User experience expert Jakob Nielsen, co-founder with Don Norman of the Nielsen Norman Group, decries the poor search capabilities within Web sites. "A lot of Web sites have search that doesn't prioritize results well and you couldn't make any sense of the results even if they were in the right order. We have relatively good search engines for the Internet but the sad thing is, within the Web sites the search engines have not really improved." The Nielsen Norman Group helps organizations design "human-centered" products and services by examining all aspects of the end-user's interaction with a company's services and products. Nielsen complains: "Web sites are also pretty bad at predicting what you want -- all the attempts at personalization have mainly failed." When a searcher's results are shown on a small display, the system's ability to predict what the searcher wants is extremely important, as is its ability to describe things concisely. Nielsen also thinks Web designers need to spend more energy find constructive ways to use this bandwidth: "We're now at a point where it's possible for many users to watch decent-quality video over the Internet. That's a technology question. But this then begs the question, what are you going to use it for in terms of content? Just because you can do it, doesn't mean it's a good idea to do it." (The Age 7 Jun 2004)
posted by Marcus Zillman |
4:00 AM
