, from oldest to newest:
c'mon Christina, stop being so sheepish!
I'm actually not too bothered by the faults you point out. The biased editorial is the glory of personal publishing on the Internet, and he's just up on his Soapbox like the rest of us.
The bigger sin is that he's confusing his trends. 'Web services' is now the established term for XML-based data exchange standards (primer: http://www.xml.com/pub/a/2001/04/04/webservices/index.html). What he's describing is good ol' hosted functionality. And that, taken to it's logical extension in the application service provider model, has pretty much burned out (see Shirky's explanation: http://www.xml.com/pub/a/2001/10/03/webservices.html).
He's a usability expert, but this is not a usability topic, hence his lack of expertise. I long for more of 'Usability Engineering' - great book.
Posted by victor @ 10/16/2001 07:59 AM pst
~~~
I think you meant peevish...
I think I felt annoyed having read the cooper (who i respect) the Neilsen (who I also respect, believe it or not) than the challis hodge.... the difference in quality hit me hard. I do think blogs are good places to try out new ideas, put out half-baked ideas for baking, and generally ponder and conversate... but I think the newsletter and the alertbox are tools to educate (and seduce, admittedly) and when these two fellows I admire put out misleading and poorly crafted work, i am disapointed.
Posted by christina @ 10/16/2001 10:10 AM pst
~~~
not sheepish as in embarrassed but sheepish as in meek :)
Posted by victor @ 10/16/2001 12:11 PM pst
~~~
The problem I have with JN is that his pronouncements always assume ecommerce of some sort. I work for a dot edu, not a dot com. While we need to have a usable site, our bottom line is not money.
Our site visitors are diverse, and need to find diverse bits of information. And our site is the only place they can find it. We would not benefit from the kinds of services JN discusses in this article (and our users tend to be a bit wary of things like JavaScript and CSS, let alone Passport!).
I'd type some more, but I have to go bake some bricks and smelt some copper...
Posted by Mark @ 10/16/2001 01:25 PM pst
~~~
He's not interested in you, Mark... you don't have $$$. Silly edu!
Posted by christina @ 10/16/2001 01:29 PM pst
~~~
It's not even just a .com vs. .edu thing -- I find very few of Jakob's "sweeping pronouncements" relevant to my daily work, and I do work for a dot-com.
Someone forgot to tell Jakob that Internet business consists of more than e-commerce sites (that, in fact, most of those sites closed down while many other web-based businesses quietly survived).
Posted by Cindy @ 10/16/2001 03:12 PM pst
~~~
While we need to have a usable site, our bottom line is not money.
Mark, I'm not sure it matters what your bottom line is, as long as you have one. I think he targets e-commerce most often simply because it makes the points easier to illustrate if you have a tangible bottom line. Talking about usabilty in terms of money is the easiest way to make CEOs care about it, and buy it.
But I don't think it makes the principles any less valid.
Posted by Jeff @ 10/16/2001 03:19 PM pst
~~~
I think one of the big misconceptions about 'ol Jake is that he is aiming his pronouncements at every website.
He has stated in the past that he is talking about e-commerce websites, not personal or art sites, not even necessarily information sites.
Designers like to imagine he is banning them from using images or colour for their own purposes.
Not so. If your primary goal is to separate your users from their money, then he is probably somewhere on the right track. If you are doing something different, feel free to ignore a lot of it, it doesn't always apply.
Jakob is no different from any number of similar companies is other industries, promoting their messages by exaggeration. Everybody just needs to accept that, take it easy and get on with doing the best job you can for your particular set of circumstances.
Posted by Mathew @ 10/16/2001 03:33 PM pst
~~~
Mathew's post got me thinking. Of course JN always talks about e-commerce. It's like Willie Sutton, who was asked why he robbed banks. "That's where the money is," came the reply.
Clearly e-commerce is where the usability-guru consulting bucks are.
Posted by Ralph Brandi @ 10/17/2001 07:40 PM pst
~~~
