Dressed In Value is a graphic design studio in Louisville, Kentucky.

Tuesday, August 12, 2008

Among the mul­ti­tude of house­hold names in web design and development, there’s one in par­tic­u­lar that I’ve come across many times, yet have never really both­ered to read. That name is Jakob Nielsen, the User Inter­face genius of our day, yeah?. (Here I risk throw­ing my own work into the fire.) From time to time I come across com­ments about the gen­tle­man, like this one from John Gruber:

I’ll just come out and say it: I think Jakob Nielsen’s advice tends to be trite. And his writ­ing style never comes across as actual prose; rather than feel­ing like read­ing an essay, read­ing Jakob Nielsen always feels like read­ing a sum­mary of an essay.

Admit­tedly, these reviews have held sway, which I know isn’t cred­i­ble. Add to that, though, that I just haven’t been able to get past the aes­thet­ics of his pre­sen­ta­tion. I have the same prob­lem with music. No matter how good the lyrics are in a song, if the music is unbe­fit­ting my ears, I simply cannot stand to hear it.

Gruber’s com­ment was in response to what Hank Williams wrote about Nielsen’s web­site, here in part:

Unfor­tu­nately, I have to say, Jakob has per­haps the worst site design I have ever seen. It is as if, while he is hand­ing out the Oscars, he is wear­ing a plaid poly­ester suit. In truth his site is fine from an infor­ma­tion archi­tec­ture per­spec­tive. But from an aes­thet­ics per­spec­tive it is awful. And aes­thet­ics is impor­tant in UI. If you begin to look at some­thing and want to avert your eyes, the site has failed.

I wouldn’t say Nielsen’s web­site is a fail­ure (nor is Williams sug­gest­ing that in an absolute sense), but he has def­i­nitely failed to engage me, and has been fail­ing for years.

What a shame, the idea that our ulti­mate aim is to make merely ‘usable’ or ‘acces­si­ble’ websites. I could be wrong, but my pass­ing famil­iar­ity with Nielsen sug­gests this — and, mys­ti­cally, that if you achieve ‘usable’ it will also some­how be beautiful.

Our indus­try obvi­ously doesn’t need any­more to choose usabil­ity at the loss of engag­ing aes­thet­ics, nor compromised accessibility for beautiful interface. Any glimpse into the rich his­tory of graphic design, book design, typog­ra­phy, art his­tory, pho­tog­ra­phy, etc., will surely bring to our atten­tion that people are more read­ily engaged with any con­tent when there is a bal­ance of tech­ni­cal skill, sub­stance, ben­e­fit, and beauty. And that ought be our aim.