Preaching to the Perverted

May 24, 2004

Design Eye for the Usability Guy

Anyone who works with the web will most likely know the name Jakob Nielsen. He is the defacto usability guru for the web, and on his site useit.com he spouts off advise about making the web more usable. Ironically (apparantly, irony is not Jakob's strong suit) useit.com is one of the ugliest, most un-user friendly sites in the history of the web.

Enter Design Eye for the Usability Guy... five designers offer some tips for how Jakob can make his site less of an eyesore, which is long overdue, and preserve usability ala his rules. Thank god... maybe more people would care about usability and follow Nielsen's guidelines, if it weren't so damn painful to read them in the first place!

Posted at May 24, 2004 10:47 AM

Comments

That's really funny (but so true...). A while back there was a "FoxTrot" cartoon about "Query Eye For the Database Guy" with all these geeky guys saying stuff like "Null pointers don't have to be dull pointers!"

Posted by: Kleio at May 24, 2004 11:32 AM

about freakin' time.

i first got into reading his stuff while at unext; and upon my first visit i said that while he must know good usibility, he knew nothing about good design, or design at all.

Posted by: amy at May 24, 2004 03:28 PM

I've noticed that all "usability" sites tend to be ugly.

The ones that insist on being perfectly xhtml compliant are usually DULL-looking just to make a point I'm sure. Like the WC3 for example. I guess they'd lose cred if their site looked cool. (I usually aim for "nearly compliant." That's good enough for me... :)

At least Zeldman.com and AListApart.com are pretty cool looking...

Posted by: Kate at June 1, 2004 07:13 AM