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Hmmm... Shall I mark Dean Allen not in the Kult of Jakob? I think so!
Posted by vanderwal @ 10/16/2001 05:54 PM pst
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harrumph. even i, a self-professed ranter, is getting tired of all the ranting.
so we know what Dean doesn't like. but what the hell does he like?
enough ranting, i'll go ask him.
Posted by victor @ 10/16/2001 06:09 PM pst
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Well, I could just indicate that all the wanky blather in the first part of the post summarizes the things I like, but for the here and now I'll say that what I like is the act and craft of rendering speech visually, of making language retrievable, and that this craft is something about which we have no shortage of accumulated knowledge, and in the execution of which we have no shortage of powerful tools, and when those whose agenda is one of making as much freaking money as possible talking about publishing x (the definition of x is hardly the issue, apparently) while manufacturing shaky rules of deportment that flout all that accumulated knowledge and plainly have no taste besides, I say "hey, step away from this thing I like, you greedy, ignorant man."
Posted by Dean Allen @ 10/17/2001 01:58 AM pst
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One one level I agree, that the holier-than-thou tone these pronouncements often display is highly annoying and sometimes counter-productive.
But I don't believe our accumulated knowledge of HOW to design is keeping up with our accumulated ideas of WHAT to design. Technology moves forward, innovation happens, and we're all struggling to keep up. My bigger concern is seeing my technology-normal friends and family struggle with the use of everyday products and services, much less find any beauty in them.
I think the companies who don't give a rat's ass about design are much more harmful to society and much more deserving of our wrath than J.N.
Posted by victor @ 10/17/2001 09:24 AM pst
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I have problems with JNs cookie cutter approach to many design/development solutions. The cookie cutter approach set a mindset that there is only one approach to a solution. We all know this is not the case. I find the best solution is often precluded by clients thinking it is "un-Jakob". JN has moved away from his understanding usability from testing and understanding the user, the client, the technology, and the content to these tenents, which many in the Kult of Jakob see as usability commandments. JN has shot his credability in the foot by making these commandments.
IAs and usability folks can learn a lot from the media/communication critiques. This context understands the audience, understands that the message needs to be clear and accessable, and the form of the content needs to mesh with the audience. If your user aurdience is rural farmers having a bus stop campaign with cutting edge graphic design is not your tool for your distribution of information. In a Web-based world cutting edge graphic designers will may not give credence to your message wrapped in three colors from the 216 color palette and little imagery.
What Jakob best understands and uses is to create extreme messages that grab attention and that do not require thinking on the part of the user/developer/designer.
Posted by vanderwal @ 10/17/2001 09:42 AM pst
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"un-jakob" - yup, hit that one a couple of times. A couple of years ago, the energies of my advocacy were about user-centred design, listening to users, testing, prototyping... now I have to devote a lot more to doing this plus guarding against the post-user-test "knee-jerk" of my bosses/clients.
data-gathering is not the same as, and does not automatically lead to: extrapolation, analysis, synthesis or innovation...
and though i'm guilty of ranting (i think it comes with the territory) i certainly agree with y'all that Jakob has to show he has some more strings to his bow...
but hey - what sells, sells. right??? :-(
Posted by matt @ 10/17/2001 02:31 PM pst
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Ad Hoc Logic
1. Simple articles are simple.
2. Complex articles are complex.
3. Simple articles are more simple than complex articles.
4. Simple articles are easy to read, easy to understand, and easy to discuss.
5. Articles that are easy to read, easy to understand, and easy to discuss, have better usability than complex articles.
6. Jakob Nielsen cares about usability.
7. Therefore, Jakob Nielsen cares about creating simple articles.
I hate to say it, but maybe Jakob is doing something right. We are mice, running around in a maze. We fire out words and we make tiny little thumps in the world. Jakob walks around like an ogre and whacks people with a big club. People step on mice, they listen to ogres. They also pay ogres whereas they do not pay mice.
My real advice? We should all stop complaining. If we think we can do a better job, we should do some research and publish it.
If you think the quality of his work is poor, do better. People will start to pay attention to you if you produce excellent articles. That is the best way to "fight" against Nielsen.
Posted by John S. Rhodes @ 10/17/2001 03:52 PM pst
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um, I think there's an error in that logic. In between steps 4 and 5 you assume simple = easy. It's a common assumption in our field and I think it's wrong.
To take an extreme example, atomic physics is complex. But if I explained it very well, using great information graphics, etc., I could help make the topic easy to understand. This does not make either the subject or the presentation simple.
Some things are just complex by their very nature, and no amount of design will change that. I think designing web sites can be relatively complex at times. Discussing them in an oversimplified manner doesn't bring us much closer to a solution.
That said, I agree with the (implied) conclusion that people will read simple articles, mostly because people are generally lazy, myself included, and don't have the will to plow through stuffy, academic papers all the time.
Posted by victor @ 10/17/2001 07:41 PM pst
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*sigh*
Victor, you are correct. i was very sloppy. I should have just posted this and walked away...
"My real advice? We should all stop complaining. If we think we can do a better job, we should do some research and publish it."
Posted by John S. Rhodes @ 10/17/2001 08:22 PM pst
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OK, hoping to wrap up my thoughts with something productive and then I'll stop crowding this comments area...
If we're more likely to read articles that are simple and/or easy and less likely to read articles that are complex, is it possible to determine the threshold between the two? If so, it would help us chunk our knowledge more affectively, writing articles that people will read, yet still recording everything we have to say.
I thought of this while reading a paper on stories and knowledge management: http://www.research.ibm.com/knowsoc/project_paper.html. I had many reasons to be interested: met the author (nice guy), talks about storytelling, Christopher Alexander, KM, and other neat stuff. But at some point in the article I lost interest and started scanning. Is it my attention span? The procession of grey paragraphs? There's probably quite a few variables, but not too many that it couldn't be studied.
(incidentally, I've been thinking that books, though I love 'em, are such an old fashioned medium, mostly due to their size. hence the proliferation of those tiny, pocket-sized books you see on the counter at bookstores these days)
Posted by victor @ 10/18/2001 07:56 AM pst
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Victor -- chunking and intermittent headers are helpful. There is nothing wrong with skimming, to some degree it is helpful. Much of what we read is repetative from what other sources write about. One of the main point of reading for breadth is to find items that contradict your current knowledge or to offer new methods of looking at what you are doing. I find books to be quite helpful (non-fiction books for this point) in that they can be scanned for content relevant to what you are interested in that moment and what is most important is catching the caveats. This is also known as gutting a book. A book may have value for many subjects and instances and each of these uses may have no relation or may even have polar relations (how to build and algorythm for a synomic search and when to avoid synomic searches).
I also have a prediliction for magazine and journal articles, which too can scanned or gutted, if you prefer. The articles I enjoy seem to follow some of the following pattern: outline a problem, a list of possible solutions, methods for chosing the right solution(s), an illustration of how to (code, a picture of the resultant documentation, etc.), a few items to watch out for, and where to find more information. I use articles as these as a whole, or gut for caveats and cures when I bungle something, use as a defense of a chosen solution, or as a reference for more information. This may contain a string of simplistic snipets, but it also provides an approach of how to think about the problem at hand and when the prescribed solution may not be the optimal approach.
The cookie cutter approach is cute, but simple articles on how to dress casual in the work place lead to 500k tech marketing folks walking around with shortish gelled spiky hair, slim retangular glasses, in french blue shirts, and khaki pants looking like each other in the late 90s. It is like JN wrote an article on the usability of a tech marketer: your hyperlinks must always be blue and your shirt must match the link so the potential customer will associate your shirt color with the color of the hyper link and "click" you. Bingo you have a new client/buyer. You also have indistinguishable people that don't understand their product (it is okay as they can easily use their buzzwords to get a job at e-X for more money) but might be mistaken for someone that can provide the right "solution".
Simple solutions that provide an understanding of how to get to that correct endpoint is much better. Along the way easy to understand writing and illustrations can provide a better way to educate than a cookie cutter approach. Showing where you want to go and pointing out there are many ways to get to the same endpoint (some better than others for the given situations) and showing how to get to the endpoint step by simple step should work. (Then again it is always fun to rant).
Posted by vanderwal @ 10/18/2001 03:23 PM pst
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