Note to Jakob Neilsen: 1999 Called & It Wants It’s Web Back
I am not a fan of Jakob Neilsen. Whenever I read his work I get the overwhelming sense that he feels that change is always bad. I think a lot of what he writes needs to be taken in context with wider trends, learning behaviours and user tolerance levels.
Take his latest piece, Fresh vs. Familiar: How Aggressively to Redesign, for example. Right from the first paragraph he makes a huge sweeping statement to setup the rest of the article:
You often hear design team members (or their management) say, “We need a fresh design.” This usually gets redesign projects off on a wrong footing, with the wrong goals and strategy.
I have never heard a designer, manager or other team member say “we need a fresh design” for the sake of it, which is what this statement implies. I think it’s the word ‘fresh’ that’s grating — ‘new’ would be much more accurate. ‘Fresh’ brings connotations of aligning a site to recent trends or buzzes; implementing a poorly thought through idea simply because it’s popular.
New sites arise as a result of businesses evolving and maturing their online strategies to meet their ever changing business requirements as well as their continual drive to meet the needs of their users. If the current design isn’t meeting the objectives of the business (or the user) then it obviously needs changing. Such changes are often so involved that you’re unlikely to hear such an utterance from any semi-savvy client.
His next paragraph sums up Neilsen for me:
Typically, a fresh design will be a worse design simply because it’s new and thus breaks user expectations. A better strategy is to play up familiarity and build on users’ existing knowledge of how a system works.
If everyone thought like that nothing would ever change — and this is the biggest problem I have with Neilsen. It’s his job to point this sort of thing out but I just don’t buy it — you can take reasonable steps to ensure that the transition from old to new design is smooth and as painless as possible for the user.
I’m reminded of some initial reviews of the Mac back in 1984 when it made it’s debut. John C. Dvorak wrote:
The Macintosh uses an experimental pointing device called a “mouse.” There is no evidence that people want to use these things. I don’t want one of these new fangled devices.
Can you imagine controlling a computer without a mouse? It has been a fundamental conduit between man and computer for 25 years. And yet it was written off by some as ‘new fangled’.
Why users want a familiar design
Neilsen says:
When people are visiting websites or using applications, they don’t spend their time analyzing or admiring the design. They focus their attention on the task, the content, and their own data or documents.
Thus, people love a design when they know the features and can immediately locate the ones they need. That is, they love a familiar design.
It’s true that users are likely to be able to accomplish their tasks more efficiently using a design or layout that’s familiar. However, my view is that it doesn’t matter whether a design is familiar or not, as long as it’s usable.
In fact, anytime you release a redesign, prepare for a flood of angry email from customers. It’s a law of nature that users hate change, and they’ll complain every time you move anything around or otherwise reduce their ability to just do what they’ve always done.
Yes if you reduce their ability to do what they’ve always done you’re going to annoy customers. But that shouldn’t prohibit new designs or ideas from emerging — as long as they’re usable.
Think of the recent changes to Facebook — it polarised people. But that was based on a wholesale reshuffle of the content presented when you logged in. The new design mixed in a whole heap of content types on the main page and this didn’t go down well with users — the site was not meeting their needs as well and they couldn’t figure out how to complete previously easy-to-do tasks.
(Having users complain about a redesign doesn’t necessarily mean that it’s bad; if the new design actually has better usability, people will eventually grow to like it. Customer complaints are thus not a reason to avoid all redesigns; they’re simply a reason to avoid changing the design purely to “stay fresh.”)
Yes! There we go! If you’d put that at the top of the article I wouldn’t have felt compelled to write this one.
Neilsen actually makes some good points in his article — evolve UI changes gently, make sure you get the basics right first — but it doesn’t seem framed in the right way to me.
Change is good. Evolution is necessary. Making sure you go about it the right way is what’s crucial.