Jakob Nielsen at Corillian Connect

September 21, 2005 Comment on this post [8] Posted in Corillian

Sponsored By

I'm down in San Diego (Del Mar actually) at the Corillian Connect Conference (our annual Users' Conference). We had Jakob Nielsen give our keynote presentation. If you're not familiar with Jakob, you should be. He's a usability guru and has been since darn near the web's inception. He started the Nielsen Norman Group along with Donald Norman and added Bruce "Tog" Tognazzini a while back. They're giving a User Experience Conference in Boston and London this year that looks pretty amazing with talks from Amazon and Ebay.

I've been a fan since Jakob's original book Designing Web Usability. A classic and largely still valid today. He also runs UseIt.com. (No RSS though?)

About Scott

Scott Hanselman is a former professor, former Chief Architect in finance, now speaker, consultant, father, diabetic, and Microsoft employee. He is a failed stand-up comic, a cornrower, and a book author.

About Newsletter

Hosting By

Comment on this post [8]

Share on or or use the Permalink

September 21, 2005 23:12

Eh...not as cool as the picture of you with Uhura, but...okay.

Andy

September 22, 2005 1:33

Did you tell him "Web pages full of nothing but text are hard to read"?

Scott

September 22, 2005 18:59

Definitely the highlight of my trip, which was limited to CTAB.

Well, I also enjoyed the presentations by some Hanselman guy, but compared to Nielson? ;)

FYI, a scraped RSS feed of Nielson's site can be found at:

http://bootleg-rss.g-blog.net/useit_com_alertbox.php

Cam

September 23, 2005 11:20

I was under the mistaken impression that Jakob was still charging something like five thousand dollars to pause long enough for a photo to be taken. Has the bubble burst on the usability hype?

secretGeek

September 23, 2005 11:27

I didn't pay him to have a picture taken. :P However, I will be charging people to have their picture taken with ME.

Scott Hanselman

September 24, 2005 21:54

I'm with Scott -- Nielson's site is no advertisement for his usability expertise. As noted, he has no graphics, which he explains this way:

"Download times rule the Web, and since most users have access speeds on the order of 28.8 kbps ..."

Uh ... true?

There's something *too* purist about his theories (or at least on his site), which ignore the subjective value of aesthetics in page/web design. The value of an attractive Web page has some weight in how "usable" it is ...

mike

September 26, 2005 8:18

mike:

+1

I found the mass of text and lack of artwork to break it up quite off putting actually.

I'm not convinced about the 28.8k either.
It may be that that majority of users (in certain countries) are not on broadband (yet) but can you even buy a 28.8k modem any more?!

Ian

September 27, 2005 19:27

Ian:

Buy? No. But I've never been able to connect any faster than that over POTS anyway.

Cam

Comments are closed.