Of the recent readings for this course, I feel most compelled to comment on the writings of Jakob Nielsen. I had heard of him before, touted as the leading expert of usability. A great deal of the discussion in class was devoted to some apparent contradictions between his ethos and one of his now defunct websites. However, I noticed contradictions on the very page we were asked to look at for class. For example, Nielsen advises designers to "conform to design conventions" by making links blue and to “change the color of visited links” as the ones in Figure 1 appear. However, Figure 2 displays a series of links on the same page that appear as black text, giving no indication that they are in fact links. What’s more is that these links do not change color after they have been clicked, as the blue ones do.
The concerns of the article also seem somewhat subjective and dated, though it was updated within the last two years. For a top ten list of “egregious offenses against users,” such things as advertisements, pdf files and opening new windows seem like either minor inconveniences or simply not everyone’s cup of tea. Considering the work at hand, I am somewhat puzzled by Nielsen’s reputation as a usability guru. His advice strikes me as either blatantly obvious, subjective, or irrelevant. I do not see much insight.
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Figure 2: un-highlighted links |
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Figure 1: Links following Nielsen's guidelines |
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