Next Nielsen Bruhaha

Recently I came across Get Elastic, an interesting blog about e-commerce. One of its postings is about a piece from Jacob Nielsen, which I had nearly missed: "Web 2.0 can be dangerous."
His bottom-line: "While a modest 2.0 infusion can be beneficial, advanced features are rarely the most important contributor to good user experience or profitable websites. If you get caught up in the hype, you divert attention and resources from the simpler things that really matter. This opportunity cost is the real reason to take it easy on Web 2.0."
Get Elastic's posting takes notice of a possible fallacy in Nielsens argument, as pointed out by GrokDotCom's Howard Kaplan: with the rise of usability being seriously taken into account by a large number of websites nowadays, conversion rates for certain tasks (like completing a purchase at an online-store) didn't improved respectively, they are even rather trending downwards (according to Shop.org).

Nielsen then elaborates that most Web 2.0- and community-features are not suitable for the general public anyway, but should work better on company intranets:

"A company's employees are an actual community with a crucial shared interest: succeeding in business. Employees are pre-vetted: they've been hired and thus presumably have a minimum quality level. In contrast, on the Web, most people are bozos and not worth listening to."

Beg your pardon? Sorry, but in my opinion this is really elitistic bullcrap. From my own experience, Company-communities tend to utterly fail (in contrast to public communities) by intertia-creep. They have a tendency to be build-up top-down, often without taking into account if their users (the employees) are really willing to take part.
Every community, even every single features on a website should help to solve their users' problems to save them time and trouble as good as possible. That's usability to me.


Das nächste Nielsen-Gelächter
Kürzlich bin ich auf Get Elastic gestoßen, ein sehr interessantes E-Commerce-Blog. Ein Posting, das ich dort gefunden habe, trägt den Titel "Jakob Nielsen Thinks Web 2.0 Sucks. Is He Right?" und bezieht sich auf einen Artikel von Jacob Nielsen, den ich beinahe verpasst hätte: "Web 2.0 can be dangerous."

Nielsen's Fazit: "While a modest 2.0 infusion can be beneficial, advanced features are rarely the most important contributor to good user experience or profitable websites. If you get caught up in the hype, you divert attention and resources from the simpler things that really matter. This opportunity cost is the real reason to take it easy on Web 2.0."

Get Elastic hält ein Zitat von GrokDotComs Howard Kaplan dagegen, welcher auf eine interessante Schwachstelle des gesamten Usability-Diskurses hinweist:

"So, a better question for Jakob would be, with so many of the top sites focusing on usability for so many years, why aren’t Conversion Rates any higher? According to the latest Shop.org numbers, they’re not even trending upward."

Ein weiteres Argument Nielsens: Web 2.0- und Community-Features sind besser für Firmen-Intranets als für das Internet geeignet:

"A company's employees are an actual community with a crucial shared interest: succeeding in business. Employees are pre-vetted: they've been hired and thus presumably have a minimum quality level. In contrast, on the Web, most people are bozos and not worth listening to."

Wie bitte? 'Tschuldigung, aber das ist meiner Meinung nach elitistischer Unsinn. Meinen eigenen Erfahrungen nach haben Firmen-Communities die Tendenz an allgemeiner Trägheit zu scheitern -- viel eher als öffentliche Web-Communities; sie werden allzu häufig von oben herab durchregiert und aufgebaut, ohne Rücksichtnahme ob die potentiellen User (die Angestellten) Interesse an einer Teilnahme haben oder nicht.
Jede Community (oder prinzipiell jedes Detail einer Website) sollte spezifische Probleme ihrer Nutzer lösen und ihnen soviel Zeit und Nerven wie möglich sparen, das ist für mich gute Usability.

:) <- Lutz