Tuesday, December 24, 2002

What is this fetish with lists?

Jakob Nielsen lists his once-in-a-while roll call of things that bug him when he encounters them on the web or in email: Top Ten Web-Design Mistakes of 2002. Nothing new here.

I have to admit: I don't read his Nielsen's Alertbox column very often any more. His stuff has become repetitive, or irrelevent, or more often than not a marketing come-on for one of the reports his company writes that are much too expensive for the vast majority of web designers/developers.

Besides, I'm tired of looking at uglyand hard-to-use sites -- and I don't think his site is ugly because it's supposed to be the embodiment of usability (too many large blocks of ugly type, unorganized lists) -- I think it's ugly because he's either too lazy or too cheap to make a beautiful and usable site -- or maybe he's just unable to put his money where his mouth is.

There is no reason Nielsen can't make a site that embodies the principles he's been blabbing about for years and is also beautiful. Edward Tufte does it with both his site and his books -- maybe that's why he has so many people acitvely applying what he teaches while Nielsen is becoming something of a joke. Tufte demonstrates what he's talking about. Nielsen just blabs.

When Nielsen fixes his site, maybe he'll be relevant again. But until then, yawn.
posted by lee on 12/24/02 at 04:16 PM

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