Despite the fact that “usability” is not a very usable word, Jakob Nielsen has declared (because when you are an EXPERT you get to declare things. The rest of us merely get to suggest. Maybe you should have worked harder at school, huh?) that all the excitement surrounding web 2.0 (dunno, never heard of it, either) has caused leading web companies to ignore good design.
Whilst I would dearly love for this to mean that Nielsen has spent the past year watching as the CEO’s of Flickr and Facebook walk right past Phillippe Starck’s offices without even looking in the window, it apparently means that in the headlong stampede to look as web 2.0 as digitally possible, companies are neglecting to make their sites easy to use. Sayeth Nielsen:
The idea of community, user generated content and more dynamic web pages are not inherently bad… (but) they should be secondary to the primary things sites should get right. The main criticism or problem is that I do not think these things are as useful as the primary things.”
By “primary things”, Nielsen means – and the man has a one track mind – usability. He points out that most people do not wish to generate content, they just want to use. He concludes that designing a website for the benefit of the small percentage of tragic losers committed individuals who create content will make it less useful for the majority of users.
Which is why I have managed to convince Mat not to re-write our entire site in Latin, complete with a Flash-based entry page which requires you to list – in order – the order of succession in Pharonic Egypt whilst verifying your age in case we try to sell you a martini.
Ah – you’ve put words in Jakob’s pretty mouth. That’s bad of you. He never suggests that the primary purpose of a site is usability (because that’s a solecism).
What he says (correctly, I suspect, if a little obviously) is that most people use the web as a collection of tools. Search Engines help me find things. Content sites help me answer questions. Web mail helps me send email. Networking sites help me manage my network. Media sharing sites help me share my photographs and videos. File storage sites help me keep backups and share large files with people. And so on.
UGC and “Social Networking” aren’t really an end in themselves most of the time. We have to consider the motivations of the Us who G the C in the first place. Let’s imagine that these are threefold:
1) We want to share something with our immediate friends, colleagues and family. Roxy used to send around a family newsletter because it was easier to do than write individual letters, but now she has a blog instead. All the comments on her blog are from people she knows (well mostly).
2) We want to promote ourselves to a wider community. Jon used to promote his club night using fliers that he handed out after other people’s gigs and fly-posters around Shoreditch, and listings in TimeOut. Now he has a MySpace page.
3) We are bored (or dispossessed), and we find that generating content in online forums somehow assuages this. Anyone who has internet dated will sort of understand what I mean — there’s a game-like quality to online communities (how many friends do I have? what can we swap? is my karma-rating higher than yours?) that makes them mildly addictive.
So – two out of three motives are “real-world” driven: i.e. they point outwards to external motivations. Only the last is “an end in itself.”
Make sense? Support Jakob? Don’t know. The man’s only trying to be controversial, after all.
I don’t really think I have put words in his mouth, Mat (nor anything else, scandal-seekers). He remains amusingly obsessed with usability, whilst rarely paying little attention to the possibility that the usability of a “thing may be a function of cultural capital, rather than an innate quality. That was really all I was suggesting, in my non-controversy-generating (ahem) manner.
But you raise an interesting point, or, rather, 3 interesting points about UGC…
There’s really no difference between your points 1 and 2, I would suggest. The only difference between 1 and 2 is that you know the people in 1. Both 1 and 2 are really just variations on 3 – people create content for the same reason people have always created: the formation and promulgation of identity. Roxy’s blog and Jon’s MySpace are merely extensions of their publicly projected identity, no different to Pepys’ diary or Dorothy Parker’s journalism.
Online UGC is, at root, the presentation of the self, the continual formation of idenitity. Promoting a gig or letting friends know about a vacation may very well have “real world” pay-offs, but they are driven in the first instance by the need to present oneself convincingly to the world.
Yep. Nothing to disagree with there. On the other hand, I rarely think (when buying a new pair of trousers, say, or writing an article for this blog) “I need to present myself concvincingly to the world” – or “it’s all part of the continual formation of my identity.”
While you’re clearly right – I wonder if you’ve shifted the frame of reference too much. There’s an amusing (and very geeky) post over at Drivl about movie representations of computer code.
One of the respondents notes:
Is your note about “the presentation of the self” actually reductio ad absurdum? No. You make a valid point. But many people (say Pepys) when asked “why do you keep a diary” might reasonably answer “so that I can look back on my life and remember what happened, and how I felt.”
We have to be careful to reduce motives & purposes to a point at which they can be usefully applied. Sometimes this means not reducing them too far.
Leaving aside any debate about the motivations behind UGC isn’t Nielsen making a good point? Sure, its fun to laugh at a man who would only consider marriage if he deemed his wife ‘useable’ but I think in the case of web 2.0 usability is a key factor. As Mat says people use the web for search, content and shopping all of which are means to ends (a product, service or most likely information) but sites relying on UGC don’t have the same ends (if any at all) but they must still be usable if they are to enjoy success.
Whilst Web 2.0 is a pretty spurious umbrella term that can mean a myriad of different things few would disagree that by and large web 2.0 champions a greater emphasis on UGC. It seems Nielsen is reminding us that whilst its fun to geek out on an awesome new website (if you have a propensity toward such things) it is important that web developers don’t lose sight of the goal: getting people hooked and that boils down to usability. Look at Youtube, Facebook, Myspace et al, they’re successful because they are easy to use – it doesn’t take much to upload content of your own or look at other people’s content. As a result of being user friendly more people begin to use the site and more hits (you guessed it folks) means more money.
Whilst a new site/service/mini-web-revolution must have a USP this is almost secondary to it being easy to use as that is what will keep people going back for more. In that sense I think Nielsen is on to a winner.
Like everything else on the web if it ain’t easy to use you can bet your house its either gonna fail or get bought out/copied by someone who can make it usable and this is the case UGC or not.
[...] So, the question is, was the 2005/2006 arrival of Web 2.0 really just a question of the press waking up to social trends that had been going since 1999 but which everyone had assumed dead in the water because of the famous bubble. New user interface design pattern are memorable but usability remains tantamount. [...]