11 December 1999

It's so smart to be simple

Jack Schofield of the Guardian interviews Jakob Nielsen

Article first appeared in the London Guardian Newspaper

“The web is about customer experience," Nielsen says.
Focus on the customer experience - how easy is it to find and buy a book? - makes it hard to justify the "bouncing heads, spinning logos," and other graphics added to make websites look cool.
Animation is almost a negative design element," Nielsen says. "On the web today, animated graphics equals useless in many people's minds, so they ignore things even if they could in fact be quite good.
Since users mentally strip out the rubbish there's not much point in putting it in, and I suggest Google, the search engine at http://www.google.com/, as a wonderful example of minimalist design.
Another advantage of minimalist designs is that they can be fast. "Response times rule the web: if it's faster, it's better," Nielsen exclaims. "We say this because when we do studies, all users say the same thing: they don't want to wait for slow download times.
 You can do websites based on text. There's so much under-emphasis on content on the web today, but it's why people are online to begin with.
Jakob Nielsen publishes his articles about website design free at http://www.alertbox.com/
Nielsen Norman Group is at http://www.nngroup.com/