CHI 97 Electronic Publications: Tutorials
User Interface Design for the WWW
Jakob Nielsen
Sun Microsystems
2550 Garcia Ave.
Mountain View, CA 94043, USA
Email: jakob@eng.sun.com
Web: http://www.useit.com/
Abstract
You are up against a million other Web sites: how do you get users to stay
at your site? Only by providing valuable content and a highly usable
interface. Cool is getting cold.
Keywords
WWW, World Wide Web, Web, Hypertext, Usability.
© 1997 Copyright on this material is held by the authors.
Trends For Website Survival
Let's start by looking at the dominating styles for websites for the last
few years:
- 1993: Just having a server on the Web was enough to show that you were
a pioneer! I remember faithfully going to "What's New With NCSA Mosaic"
every day to see who were putting stuff up on the Web: the pages may have
sucked like a vacuum but they came to us from the other side of the world
which caused a major novelty effect.
- 1994: The main thing in 1994 was to show users how much information you
had. This was the year of home pages that were no more than glorified
hotlists with long bulleted lists of links. At this relatively early stage
of the Web, people were still easily impressed by anybody who had real,
useful content.
- 1995: Focused value-added information became key as users suffered
under ever-increasing information overload. The preferred style for home
page design in 1995 was to provide a clear sense of priority for the user
and to showcase a small set of high-quality information, recognizing that
users normally cover no more than. Less is more definitely became a key
design strategy.
- 1996: I think that web-surfing is dead. Sure, users may check out a few
new sites every now and then, just as they may buy a new magazine from the
newsstand when they are stranded in O'Hare. But to continue the magazine
analogy, most users will probably spend the majority of their time with a
small number of websites that meet their requirements with respect to
quality and content.
Hotlists can only grow so big (especially with the lousy user interfaces
for bookmark management in current webbrowsers), so only a few websites
will be graced with substantial numbers of repeat visitors.
Not only will users have a relationship with a small number of key
websites, the websites will also have to start treating their users as
individuals rather than as a nestful of hungry GET-requests all of whose
mouths get stuffed with bits of the same juicy worm.
The relationship between a website and a user can be enhanced, for example,
by allowing the user to indicate an interest in a specific information
object and then inform that user when the object changes or has been
significantly updated (you don't want to bother users every time you fix a
typo). We have done this at Sun for some time with our bug fixes.
Subscribing customers who are particularly bothered by a certain bug can
mark the SunSolve page for that specific problem and get notified when a
patch is available.
An interesting way of supporting user relationships is the personalized
view of Ziff-Davis' ZD Net. Users can
store an interest profile on the server so that subsequent visits will
produce a list of new stories that match their interests. Of course,
simplistic information filtering based on keyword matching will never do a
perfect job, but they do seem to direct my attention to stories that mostly
interest me, so the feature has succeeded in enhancing the relationship
between me and Ziff.
Future personalized view servers can be expected to use advanced
information filtering methods like relevance feedback and various synonym
matching ideas and may also allow users to help each other find relevant
information.
- 1997: We will finally see real community on the Web. The term
"community" is much misused among Internet pundits, and most current Web
sites have less community than a city bus: at least all the passengers are
going in the same direction. We need Web sites that truly allow users with
common interests to provide value-added services for each other. Also, real
business will happen on the Web (that is, sites will have to do something
real for customers and not just be online brochures).
Top Ten Mistakes In Web Design
1. Using Frames
Splitting a page into frames is very confusing for users since frames break the fundamental
user model of the web page. All of a sudden, you cannot bookmark the
current page and return to it (the bookmark points to another version of
the frameset), URLs stop working, and printouts become difficult. Even
worse, the predictability of user actions goes out the door: who knows what
information will appear where when you click on a link?
2. Gratuitous Use of Bleeding-Edge Technology
Don't try to attract users to your site by bragging about use of the latest
web technology. You may attract a few nerds, but mainstream users will care
more about useful content and your ability to offer good customer service.
Using the latest and greatest before it is even out of beta is a sure way
to discourage users: if their system crashes while visiting your site, you
can bet that many of them will not be back. Unless you are in the business
of selling Internet products or services, it is better to wait until some
experience has been gained with respect to the appropriate ways of using
new techniques. When desktop publishing was young, people put twenty fonts
in their documents: let's avoid similar design bloat on the Web.
As an example: Use VRML if you actually have information that maps
naturally onto a three-dimensional space (e.g., architectural design,
shoot-them-up games, surgery planning). Don't use VRML if your data is
N-dimensional since it is usually better to produce 2-dimensional overviews
that fit with the actual display and input hardware available to the user.
3. Scrolling Text, Marquees, and Constantly Running Animations
Never include page elements that move incessantly. Moving images have an
overpowering effect on the human peripheral vision. A web page should not
emulate Times Square in New York City in its constant attack on the human
senses: give your user some peace and quiet to actually read the text!
Of course, <BLINK> is simply evil. Enough said.
4. Complex URLs
Even though machine-level addressing like the URL should never have been
exposed in the user interface, it is there and we have found that users
actually try to decode the URLs of pages to infer the structure of web
sites. Users do this because of the horrifying lack of support for
navigation and sense of location in current web browsers. Thus, a URL
should contain human-readable directory and file names that reflect the
nature of the information space.
Also, users sometimes need to type in a URL, so try to minimize the risk of
typos by using short names with all lower-case characters and no special
characters (many people don't know how to type a ~).
5. Orphan Pages
Make sure that all pages include a clear indication of what web site they
belong to since users may access pages directly without coming in through
your home page. For the same reason, every page should have a link up to
your home page as well as some indication of where they fit within the
structure of your information space.
6. Long Scrolling Pages
Only 10% of users scroll beyond the information that is visible on the
screen when a page comes up. All critical content and navigation options
should be on the top part of the page.
7. Lack of Navigation Support
Don't assume that users know as much about your site as you do. They always
have difficulty finding information, so they need support in the form of a
strong sense of structure and place. Start your design with a good
understanding of the structure of the information space and communicate
this structure explicitly to the user. Provide a site map and let users
know where they are and where they can go. Also, you will need a good search feature since even the best navigation support will never be enough.
8.
Non-Standard Link Colors
Links to pages that have not been seen by the user are blue; links to
previously seen pages are purple or red. Don't mess with these colors since
the ability to understand what links have been followed is one of the few
navigational aides that is standard in most web browsers. Consistency is
key to teaching users what the link colors mean.
9. Outdated Information
Budget to hire a web gardener as part of your team. You need somebody to
root out the weeds and replant the flowers as the website changes but most
people would rather spend their time creating new content than on
maintenance. In practice, maintenance is a cheap way of enhancing the
content on your website since many old pages keep their relevance and
should be linked into the new pages. Of course, some pages are better off
being removed completely from the server after their expiration date.
10. Overly Long Download Times
I am placing this issue last because most people already know about it; not
because it is the least important.
Traditional human factors guidelines indicate 10 seconds as the maximum
response time before users lose interest. On the web, users have been
trained to endure so much suffering that it may be acceptable to increase
this limit to 15 seconds for a few pages.
Even websites with high-end users need to consider download times: we have
found that many of our customers access Sun's website from home computers
in the evening because they are too busy to surf the web during working
hours. Bandwidth is getting
worse, not better, as
the Internet adds users faster than the infrastructure can keep up.
References
http://www.useit.com/alertbox:
twice-monthly updates on Web usability
http://www.sun.com/sun-on-net/uidesign
http://www.sun.com/sun-on-net/uidesign/sunweb
http://www.sun.com/styleguide
Nielsen, J.
Multimedia and Hypertext: The Internet and Beyond. AP
Professional, Boston, 1995.
Nielsen, J.
Usability Engineering, paperback edition. AP Professional,
Boston, 1994.
CHI 97 Electronic Publications: Tutorials
