Nielsen redux
It was interesting to take another cruise through Jakob Nielsen’s Designing Web Usability, the seminal book that, when it came out in 2000, defined design standards for web pages.
One interesting aspect is the evolution by which web metaphors become things that everybody knows. An example is the hyperlink: Nielsen recommends using default hyperlink colors (blue for unvisited, purple for visited). At the time of writing, the navigational components of the web weren’t so deeply ingrained that the designer could take for granted that the user could spot and understand hyperlinks.
Among current prevailing design fashions, the link metaphor is the underline, colors are optional, and page layout is sufficiently standardized (with navigational elements usually located in side and top panels) that some links don’t even have special visual characteristics that indicate that they’re a link.
On Nielsen’s site, however, unvisited links are blue and visited links are purple. Is Nielsen an anti-aesthetic curmudgeon? I doubt it. Rather, I expect that he remembers something that the savvy always and forever forget: He remembers that not everybody is savvy.
Remember the aphorism that “If the population of the world were condensed into 100 people…70 would be unable to read…1 would own a computer…etc”? The vast majority of the world has never used a computer. Billions of people have yet to learn the metaphors of web navigation.
Unfortunately, as “we” (the wealthy and young - or, in my case, formerly young) have internalized web metaphors, we’ve made those metaphors more subtle, more dependent on prior knowledge. So the next billion people who learn to use the Web are going to have a harder time. Maybe not much harder - maybe the standardization and improved quality of layout and design elements will militate against the steepness of the learning curve. (Remember chasing pop-up navigation menus around the screen in the late 90s? Who knew that such chaos could exist in 640×480 pixels?)
And, well, I’m not sorry that blue and purple links are no longer standard - I think the Web should be a beautiful as well as functional place. But Nielsen’s thoughts on usability and design are still important and relevant, both in and of themselves, and because they give us a historical base-line we can use to evaluate where we’ve come from, where we’re going, and what we should remember along the way.