The Changing Face of the Internet
Wednesday, 8th December 2004
The BBC have an excerpt from an interview with Jakob Nielsen, talking about ten years of usability and improving web design.
The web looks very different today than it did 10 years ago.
…
“Roughly 80% of the [usability issues] we found 10 years ago are still an issue today,” he said.
“Some have gone away because users have changed and 10% have changed because technology has changed.”
Some design crimes, such as splash screens that get between a user and the site they are trying to visit, and web designers indulging their artistic urges have almost disappeared, said Dr Nielsen.
Which is all very nice to know, although I would have to disagree that designers are less indulgent or that that splash screens have all but disappeared.
4 years ago, a web design unit (for an online CV) was included as part of my architecture degree, and we were advised (by this gentleman, who was teaching the unit) to add splash screens (as animated .gifs in most cases) and to be indulgent. We were also told not to use stylesheets, that table layouts were the way of doing things (ok, so 4 years ago they were) and cross-browser compatability was a footnote.
4 years ago, this made me angry. I had already waved a relieved goodbye to font tags, and as the only person in the year who knew any HTML, I did not see why I should be disadvantaged by having to unlearn anything.
Anyway, it was ages ago, the web has moved on, and I hope I have too… except that I (along with the rest of my year) have just graduated, and started getting jobs and I expect a number of my year will be going back and updating the online CVs that they built then, and as designers trying to make a first impression they are going to be indulgent and working to standards that were out of date when they learnt them.
Ben:
Ooo-errr, a slash screen on a CV. That doesn’t sound very pleasant at all.
It’s interesting to think not just how far the web has moved on and the changes in authoring there’ve been but also the uses of the web.
4 years ago, it strikes me Everyman having his CV online would be a novelty (hense the tempation for splash screens, maybe). Maybe that’s why rules you would have applied to printed media were ignored or discarded when designing a web version (every piece of CV advice I’ve ever been given has featured “Don’t include a title coverpage”, for instance).
Now, though, as well as having a CV online being pretty normal, I can’t help feeling that XHTML + CSS may actually be as good or better a choice for writing and presenting one than traditional tools like Word.
In the same way as Eric Meyer’s S5 outdoes Powerpoint through its use of CSS and degradation into logical text, HTML+CSS as a primary document format is tempting for its amply powerful presentation and also ‘usefulness’ (link an online CV into an online portfolio using XML, perhaps? Or even just using clickable hyperlinks on the web and expanding them into readable text using ::after and attribute selectors is a massive presentational benefit).
Interesting (and nostalgic..) read, thanks. It certainly set my mind ticking over far too fast for this time of night…
Thursday 9th, December 2004
at 1:20 am