Learning GUI lessons From Yahoo! and Jakob Nielson
User Interface guru Jakob Nielson is known for his forthright, even cranky, assessments of big-company graphical user interfaces. To put it bluntly, he thinks most interfaces for desktop software and Web sites are pretty poor.
But Nielson loves the humble homepage of Yahoo!, and urges interface designers on and off the Web to learn lessons from it. Chief among Yahoo!’s right moves, according to Nielson:
– A great deal of information is packed into the front page of the site, offering a thorough knowledge of what lies on pages one level below. Yet careful arrangement of font sizes, and ample use of white space on the site keep the feeling open and uncluttered.
– Colors are simple and few. Contrasts between background colors and text colors are stark.
– The page makes few demands on the user’s technology. It looks pretty much the same on old browsers, low-resolution screens and PCs without plug-ins as it does on suped-up machines.
– Yahoo! links to information resources regardless of whether it has a financial interest in destination sites, thus delivering value to users. Yahoo! generally avoids the common sin of many Web sites, which is to offer easy access to second-best resources that deliver a private payoff in exchange for special placement.
– Light graphics and limited use of rich media keep Yahoo!’s homepage nimble — it downloads fast even on slow connections.
Nielson does have some reservations, though. He tells readers of his online column, Alertbox [http://www.alertbox.com], flat out: “Avoid Yahoo’s mistakes: Allocate editorial resources to maintain [your] site and keep it meticulously up-to-date … and make sure to emphasize high-quality or recommended information.” Also, Nielson finds Yahoo! far less of a “smart system” than it should be; the site doesn’t seem, in his opinion, to learn and react to site visitors’ preferences.
“Discover users’ goals and design the service to support these goals and not the things you think users ought to want,” he tells interface designers.
That last point is perhaps the most salient of all. The discipline to recognize what users actually do on your site, and to avoid the blinders of your own expectations of what they’ll do, is hard-won.
Yahoo! is a notably bright light in Jakob Nielson’s constellation of user interfaces, but even the pioneers there don’t seem to get this all-important point, at least according to Nielson.
