Change vs. Stability in Web Usability Guidelines
Summary: A remarkable 80% of findings from the Web usability studies in the 1990s continue to hold today.
A little History by Jakob Nielsen
10 years ago, I wrote an article on the changes in Web usability from 1994 to 1997. A few of my original findings were no longer valid a mere 3 years after they were issued. But most of the 1994 guidelines held true in 1997 -- and they're still correct today.
Considering how primitive websites were in 1994, it's striking that most of these initial usability guidelines remain valid for today's sites. It's even more impressive when you consider that the Web currently has 120M sites, and my very first study tested only 5 sites with 3 users. This tiny, exploratory study's outstanding outcome and endurance is testament to the power of qualitative usability methodology.
In 1999, I published my book Designing Web Usability: The Practice of Simplicity. I based its guidelines on tests of about 100 websites with 200 users. Over the 5 years between my first test and publishing that first comprehensive book, we learned a lot about Web usability, making it possible to provide sound advice for successful Web design.
Reassessing Old Web Usability Guidelines
It's reasonable to ask whether the guidelines in Designing Web Usability continue to be valid. After all, our current Web usability guidelines are based on testing 831 websites with 2,744 users in 16 countries. The new research is vastly more thorough than the studies I did in the 1990s and has identified more than a thousand new guidelines.
My recent book, Prioritizing Web Usability contains a chapter assessing the guidelines from the 1990s in light of the new findings. (The rest of the book prioritizes the thousands of new usability guidelines according to their importance for business success.)
In the new book, I offer a section on each of the early Web usability guidelines and judge them in relation to current research findings. I award each guideline a number of skulls, depending on how important it is for today's users:
* No skulls means that the issue is no longer a problem.
* 1 skull indicates guidelines that are now minor issues.
* 2 skulls signify medium-impact usability problems.
* 3 skulls indicate issues that still cause major problems in current user testing.
Why Guidelines Change
I remove skulls from a guideline for three reasons that align with the three ways in which a usability issue might be diminished in the modern world.
Technology improvements: Better browsers, faster bandwidth, or other beefed-up technologies make a particular design idea easier to stomach.
Behavioral adaptations: As people grow accustomed to certain interaction techniques, they adapt their behavior, making the techniques easier to use.
Designers exhibit restraint: A design element might remain problematic in principle, but Web designers learn to avoid its most obnoxious forms. The element thus causes fewer problems, simply because it's being abused less often.
Conclusions from the pie chart:
* More than half of the usability findings from the 1990s remain in force.
* Only 10% of the original usability issues have resolved because of improved technology. Yes, there have been many advances in Web technology, but they typically haven't addressed the real issues that cause users to get lost, misinterpret sites, or be annoyed.
* More skulls were taken away because of changing user behavior than because of technology improvements.
Stability of Usability Guidelines
When we add the points that remain in force to those that represent designer restraint, we find that 80% of Web usability insights from the 1990s are still current or potential problems today.
I think 80% is a fairly good performance, considering that my 1999 book was based on data from only 200 users.
On the other hand, we can compare the Web usability guidelines with the durability of application design guidelines from 1986. When I analyzed these guidelines, I found that 90% continue to be valid. This higher score is all the more impressive when you consider that the application guidelines are 13 years older than my Web guidelines.
There are two reasons the application guidelines had higher durability than the Web guidelines:
* The 1986 guidelines were based on more than 25 years of research into application usability. Studies are cited from as far back as 1961. In contrast, my 1999 Web guidelines were based on only 5 years of research. Still, it was worth publishing the book in 1999 instead of waiting another 20 years, because it was unthinkable to let the horrible state of Web usability continue until 2019 without fighting back.
* The Internet has changed more rapidly than computers in general. Even if most of these changes don't impact usability guidelines, some of them do. As a result, we've had to modify the early Web guidelines to a greater extent than what's usually necessary for usability guidelines.
My Comments: I need to get hold of Nielsen's newer book to see his latest web design / usability guidelines, i.e. "Prioritizing Web Usability".
Learning from History
In 1995, the enemies of usability said that user testing might be a good way to improve applications, but that it didn't work for websites. (Ironically, these same people say the opposite today: that usability methods might work for websites, but not for applications.)
In 2000, the enemies of usability said that the usability guidelines might be fine for static websites, but that I was crazy in warning against excessive use of Flash, which "obviously" made for more exciting, dynamic sites.
Now, the enemies of usability say that while I was perhaps right about the early Flash problems, it's not reasonable to apply traditional usability guidelines to " Web 2.0" which proponents claim will revolutionize everything and do away with all that we know. (No, it won't.)
Source:
Jakob Nielsen's Alertbox, June 11, 2007:
Change vs. Stability in Web Usability Guidelines
http://www.useit.com/alertbox/guidelines-change.html
Change vs. Stability in Web Usability Guidelines (Jakob Nielsen's Alertbox)
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