Enter World: exploring mediated cultures

Wednesday, April 23, 2008

Nielsen fails to support web strengths

I was shocked and angered to see Jakob Nielsen’s response (below) to a student highlighted in his April 21, 2008, Alertbox email:

I WON’T DO YOUR HOMEWORK

Last week I got this email:

“My name is Donald Duck, and I am currently a junior psychology major at Duckburg College. For my senior thesis, I would like to conduct some usability studies in the process of redesigning my old high school’s website. In making this my senior thesis, part of what I have to do is find out what research is currently being done in the field, in order to build upon it. I do not know much about usability or interface design from a research perspective. I am wondering if you might be able to point me in the right direction for where I can get started learning about this field.”

Sorry - I am not going to do your homework for you. Even today, there is such a thing as the library. Or search engines that rapidly will turn up articles such as “Usability 101” to serve as a starting point for online research if you can’t be bothered to crack open a book or research journal:  > http://www.useit.com/alertbox/20030825.html

What good is a usable site if you refuse to connect with the readers? The ability to contact people otherwise remote is at the center of the internet’s democratization of networking. Unless more than the name, “Donald Duck” is surely not the sender, was edited by Nielsen, it appears that the student was asking for resource suggestions to start researching not a 250-word essay to plagiarize.

On top of that, although I am an avid fan of libraries—why discount the student for contacting the most notable primary resource on the topic rather than relying on secondhand information watered down by publishing houses and buried in the stacks? Yet another thing that a usable internet gives us is access to the source.

Nielsen was flat out rude and inconsistent with usability—on top of which, he downplays his own site by referring to it only as a source to use as a last, lazy, resort. Poor form.