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RSS feedsJakob Nielsen, usability expert at the Nielsen Norman Group consultancy (NNG), says poor design and poor usability of intranets and Web sites is losing time and money for firms - though he adds that it is often easy and cheap for firms to carry out tests and improve matters.
Nielsen was in the UK recently as part of the NNG Usability Week tour, helping to present a number of workshops on usability aimed at Internet and intranet designers. He says he is surprised how often firms fail to invest the time and effort to ensure good usability, and argues that they are making a false economy.
"There are two areas where return on investment is core: e-commerce, where you should be making it as easy as possible to find information and products; and intranets, where effectively you could be paying for your employees to waste their time," says Nielsen. "If people don't find what they want on your site they will leave, while a bad search solution on an intranet causes the average company to waste about £400 per year per user. Unless you get these right, you suffer and you get no value from your investment."
Though NNG has seen a lot of registrations for many of its presentations, particularly for its talk on intranets, Nielsen says many firms seem reluctant to sign up for in-depth advice on usability, despite the fact that poor design may lose business. "I always try and emphasise usability as a whole, but there have not been many registrations for this," says Nielsen. "Accessibility too is very important. People want it, but it seems that they don't want to spend a whole day learning how to do it."
One NNG partner is Macromedia, a provider of tools for online development. Macromedia has attracted plenty of criticism in the past from those who feel its technologies, such as Flash, tend to make Web sites less easy to access. Nielsen says NNG has been acting as a consultant to Macromedia for under a year, and improvements have already been made. "A lot of the things that we used to criticise have now been changed, and Macromedia is now really doing some excellent work," he adds.
NNG attended Macromedia's developer conference in Florida last month to encourage good design practices. "Macromedia doing the right thing is one thing, the next challenge is to get all of its developers to do the same," says Nielsen. "That needs an emphasis on usability over glamorous design."
Nielsen notes that many developers are uncertain of how best to balance style against usability. "They fear that if you follow standards you will not be able to innovate," he explains. He admits that there is some justification for this view, but adds that the priority for users is easy access to the content of sites, so spending a lot of time on superficial design is often wasteful.
"Do not try to create a new graphical interface, and don't assume that you can create a better scroll bar," says Nielsen. "Those things take a lot of time and planning. It is the content that is engaging to the user and that is a big enough area for you to innovate in. You should spend your time and money on that. It is also important to remember that online users say that different is bad, so only do new things if they are going to be substantially better."
NNG's own reports have been criticised for not being very user-friendly, often because of their length. This is something that Nielsen says is unavoidable. "Our reports are long and that is unfortunate, but there is so much that has to be covered. We have debated whether we should only give a list of the top 50 things, but we know that in most cases half of what we recommend gets done, half doesn't."
Though NNG offers workshops and advice on usability, Nielsen points out that firms can do a lot to improve matters on their own, especially through usability testing. "Don't wait for us, or users, to point things out. Do tests on your own," he says. "Most mistakes are easy to recognise. It only takes three days to do a study, and if you say, 'We don't have three days,' I say, come on, you can afford to do a small study."
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About Jakob Nielsen
Jakob Nielsen is a usability expert and principal at the Nielsen Norman Group consultancy.
Nielsen co-founded the group in 1998 soon after leaving his position as a Sun Microsystems engineer.
He has invented and patented a number of usability methods.
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