On 10/4/05, Andreas Boehmer [Addictive Media] <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > How useless is that?! People who subscribe to Jakob Nielsen's newsletter are > *not* normal. They are people who show interest in Usability, people who > have got an above average understanding of Website Structure and Web > Standards.
Believe it or not, people who design and build websites also do use the web from time to time. > Sounds familiar? Of course - it's the kind of stuff Web Standards and > Usability people love chit-chatting about all day long (including us here on > the WSG list). But does it mean they are really the two biggest Usability > problems around? I don't think so. Go onto the street and ask anybody who's > not absolutely fanatic with Usability or Web Standards what they find is the > biggest Usability problem. Will they answer "Oooh, I am really annoyed that > I cannot change the font-sizes in my Internet Explorer browser because the > evil programmer has set it to a fixed font-size"? No, of course they won't > say that. Because it's not the biggest Usability issue in the world, even > though Usability and Web Standards discussions might make you think that. Over the summer I was involved with the development of a major political site (mentions on CNN and in Newsweek, guest appearances by members of the US Congress, tens of thousands of people interacting and discussing, etc.). We had a very prominent address for sending complaints, bugs, suggestions, etc., and after a few days we ran through the emails and looked at the most common complaints. "The text is too small" was among the top three. The number-one complaint was the fixed width of the layout, which is number 9 on Nielsen's list. And we got an awful lot of bug reports from people who had trouble registering and activating their accounts (take another look at Nielsen's list, and you'll find that covered as number 7). -- "May the forces of evil become confused on the way to your house." -- George Carlin ****************************************************** The discussion list for http://webstandardsgroup.org/ See http://webstandardsgroup.org/mail/guidelines.cfm for some hints on posting to the list & getting help ******************************************************
