10 Top Reasons Why Jakob Nielsen’s USEIT.COM is NOT usable, nor intuitive
Usable? Maybe somewhat. Intuitive? Absolutely not. What good is a site if it is not intuitive? A site that stops at usability is really only good if your site visitors are robots, search engines, zombies, and other non-humans. As a little background, Grokdot discusses how usability fits in the larger scope of your website’s ability to convert users. Here’s the list of why useit.com is so un-usable (has someone already registered unuseit.com?:
1. There is no condensed organization of site information. Everything feels so loosely connected, that I don’t know were to begin. Thats why they invented categories, tags, heirarchies, etc…
2. Lack of clear boundaries between sub-sections on the main page
3. Overly busy, and weird layout homepage–hard to know where to start because lack of visual queues.
3. The lack of clearly organized data in a time-oriented fashion, as you might find on a normal website. News should be much more organized in time/archived fashion
4. Page width so wide (totally fluid) that I can’t keep track of the line I am reading on.
5. No images as to break up monotony, or just make it more readable or convey meaning. It’s a website; not “War & Peace.”
6. A site search which makes it difficult to find what you are looking for (more above the fold please).
7. The lack of a clear summary, purpose, goal of what his site is about (neither short nor long).
8. Lack of a sitemap. Even with 600 pages indexed in Google, he could make a bare minimum attempt to create some sort of sitemap. It’s a standard thing these days.
9. So much talk about himself that it’s hard to find anything usable.
10. If I missed other points, I apologize as I had difficulting using his site to find these type of problems.
He is most famous probably cause he was the first to start talking about it, while spending more time promoting himself to tell others how great he is, than on anything else, and in fact, there weren’t a ton of people/businesses directly competing against him for quite some time it seems, so no one else had the opportunity to call themselves experts.
Jakob. It’s time to get with the times and go “Usability 2.0,” and to stop making obscure statements like “The letter ‘C’ is 95% bad”
If you agree with me, link to this article, Sphinn it, or Digg it.
Let’s vote for a new website design usability hero of the web (leave comments below).
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update
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No Mr. Nielson, I will not come work for you, and I will not remove this post. I am not for sale.