t have tabs back then.
> CSS support from the two main browsers at the start of 1997 was patchy at best. Internet Explorer 3.0 was the closest to supporting the W3C standard for CSS, but it was buggy and inconsistent.
It was basically nonexistent apart from very minor things. Internet Explorer 3 didn’t even understand the em unit and just treated it as pixels, so if you set something to font-size: 1.5em, it wasn’t 50% larger than the parent element’s text, it was invisibly small.
> As for Netscape, its 3.0 browser had poor CSS support. In fact, the company even tried to create an alternative to CSS, with a JavaScript-powered styling mechanism called JavaScript-Based Style Sheets (JSSS).
Netscape 4 transcoded CSS to JSSS on the fly, which had the side-effect that when you disabled JavaScript, it also disabled CSS.
> For all their differences, CSS and Flash did have similar goals: both aimed to expand the state of web design on the web.
Before web fonts were supported by browsers, one fairly common technique was sIFR, which looked for specially marked up text on the page and replaced the text with Flash applets rendering the text in an embedded font. It was pretty ugly loading and caused bunch of problems, but the designers didn’t mind as long as it let them use custom fonts.
It was a pretty hellish time to be a web developer, but exciting as well. The browser bugs and incompatibilities were a thousand times worse than they are today and could really ruin multiple days at a time on the most trivial stuff, but it was also a period of great inventiveness and variety.
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/4541460-the-viewport-tec...
Usually though it was a direct display of the program state for a given task, which was part of what made it so efficient --- the task needed to be simplified down into chunks which would fit on/make sense when viewed as text on a text screen viewport.
It looks pretty nice and it's well written and I won't delve deep into the flaws, I'm sure others will.
However one big thing that climate change skeptics/deniers keep missing or handwaving about renewables is that they've never listened to Wayne Gretzky. None of them are skating to where the puck will be. Living in the past is worse for everyone.
I don't have to follow or agree with someone overall to also think that "even a broken clock is right twice a day" :-)
This article reminds me of "A List Apart". That website is still running, incidentally.
https://web.archive.org/web/20240206220342/https://lists.evo...
However their browser archive, where you can download ancient versions of over a hundred different web browsers, is still online:
https://browsers.evolt.org
And that was back when browsers had their own rendering engines and they weren’t all based on Blink, Gecko, or WebKit!
Now there's rarely anything neat, and when there is you can poke around with the inspector but it's likely buried deep in some obfuscated JS you'll never decipher.
The instant marker of my generation
I try not to profess in mixed company that young designers should know the history of the web (it’s so young after all!), lest I be pegged an old man yelling at clouds. However, there was a time when there was a really interesting intersection of print designers coming to work on the nascent web, asking for the moon, and web developers teasing out compromises because the platform was so limited. Now that the platform is so capable that it could accomplish those designs, we don’t have designers capable of imagining it.
I’d love for a designer to ask me to do something different for a change of pace. There have been many neat APIs that have slowly made their way to CSS over the years sitting unused.
I really looked to him at that time. I would sneak away during lunch my senior year of high school to read his new Web Standards book. I still regularly check A list Apart, albeit its seldom updated these days. But his approach melded nicely with the other things from XML land I had been reading at the time.
Oddly enough, I much prefer it to the corporate NNGroup site. And that last version reminds me a bit of HN itself. Simple, clean and usable — really simple, really clean and really usable, not mindlessly aping a trend (and getting it wrong) but intelligently setting its own trend.
I wish more sites adopted that style of design.