Web usability guru Jakob Nielsen interview

He was called the "Web usability Guru " by the New York Times, known as "The King of Ease" by Internet Magazine, and he passed his Alertbox mailing list and useit.com website to thousands of web designers since 1995 web Usability Knowledge, although some of his ideas may be controversial, at least in the eyes of web designers, he is the web of ease of use in the field of the top leaders, his name is Jakob Nielsen, this is the WDD site to his interview.

can you talk about yourself, how did you get into this field?

I was in the field of usability in 1983 years, and my first project was a character-based interface on mainframes. Later, the main study of the graphical user interface, such as me and my students do a lot of Mac software research, then the Mac software is not easy to use. My early experience was useful for future research because the early Web interface was similar to the IBM3270 mainframe program.

On the whole, the experience of computer systems at all times is useful for a professional in this field, because you can see the problem in the development trend of macroscopic human behavior.

The first decade of my technical career has focused on two issues, how to make those ease-of-use methods more widely used, how to adapt to those big discounts and how to improve the ease of use of online information. In the light of this, I later wrote my first book on Hypertext in 1989 (published in 1990) and an Easy-to-use engineering textbook that was widely used in software projects.

I started studying web usability in the 1994, just to blend the two interests together, and the early web usability was fun, and people rated it as not available on the Web because it was for software programs.

Instead, in recent years, the usability antagonists have begun to claim that the research can only be used on the WEB, unable to push programs and AJAX, and that people are always trying to ignore their users. The reality, of course, is that ease of use applies to anything that has a user interface, whether it's a website, a program, a cell phone, a DV, or something. The specific rules may be different, but the general principles derive from the way humans have formed in the past more than 10,000 years.

Broadband has developed rapidly in recent years, do we still need to focus on page size and load speed?

Yes, but it's not as harsh as the 28.8K dial-up Internet age.

But the time lag principle is the same, because the Internet is connected to people, and even the World War II studies are still established. One of the main principles is that when people click on the next page, the delay should not exceed 1 seconds, otherwise it will feel card, in the broadband era, the United States access users can download about 1MB of data (those in Asia faster, but not including China-translator), so now the problem is not on the Internet, Instead, they are on the server side, where people cram too many ornaments and dynamic objects into the Web page.

Remember, 1 seconds, otherwise the user will feel the card, which is still the entire page, the internal nesting of those pages of AJAX control requirements higher, is 01 seconds, otherwise it will feel card.

in your opinion, what is the best way to test the usability of a website?

Follow the three basic principles, find a trustworthy customer, have them actually visit your site, and then close your mouth and let them speak to you. You only need 5 users to find enough usability problems and keep you busy for a few months. Despite these three simple principles, many studies have found that people are still not fully compliant.

For example, you can't let friends or co-workers test, you should look for external users who don't know anything about your project, they can't muddle through, they have to actually use them, and you can't influence them and not imply how they should operate. That's why it's so important to shut up. The best way to do this is to look for big, experienced test teams to do it, and, of course, the small team can still do it well, and it's economical, and if you follow the basic principles, the developers themselves can do a good job of usability testing.