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Jakob Nielsen on intranets and hype
Jakob Nielsen has gotten us used to his conservative style when addressing topics such as usability or portal design. Two days ago, he published a new Alertbox on the 10 best intranets of 2007, and took the opportunity to do his typical web 2.0-bash. This paragraph pretty much sums the tone:
Star ratings and user comments have long been found on public websites — from Amazon.com to weblogs — but they become much more useful on intranets, where they’re not degraded by the Bozo effect. (…) For all these reasons, ratings and comments from colleagues are likely to be much more useful than those of random blog readers.
I guess over the years I’ve grown used to Nielsen’s style of depicting situations, but reading paragraphs like that one make me wonder whether his concept of usability is blending with his own conservative ideas. Sure, he’s a brilliant guy and makes great points more often than not, but usability and design (in the broad sense) need to take factors like participation into consideration.
In this article in particular, Jakob goes on and on about intranets that use Wikis, Ajax or blogging capabilities, never without mentioning how hyped or not some of those concepts are, or should be.
Sometimes, I wish Jakob would be the smart guy he is without putting on the Web 1.0 crash helmet and writing things like “Web Trends Without the Hype”, and richard seems to agree.
Jakob must be suffering from over-consulting and needs a reality check.
Design (and for that matter, usability) is always reinventing itself.
As Andy Clark brilliantly puts it:
“… I do take issue with his notion that just because visitors are familiar with a convention, that makes it right in all the cases. (…) Throughout the history of art, successive generations have often rejected the conventions of the past and invented new rules to challenge the old”
In such a new medium as the web, if we all believe in the J.Nielsen creed we’ll always be narrow minded. I believe in using the right tools, interface or forms of expression to better achieve a result. You know - usability.
Comment by Armando Alves — January 17, 2007 @ 2:20 pm