John - OK, good. I'm going to be very short. I know you're here to see Jakob,  not me, but just a couple of words of introduction. First, it's my pleasure to  welcome Jakob to Google. He it's not his first time here. He actually was on the  Google initial board, years Advisory Board, years and years ago, and was one of the original early consultants at Google, so he's actually returning. Jakob is, I  think, arguably, the world's foremost expert on usability right now. He wrote a  book last fall called mobile usability, on mobile usability, and I think there's some  copies in the back that if you are interested, some are free, and you can buy  them as well, if you'd like. Jakob has a PhD from the technical institute of  Denmark. He's worked at Bellcore Sun IBM, and now is in his own company  with Don Norman Nielsen. Norman Group. One interesting thing that I found  when I joined Google a few years ago was we were over in 42 and the design  group was centralized at that point, and there was a picture of Jakob on the on  the wall, kind of in an angelic pose, and underneath it, it said, WW JD, and  under that, in case you didn't understand what it said was, what would Jakob  do? So it's kind of a little bit of an irreverent play on Jakob's influence at Google  and the field of usability. So please help me welcome Jakob to the stage.  

Jakob Nielsen - Thank you John. Thank you everybody. Yeah, so I won't really  talk about mobile usability, kind of now, because I'm sure every year, all you're  working that anyway, I'll talk more about the past and the future, really kind of a  

combined little set of things. There. Some of the themes I want to cover that we  actually have a lot of things we know about usability that has that is very stable  in this otherwise fast changing field. I want to touch a bit on the question of the  

specific technology and platforms, whether it matters or not, and kind of both are the answer here. And then I want to end with talking about how we get usability  more widely applied. Before I do that, I'm just going to show you a little video clip of one of which, you know, we do a lot of user testing as you do as well as to  show you a video clip of one of the studies. And this is a study was done  actually in London, as it turns out. But we did it in a hotel because we didn't  have a lab there. So as you may know, in hotels, when you want to get onto the  Internet, they first show like their own hotel screen, and then you kind of click  through that and you get online, right? And for everybody in this room, that's not  anything you consider to be a usability problem, but we have this user, I'm going to show you what happened when he's trying to to get onto the so he's just  trying to get online. Basically, that's the problem. So all of your work is for  nothing because he can't get to Google, right? And the reason I'm showing you  this is that it really, I think this showcases, in many ways, the design challenge  we're facing that we have a lot of users whose mental model of computers and  the internet is like, there's no distinction between what's a browser, what's a  website, what's an operating system, what's in this and that and the other for all  the people in this room, we have those very clear distinctions, and that helps us 

then understand all the fancy stuff. But this guy couldn't even get onto onto the  internet, really good. He couldn't get to Google. It didn't distinguish between  what's if, what's browser, what's a Google what's a website. You know, our  moderator who was running this study, you know, was kind of violating a little bit  some of the guy the rules for doing user testing because he was helping him  here. But the reason for that was that we were not interested here in studying  how he gets online. We're interested in studying how he would use various  websites we had had like actually get him to those websites, which is, why is he  trying to help him? Well, maybe you use another browser, it'll be easier. No, that  was not the problem, actually. So I think we have still a lot of things in usability,  and that's just going to again, a little bit of history show some of the cases of  where I have taken big companies to task. Because, of course, small companies make design mistakes as well, but the big ones are the ones that are worth  talking about. Flash 99% bad. I mean, that was just really in the in that, at that  time, a great kind of assault on usability. WAP was, you know, the early way of  doing mobile, mobile devices. And I think web is a great example of that. The  technology actually does matter, because it's not just that. It was mobile way of  getting onto the internet. It was such a bad way of getting onto the internet that it was simply didn't work. We did a big study of this in 2000 and usually when we  when we do in my company, we do a study, we publish, like a big report with  guidelines and. We recommend you should do design, but in that case, there  was only really one guideline, which was, don't do it because WAP was so bad,  right? PDF, online. So the one I have here, like the search engines, this is  actually not a complaint about Google being bad. It's a complaint about Google  being too good. The others are complained about bad design. This is actually a  complaint about good design, because I think Google has been so good that it  has kind of almost taken over the internet more than I would like to see. But I  can't really ask you to do worse work, so I don't really know how to handle that  problem, other than ask other people to do better work. I guess Amazon's  Kindle, that's another good example of that. The details really matter, because  their first attempt at doing a tablet was really terrible. And, you know, we did user testing on this and just with a handful of people as a great example of why you  can do it with few people, and you will really learn, because we had just with  those few people, it was clear that it was insufferable to do get anything done  on, I would say, on the first on the 2011 model of the tablet. Now last year's  model is already much better. Another exam that, by the way, was, was the web  study. Because we had, I believe we had, like, about 10 users or so on that  study, and after we published the findings that the telecoms industry, then the  entire telephone industry, which is a huge industry, particularly back then, kind of rejected our findings, said, Well, you only test it with so small people, for few  people, and they only had their phones for a week. And it's kind of like, well, if  after a week, you still can't figure out how to, like, get the tonight's weather 

forecast, and you are. We ask people, would you like to use it? And say, No, it's  kind of like, this is not a small finding, in which case for sure, if it had been a little issue, that it wouldn't have been a big enough study to determine big a small  issue, but for big issue, for sure, the latest example is, is Windows eight. And  what I wrote about Windows eight is because Microsoft window, in the singular,  because they abandoned multi multi window, and which is their trademark,  really. And that's another example where it's reportedly they're now going to kind of scale back and do it, do it either right or at least better the second time  around. But for a lot of these, a lot of these cases, lot of these kind of really big  failures, were things that could have been found with relatively small studies. I  mean, our studies are not big studies. We don't have the budget of, you know,  Microsoft usability department or Amazon design group or anything of that  nature. And we find with very small studies, that these have failed products. So I do think that these big companies need to get better, except maybe Google  needs to get worse. I don't know. But because I have been doing these things,  it's been somewhat controversial over the years. And so I do see things like this  from time to time getting out there. This one I kind of like better. This is when I  did a talk with Don Norman, and it's like, feel like the Rebel Alliance, you know,  trying to make things better for for the people. But one of the big things that that  people say kind of against all of this work that I'm talking about here is that when we have our usability findings and these guidelines and recommendations, it  constrains the their creative freedom. So is it true that designers, you know, sort  of suffering under these Nazi usability people? And I would, I would say no, and  I'll give you a few different arguments for that. And so my first one, I'll take an  analogy from this from the field of music, and I'll do it as a little participatory  exercise here. So I'm going to play for you two pieces of music. So this one  piece of music, but performed twice, and it's by two different opera singers, so  they're both going to sing the same little, little piece of an opera. And your job is  to identify which of these two opera singers is Luciano Pavarotti? You know this  rather fat, very famous opera singer, Pavarotti. So which of these two people,  first of The second, they're saying the same thing? Who's Pavarotti? Okay,  exact, same thing. Second, singer, hey. It Okay, so who thinks that number one  was Pavarotti? We have 5% the audience who thinks number two was Pavarotti, and we have 80% audience, and last 15% have no opinion. Okay, so the  majority was right, which means that you guys are all big opera fans. Well done.  But it's clear in this example, it's clear that there's a difference. And the first guy  was a great singer too, but there's still a difference between the singers, and this is a very constrained design problem to create this erratic performance, because every single note they're singing was written more than 100 years ago, every  word they're saying was written more than 100 years ago. And yet there's plenty of creativity left in the performance, and the scientists are nearly that  constrained, you know. And what we're doing in usability is we're documenting 

the facts of the world, which is how you know how things really work. And so as  an example, another example, see if I have a pen, here I have a pen. So here I  have a pen. And since I'm actually giving a lecture, now, I don't really need a  pen. So therefore I'm just going to leave my pen here. You see the pen, right?  I'm going to leave it there. And maybe later, I think maybe I do need my pen  anyway, so I'll get my pen. And do you remember where to leave my pen? I left it here, I swear. So this is bad. I leave my pen here. This is why I want my pen  now I'm very annoyed with Sir Eric Newton. Why did Newton come up with a  stupid law of gravity that causes my pen to not be where I want it? Well, that's  clearly the wrong reaction. It's not Newton's fault that things fall to the ground.  It's not my fault that people have trouble using certain websites. It's because  that's the way human people are. And so in my view, usability constrains design  in one way, which is that it reveals the facts of the world, which is the fact of the  users. And users are very different than you guys. Users are like the first guy we saw in the video, and that's how it is. And they are like that, whether or not we'd  show the video clips, they're like that anyway, and you got to design for the way  people actually are. And so that's really what I'm trying to, kind of get, get  through, is those issues. And we have a lot of things we have learned over the  years about usability. There's also things that are not, no unchangeable facts. I  think that. So let me show another example to demonstrate that. So, what am I  doing now? Anybody knows what I'm doing? Now, you're being very literal  here. I'm guarding against evil spirits. If you've ever been to the British Museum, you will have seen this. This is the gesture for guarding against evil spirits. But  you don't have to go to British Museum. You can also go to louver in Paris, and  you'll see that as well. There's, in fact, endless of these monuments that show  this, guarding against evil spirits. When you hole up like, this is guarding against evil spirits. So this was universally accepted, at least in Syria, you know, 3000  years ago, and today, I think nobody knew, right. So in that sense, that's kind of  like, well, can we use this icon? I mean, well, if it's universally known, yes, I can  use the pinecone gesture to guard against to make you feel I'm guarding you  against evil spirits. On the other hand, there's no inherent reason why that  should be so that can easily change over time. And a great example of that in  the web world is whether blue indicates clickability. There's no real inherent  reason blue should mean click here. For a long time it did, because that was  way all websites worked. And today it's one of the ways. It's probably still  marginal, speaking the best way. But there's not a big, big thing there,  specifically in blue. On the other hand, a lot of other things are pretty long,  lasting and universal. So for example, if you have a big head, you're probably  important guy, right? And that's many 1000 years ago, and we can still see the  same thing today. Or you want to give people an idea of what's ahead, which we sometimes call information, send up before people go there. So this is a photo  from the Las Vegas airport. It's very. Useful, very good usability to have things 

like that, and those are more more universal, or that complexity is inherently  more more difficult to use. So I have both these two kitchen timers, but the one  with the big numbers that can read without glasses, and it's easier to set it and  like, how often do you really need to keep track of like three different roasts at  the same time. It's not nearly, nearly as useful, right? So I think a lot of these  things we have found over the years really do still, still matter. Another example  that a lot of people have been been kind of rejecting is cuts of banner blindness, but we keep finding it again and again. So to the right as an example for some  eye tracking studies, and I put in these little boxes to indicate where the ads are, and they see no fixations there. To the left, on the other hand, I have an example from one of the first studies we did. Enough Is it annoying enough? Yet a little  little running car there. So in that study, we asked people to find out about  delivery information on this flowers website, and nobody could find and this  thing, this blinking delivery truck, was on the screen at all times, and people  couldn't find it. And it's because, you know, if it looks like an it was not an ad, it  was, in fact, important delivery information. But if it looks like an ad, it'll be tuned  out. And this is just a learned behavior that keeps being like that. I'll show you  another example, because it's like, really nice we did a few years ago a study on the Ask website, how can you like not notice that big red right in the middle of  the page, right? But, but that's how it is. And and I can show you, I can spend  another five hours showing you more video clips of the same phenomenon, but  it really, it looks technology really are true. And so what I want to talk about, so  therefore, that's why a lot of the technology issues don't matter as much as we  think. I think there's a lot of tendency in our field to believe that, because we  moved to a new platform, all the rules are different, because we have, let's say,  faster bandwidth, something that things changes. Some things do change.  That's very true, but a lot of them don't, and we are too enamored, I believe, with technology, as opposed to these kind of really basic human factors phenomena.  So I'm going to show you an example of that from one of my my own very early  work, just to show you how I make, you know, bad mistakes as well. So this is a  study I did in 1984 and the problem is, if you have more information you can fit  in the screen, what? How do you do? Why? That's a very what? How do you  deal with that? And so there are two ways of dealing with it. So if I'm going to,  let's say, want to watch view line k right? Is that up or down? Right? So it could  be I move the information up, so that was mental model is up. It could also be  that if you move my viewport down, and now k is visible, those are two different  ways of thinking about the same problem. So at the time, in in 84 I'd been to  some, you know, usability conferences, and had been there was some research  done at IBM. And at IBM, you know, at the time, they had these full, full screen  text only terminals, whatever they're called, 3270 terminals. And they had done  a study showing that if you gave people, if people had the mental model, in this  case, down, then they would perform a little bit better than if they had the mental

model up. So just change what you call the commands. I mean, the same thing  will actually happen. But if you change what you call the commands, people will  be a little bit faster if they think of it being a down command to display the line K. 

And, of course, they test display the line a as well and all that. But, and I had  seen these early computers had to come out at the time, like Mac and such and  stuff like that, really early, revolutionary graphical user interfaces. And so I went  to university that was too poor to buy a Mac and search. They were expensive at the time, so I didn't have one. But I'd seen the demos. And then the demos were very clear to me that you could see the graph use interface, you could really see the text move up in a more smooth manner than you could see in those full  screen terminals. So to me, very much, felt like it was an up command to move  the k up to become visible, because you could see it move up. So we actually  did get hold of a graphical computer at the university, and we implemented this  thing and did the study, and I really expected that now I would prove that  graphical user interfaces required the opposite mental model of text based user  interfaces, because clearly in text it was down, or text only screens were down,  and in graphical user interfaces was up. Our study came out the same as the  IBM study, down was a superior mental model. I mean, not by a lot, but by a  little. And the reason was because the difference between up and down here  was not the difference between text only versus graphical screen. The difference was between you moving something and seeing it being moved. When I saw the demo, I didn't have the computer myself, and when I saw the demo, the text was clearly moving. But when I was there, I was clearly moving. Or the user was  there, they were clearly moving towards K. I mean, their thinking was, I want to  move down the document. And that became the superior, the dominant factor in  which of these two ways of thinking about the problem are superior. And so I put pointers out because I'm kind of arguing against us being too enamored of  technology while admitting that this example, I was too enamored of technology  because I thought that the difference in the type of screen we were using of the  slave we were using would make a difference. In fact, it was a different user's  task that was making the difference. And of course, today we do have acts an  interesting difference, because now we have another way of moving information, which is the with with the gesture, and when you so when you're moving the  gesture, then actually moving to CK actually does feel like an up movement.  That's because now I'm moving now I'm actually moving the text before I was  manipulating the window. So again, it's a difference in the task that makes the  difference, and I think that's important for us to keep remembering. Now after  this long argument about how technology doesn't matter, it actually does matter,  because even though I think the big principles are definitely the same. A lot of  the smaller details are very different, and the details matter so immensely to  usability. It's like people can have sort of longer, like really big picture ideas that  do really right? And if people can't figure out where to click, the entire thing is for

nothing, right? And we have, we've seen a lot of examples of this, one of the  most recent ones to come out was, I think Facebook's home thing for Android  was for poorly West, but a big failure because it didn't design really for Android's  special features. But that is history repeating itself, because the exact same  thing happened has happened many times over with for example, people porting software from Windows to the Mac, and just like Microsoft, earlier versions of  Microsoft Word and things like that that were not really native to that  environment, or when Windows was young, people porting things from dos to  Windows, and it wasn't a graphical user interface. So it's really just another  example of the same point, which is you have to have designed for the  characteristics of the device. And as the devices particularly, the more primitive  or simplistic they are, the more important it becomes a really fit with them. If you  have a very broad general purpose, like powerful it's maybe a little bit less so  important to exactly fit it right. So if you have a really big, huge computer screen  and a very powerful computer, you can suffer a little bit more than it's not 100%  right. And if you have a small, small phone, it's more important that it said that  it's exactly right. And so there's a lot of discussion today about things like  responsive designs and so forth about how you can make things adapt and fit to the different environments, different screen sizes and so forth. And on the one  hand, it's very appealing, because you obviously want to know design one and  design once and and run everywhere. But you know, I remember once we had  the slogan, no code one and run everywhere. And it really was like code once  and run everywhere, but test everywhere as well, because it still broke in half  the cases. And that's the same here. If you're trying to make a design it's like  reform flows itself, and you're using it on different circumstances, then you do  need some different prioritization of features, maybe certain things should not be visible initially, and so forth. So I'm going to show you another example of this, of how the details matter. And this goes back to this web study from 2000 so again, looking at so this was considered to be an advanced mobile phone at the time,  and you can see here that where we if we wanted to see the news, first we get a new screen up, then the upper left and upper right is we get a news menu. Then we click New or select news. Lower left is the menu of news headlines. We  select one of these headlines, let's say rail track. Says head filled line, not in  good state. So then we get an article lower lower right. What has actually  happened is that over four screens, we've gotten two lines of actual news  because they keep repeating the same things over and over again. Now, so for  example, we go from from lower left to lower right. They repeat that headline  that we just clicked on. Now, in traditional design guidelines for things like  websites and so forth, for hypertext navigation, all that the traditional guideline is to actually confirm the user's location. Give them some some navigational  situate, situate situation, and confirm to what they just did they can they know  where they are. Also things like excite Latest News to top line as well. Is another

example of a. Of navigational feedback or confirmation. So in that sense, they're following a lot of the guidelines that in 2000 we would have had for doing a  website for a desktop computer, but for this small display, those guidelines  should actually not be be followed. You should follow other guidelines instead.  That says, really maximize amount of content you're giving to people when you  have that small screen. And interesting enough, it may be that these type of  findings we had back from the old study and kind of relevant again now with  design for watches, because smaller screens are getting popular again. But my  main point anyway is we really had to optimize for the device, the smaller device we get. So I want to talk now about how to broaden this out to to more people,  more companies and and, of course, it's nice that that big companies like  Google has has a great user research and great designers and everything. But,  but we need more companies to do it. We need all 300 million websites to do  well and all of that. So again, I want to reach back to history and give you an  example here. So this is from 1628 so if you go to Stockholm in Sweden today,  you will see this ship here at the museum. It's an old warship, and it was built in  1628 so at the time, Sweden was at war with Poland, and the king decided that  they had to have, like a really big warship to fight the Poles. And so they built the ship that was the biggest ship they had ever built, biggest warship they ever  built. And when it had been built, it was still sitting at the harbor. Hadn't sailed  yet, but the captain said, Well, before we launch the ship, we should do a  stability test on the ship. So you've got all the sailors in deck, and had them run  back and forth. So they run to the one side of the deck, and they run to all of  them run to the other side of the deck, and they run back and forth. So as these  guys run back for us, the ship sort of start leaning more and more tills and tills  and tills. And so at this point of time during the stability test, the Admiral of the  Swedish fleet comes on to down to the harbor and sees what they're doing. And  he says, orders the captain stop that test. We're going to launch this ship now.  So they launched the set sail. They launched the ship. They sail out, and while  they're in the middle of the harbor, a gust of wind comes and blows over the  ship. It keels over, it sinks. And it sank in the middle of Stockholm Harbor, which  is why they recovered it hundreds of years later, and it's a museum now, but it  never made it out of the harbor. It was that unstable a ship. And so this story  actually proved two things. The first, of course, is that Star Trek was right.  Captains are smarter than admirals. But the second thing more to our point is  that test before you launch, you know or your ship will sink, and so it's just  proven hundreds of you. I mean, every time, basically you've got to do it before,  before you launch. I saw another nice t shirt by some guys in Italy that says, test it, or they will detest it. You know, it sounds better in Italian but, but that's kind of  the basic point. So we want to do these very simple early, simple studies and,  and here's an example of a study that that one of my kind of early studies of  some early intranet icons to test them with just four users, and the first one was 

intended to be a bulletin board, symbolizing what's new, and what the user says  was bulletin board, bulletin board, bulletin board laundry. Now, when you have  one of four users telling you that your icon is completely mistaken, that's 25%  but it's not really statistically, you know, reliable number there. So what are they  going to do about that? And so this is where the expertise comes into play. You  interpret this data and you say, well, it's probably not going to actually impact  when you we have people used to use this that they're going to think it's laundry. So we keep the icon, but in further research, we keep in mind if it's going to  cause any issues, and it never did. So that was the correct decision. The next  icon, the middle icon, was in terms of million World Wide Web this was so new  at the time, and it's directly represented in the interface. So what did people  say? Networking on a world scale that's close enough map location global, the  dimensions of the planet really right, completely off the wall, and networking  around the world also pretty close well. So here again, we have just a few  people getting it wrong. It's really the same as for the first icon, statistically  speaking. But here the decision, My decision was, there's something wrong with  this icon. And the reason is, I can refer back to some usability principles, which  in this case is a mismatch in dimensionality. The Globe is a three dimensional  object and the network map is a two dimensional map. And that's a mismatch,  and that's what causes people to not understand the two things don't feel  connected. So we replaced the 3d globe with a flat map, as you can see the  final icon, and. And that worked well. So this is kind of why, if you're going to do  these kind of very small end tests, you cannot really rely on a statistic. You have  to rely on interpretation. So why is it okay to rely on interpretations? Because we do know things about usability. This doesn't mean that these interpretations are  always 100% accurate, but it does mean that they're likely to be correct, and it's  much more it's much better to make it, to make a decision and proceed on your  project, while you know keeping in mind, like with this first icon, that just maybe  you're wrong and you may have to revisit your decision, because remember that no decision is also a decision, and if you don't act on the data, then you are  much more likely to be wrong than if you let yourself be guided by by just a little  little bit of data. So probability of making the right decision actually goes up  dramatically with even a tiny, tiny amount of data. So what we want to do is to  want to expand the use of these user research and usability methods around the world, and I have a little slightly complex chart here to indicate this. This is there  are two ways really of you can how you can do better in terms of usability. And  on the x axis is better methodology. So doing kind of what I and many other  people recommend, and on the y axis we have, you can have better  management support. You can have a more institutionalized, more part of the  official way the companies run. So to kind of, there's a pragmatic how you do it,  and then there's kind of on how it's organizationally instituted and supported. So  the two different ways you can worry about and these bubbles here indicate I did

this. We did a survey among people participating in an event that we run called  usability week. So 244, people positioned their company on these scales. And in fact, there's a fair number people from Google who go to this event, so probably  some of them are you. But of course, anonymous. I can't say where Google is in 

the map according to the Googlers themselves, but you can think about that.  That's your little exercise, take home exercise. But what I want to point out is  that so the size of the bubbles indicate how many people position their company at that spot in the diagram. And what we really want to point out is how they,  vast majority of companies, are in the red zone. So they only they don't do really quite the recommended methodologies, and don't have that much management  support for it, either. And this is, of course, a biased sample, because these are  people come to usability conference. So if we think about all companies in the  world, they would probably be much worse off, you know, but, but this is why  we're still in the early stages of really making design driven by user needs. So  there are some companies up in the green area that do most, or maybe even  everything, for a very few up at the number eight, do everything right. But  another thing is interesting about this chart is we don't have so many people out  in the other corners, the upper left and lower lower right corner. We have a  pretty high correlation between these two dimensions of two different things you  can you can do. So the everyday kind of as I'm doing it, methodology, work and  the management support and how much it's part of the company culture and  institutionalized, these two things tend to go quite, quite together. And that's  interesting, because these are, there are two different sort of strategies for how  to get better design, and different people have different opinions about it. So  actually, in the Nielsen Norman Group, I have been the one advocating the  methodology approach. You know, that's kind of let's do it. And my colleague  Don Norman has been advocating more the management support role. Let's  convince management to do better. And the truth is, really that both of us are  right in the sense that you need both, because these things tend to be Be quite,  as you can see from the data, quite correlated among companies. But if you  think about this point that almost everybody, even among the buyer sampler of  companies, that do care enough about usability to send people to usability  conference, even there, most most companies, are in the red zone. So we're still in the early stages. Are really getting, getting technology to work for people. I  mean, even just before we did this talk, I had trouble getting the projector set up. And thanks to the good AV staff here, we've made it work. But it's amazing. It's  still to this day, you know, we have to struggle of just getting projecting a simple,  simple slideshow, and that's it, I think. And that's because, you know that that  companies, technology companies, still care too much about. Let's put on some  new features as opposed to make the old feature work. I think we need more  attention. Just that simple. No quality assurance, really. Okay. So to conclude  here, some of the big challenges for usability. I think we need to have much 

more focus on productivity growth for knowledge workers, and so much of what  we hear today is more about the fun and playful side of computers. Was also  very important, admittedly, but we do live in an. Knowledge Economy and  supporting essentially our type of work, but many other types of work as well,  collaborative work, all this kind of more information processing work. We don't  really have, I think, a good enough grasp, and that is one of the big reasons that growth in the economy is really slowing down in all the advanced countries, is  we know how to make agriculture more productive, for sure, know how to make  industrial manufacturing more productive. Those those two sectors of the  industry are both doing extremely well and being more and more productive  every year. But our share of the economy, which is much the biggest these days, we don't know how to make us much more productive. And it's numb. It's one of  the reasons we don't know is that it's not worked on very much. So the project  we did recently was about social networking in the enterprise, social networking  in intranet. And we studied a lot of different companies, how who are doing  these type of things, and the common feedback we asked about, so how do you  measure the ROI, the return on investment of your investment in adding these  features to your internal computer system. People said, Well, it's obvious. We  should have that. Just like emails, obvious, we should have it. Well, obvious is  not good enough, because actually not obvious. There's so many we have had  so many other examples of things that sounded good but were not good or were done in a sub optimal manner, that I feel that that's the same here. That if we  really found better ways of measuring which type of computer interfaces really  make people, let's say, better at problem solving, more creative, more able to  get their work done in more high value fashion, we would have, you know, it  would vastly increase our growth of the economy, our contribution to the  Economist. That's, I think maybe the this is one of the really biggest, biggest  thing. Another one is the health risks of Information Technology, where I  particularly want to point out the problem of driver distraction, which is a huge  killer of people. So it's possible that the real answer to driver distraction is the  driverless car. So maybe you guys are onto that, but, but truthfully, even if that  works and it's it'd be at least 10 years before everybody has one, that's for sure.  So let's just look at the 10 year perspective. So over the next 10 years, about 2  million people will be killed by driver distraction worldwide. So one more thing  about this is people work on Android here, you're going to be responsible about  1 million people being killed over the next 10 years. I mean, not personally  responsible, but I mean because they use it wrong and so forth, right? And so  we can, if we can work on driver distraction and really try to not even solve the  problem, just reduce the problem. So if we could reduce driver distraction the  department, we could cut this death in half, that we could save a million people  from being killed over the next 10 years. It may be not as good as curing cancer, but it's almost it's, it's a really major thing that that we could do if we could really 

address this problem some more. There's also the problem about people being,  you know, there used to be this issue about couch potatoes, people sitting in  and look, watching television and getting getting sick, and now we probably just  going to have iPad potatoes instead. So, same type of problem again. There's  also other issues that are maybe not as well known. So the internet has really  been, been pushing a much more shallow approach to information, as we know,  this kind of in out and just kind of click quickly and things and all that. And which  is what information forwarding theory predicts. Because the easier it is to get a  move around, the more people will move around that's and they will move  around information so they don't sort of embed themselves, immerse  themselves deeply. You know, I just wrote a new book. I just can't help myself.  But the truth is that a lot of people don't read books anymore. Just look at like,  here's a web page about this stuff, and you don't really learn as much from a  web page as you do from from, let's say, reading a book. So we need to do  something to overcome this problem and also look at what does it what effect  does this have for, let's say, the school system, or for children's learning, but you know, just for our adult people, our learning, our ability to understand new  things, it's very shallow information environment on the web. Unfortunately, my  final point is about old users, or seniors. So as we all know, is we have a  problem with the aging society in terms of things like social security, because  those pension schemes were introduced when there's a lot of young people  available to pay for each old person to be retired. And nowadays, two things  happen. First of all, people live longer, which, you know, generally speaking  good. And secondly, lower birth rate means there are fewer younger people, so  now there's fewer young people to pay for each old person to be retired. So  that's why Social Security is like going bankrupt soon. We all know that. But  that's only one thing. There's also the problem of going back to the issue of.  Productivity. We know that productivity is declining as people age, in terms of  some of the more raw measures of things you can do, like how fast you can get  various different things done. And so the hope is that in return for that, old  people are hopefully, like, more knowledgeable and so forth. That goes to my  first point. We don't really know yet how to really do well on that. But in any  case, we are an aging society. We are going to have more and more and more  old people around, and so we need to really focus also on supporting old people in use of computers. And that's another thing that's being quite ignored, and  most companies are much more interested in chasing after teenagers and  chasing after grannies. I'm going to show you. This is a is a study that we just  announced, actually, today. So this is a new news the data we did. We did a little study where we compared seniors versus middle aged people, I guess, using a  variety of websites. And you can see here the usability metrics here, basically  seniors have lower success rate. They are slower. They're 43% slower at doing  the same things. They make more more errors, and not surprisingly, they 

therefore don't like the web as much, or these websites as much. So we put all  that together, right? And we can see that we really have a significant problem. If  we want to empower this group of users, and power in so many ways it could be to stay in the workforce longer to solve some of our problems in the economy, or it could be more on a personal fulfillment based thing. I mean, people are living  longer, so they should stay active longer as well. So all these different ways we  

need to really work harder on making websites and other technology more  usable for seniors. I'm going to end with just one video clip of one of the people  in our senior study. So yeah, that's how people that's how real people are, right?  And then so I show this video clip for two reasons. One is that I think his last  reaction is that's the business rationale for doing usability right? Because delete  if you don't, if they can use your site, but the otherwise, the more maybe the  more human or humane issue that we really do need to support a broader set of people, and if we do that, I mean, we all talk about, like, this great future of  computers and how great technology can be, but it only really will be Great if we can support all of these peoples and we can, we just have to work on it. So  thank you very much.  

John - All right, I think we have about 10 minutes for questions, so we have a  mic here, and we also have a Dory that you can post a question to. And let's,  let's take one from the Dory before we get somebody here. You've talked about  this first one. How do you think designing? Think about designing across  devices such as mobile, tablet, laptop, glass, driverless cars, consistency versus any tailored features?  

Jakob Nielsen - Yeah. I mean, I think it is a paradox, because, as I said in my  talk, it's like, on the one hand, technology does not matter. On the other hand, it  does, right? So I think you first have to find out what are the core user needs  and try to make those consistent across the devices. But then you have to, on  the other hand, adapt to the circumstances of the of the specific specific  platform, because if you don't do that, if there is, if it just kind of grates on people as they're using it on that platform, they will just not want to do it. On the other  hand, we're definitely going to have, we already have more of a transmedia  environment where people do move between devices during the day, and if they  can't keep their, I guess, their expectations constant. So it's more like the deeper expectations should be kept constant, but the more surface manifestations  should be adapted to the device.  

John - All right, next one. If anybody has a question here, we've got a mic there.  But have you run any voice related studies? If so, what are the primary insights  that you've gained? 

Jakob Nielsen - Well, I'd say this is so long ago that I'm not sure how much to  translate. I used to work at the phone company, and we did some you know  thing that were only only voice, but it really so long ago that I can't really I think  the main problem, I think, with voice, well, the other thing we've done, of course, is don't have accessibility studies with blind people, and that is voice only as  well. And I think the main thing I want to say about that is it the problem with  voice is that it's one dimensional. It's kind of has low persistence. So as soon as  the word is uttered, it's gone. So memory load is a much harder problem in  anything is, or that's an audio interface. And so that's again, goes back to this  thing about you got it designed for the device, in this case, designed to really try  to minimize memory load. Those are, like the word order becomes more  important, like the thing that people should remember the most should be set set last, which is more important in voice, and we fit on a screen where they can  kind of glance over everything almost equally.  

John - Let's go live. So there's been a movement, especially with touch devices, away from words and menus and more toward, sometimes features that need to be they're not that obviously discoverable. And you kind of discover them by by,  you know, touching sort of randomly and playing around. Do you have any  

advice on how to teach people that are not normally familiar with touch screen  devices how to how to discover these types of features?  

Jakob Nielsen - Yeah. I mean, first of all, I would actually recommend against  that, because I think that discoverability is an inherent problem, and we it's, I  think it's better to make things visually apparent rather than hoping people will  discover them, because most people don't tend to explore so much. Young I  mean, little children do that a lot. They really like to poke around everywhere. So we found in studies with kids that they actually prefer this kind of mind sweeping thing, move my hand around and touch thing and see if that blows up, but if  things happen, right? So that's a nice kind of games, like environment. But for  for grown up users, they tend to be so focused on the thing that they know that  they don't explore other places. I mean, you can do things like having little no  demo mode or reveal modes and some form of animations, but it's, I think those  are all almost like Band Aid type of solutions. So I think anything that's a core  feature, I really would encourage to still emphasize discoverability, because the  majority of people don't like to spend their time playing with computers. You  know, see, we do this again about how we are different than the majority of  people. So the majority of people don't spend so much time exploring, and  therefore they don't. They often will never explore these features, and actually,  almost worse, sometimes they may discover them by mistake, not knowing what they have done. This is called accidental activation, which is a lot of big problem  in touch screens, that you touch something by mistake, and if you didn't know 

what you touched, it comes almost like it literally is blowing up under you. So  that's another kind of downside of that. So yeah,  

John - thank you. So another question, live, please. Hi. I'm wondering, how do  you think about change and change aversion, like when people are iterating on  interfaces or rolling out new versions of a service, that's always a big topic  internally.  

Jakob Nielsen - Yeah? Oh, I think the first thing is to recognize that it is real. And so yeah, if you roll out something and get a lot of nasty email, it's not because  you did a bad job. It's because users just don't like change. So that's the first  thing, just because steel yourself and once I ignore that, but don't take it so  seriously. There's a lot of criticism just when something new comes out, but that  said it is real, and therefore you shouldn't roll new things out just to be new. And  I think there's a lot of problems with the people who work on a design project to  feel that it needs a kind of fresh approach, because you sit staring at this screen all day, whereas the users don't, or even if they do, they don't care about it, so  they don't absorb as much about it. So that would be my kind of another  recommendation is to kind of be conservative and don't change unless it really is a major step up. Because it's a small step up, it's probably not worth it, because  you are going to aggravate a lot of people. So those would be my main  recommendations there and but for sure, we want to do new things, right? So  you want to have new design as well. But big news,  

Speaker - sorry, Mike, as a researcher, how do you distinguish when you're  getting feedback between something? How can you tell if it is change aversion  versus this is actually a step backwards?  

Jakob Nielsen - True, true, true. I mean, you probably can't really, other than you have to expect that there's some change aversion. So therefore, if people just  say, I don't like it, then it's likely to be that it's just because it's different one to  what they already know. On the other hand, if they have, if they have difficulty  using it, well, then you have to, of course, it's possibility that's just because they  are very used to doing things in one way, and that's when you may have to do,  like a longitudinal study, and you may have to actually hire people for a week or  something like and just torture them until they get over that, and then it's still  gonna have the problem. But then it really is bad. On the other hand, if after a  day or two, people are all of a sudden much better, then it's just, it's just a  temporary problem. But, I mean, but still remember that the temporary problem  may become an insurmountable hurdle, because in real life, you can't force  people to use it for two days until they have. You know, gotten better. So often  people just give up on something. I mean, depends on what it is, whether or not 

people will stick through it and but that's how what that's why you need a lot of  these kind of assistance mechanisms that help people. If you move something  around an interface like in the old place, leave a little marker behind for a long  time to teach people where it moved things like that. So you need to kind of help 

people overcome that as much as you can, because it is real.  

Unknown Speaker - I'm concerned. I'm kind of reiterating the last question, but  there's, I've noticed a bit of a trend people backporting mobile interface  paradigms to the desktop, kind of like what Apple did with scrolling. Like, do you  think that's a good move in the long term for the sake of, kind of normalizing  those things, especially for like, like, my kids think in terms of time. Speaker  Devices for like, will that make more sense to them? Inevitably, is it worthwhile,  or is it just, is it just arbitrary?  

Jakob Nielsen - Well, I mean, first of all, it's part of it is arbitrary, like the example show with the pine cone, that's just completely arbitrary, simple. But if that is  simple, people know then, then take advantage of that and then use it. And it  could be the same here, like, if people have a lot of experience with, let's say,  mobile interaction paradigms, then that could be your first gold mine. The first  thing that you go to mine or pick from when you're coming up with ideas for new  design, we definitely leverage what people already know that said, I mean, one  of the points I made in my presentation was that there are differences between  the devices, and one of the big differences is on a desktop computer, you have a much larger screen, you have more accurate pointing device and so forth. So I  don't actually think that we really should move to having only touch interaction  on the desktop, because I think we can do much more. And also, like these  bigger, bigger gestures you have to do on a really big screen, also are more  tiring and so forth as well. So I don't think we should make it the same, but I  think we should try to, I mean, consistency is always good. It's good for its own  sake, because this is why design is a little bit more challenging. Into saying, Oh,  this is how we do it, because you have kind of contrasting trends there,  

John - all right, so let's go two more questions, and I'm going to ask mine first,  and then we'll end with yours. This question, I think, is interesting because it's  from the book, and I'm interested in the relationship between client apps on  mobile devices and web apps, or interaction with web based products, and how  you see that playing out over time, right?  

Jakob Nielsen - Well, I mean, over time, it's a little bit different. I think what we  know now is that the native apps are definitely superior just because of what I  was saying, that you do optimize the device, and the more impoverished the  devices, the more important is that you optimize as much as possible, and that's

what the native native app will do. And that said, I think that over time, we will  expect that the mobile devices gets more powerful, the mobile bandwidth get  gets speedier, and so forth, and also the web, toolkits and whatever get better  

as well. And so I would actually expect that this distinction will probably narrow  and not be as big and and in five years from now, it may well be that no web  designed mobile website will be just as good or better than a native app. So it  may not be something that one would want to invest in for the true long term, but I think for the short term, I would, I would recommend, well, if it's something  that's a big, you know, big, big, important thing, I would recommend doing a  native app. And if it's a small, small scale thing, it's going to have five users,  then just do the website, but, but right now, I would say the app is still better.  

John - And our last question, hi, since in the future in the title of your speech, so  I wonder, what do you think about the future of the gesture control, the input or  something like Xbox Connect? How do you think, do you think that's the future  of the user interface?  

Jakob Nielsen - That's a great, great question. I actually don't think it's the  future. Actually had, like, futures and plural in my, in my, in my title slide,  because I do think that it's going to be more diversified. And I think that's a lot,  lot of environments we're having. Well, having your body be the be the input  device, having the world become the computational environment. I think there's  a lot to be said for that. At the same time, I don't think that's the only thing I even necessarily the optimal thing for a lot of the tasks we will we will want to do. So I  think there's, there's a lot to be said still, for having as big a screen as possible. I don't know what's the biggest screen. Had never yet seen the truly biggest  screen, but like, maybe, like, certainly, the size of an old fashioned big  newspaper is probably the biggest screen we would want to have, but that's  about that size, at least 300 dpi resolution and so forth. So like, millions of pixels type of screen, I think there's a lot of lot of value in that for a lot of the lot of tasks people want to do. So I think, I think both types of interfaces will be there.  Gestures have no several downsides, and they are less precise, and therefore,  certainly, they have less of that persistence, whereas something that's a visual  interface, and there's a reason why all these icons and stuff live have lived for so long, it's because they have a lot of usability and inherent benefits. By being  steady on the on the screen, you can see them. You can remember them. They  tell you what to do what you click on, what's a gesture? I gotta make up the  gesture. I gotta remember the gesture, and so forth. So you probably have a  smaller vocabulary there, that fewer number of fancy gestures you can I mean,  we know even now from tablets, that any advanced gesture you will not see if  you run a study with normal users, because they don't do advanced gestures.  They only do like tap and slide and very simple things.

John - All right. Thank you all for joining us today, and please join me in  welcoming Thank you. Jakob Nielsen 



Last modified: Wednesday, September 17, 2025, 9:13 AM