Jakob Nielsen Takes Potshots at Web 2.0 in Best Intranets of 2007
I've been following
usability guru Jakob Nielsen's annual Best Intranets column for as long as I can
remember. This year
Nielsen specifically mentions web 2.0, albeit in a very condescending way. The summary is
just the start:
"This year's winners emphasized an editorial approach to news on the homepage. They also took a pragmatic approach to many hyped "Web 2.0" techniques. While page design is getting more standardized, there's no agreement on CMS or technology platforms for good intranet design."
Enterprises are always "pragmatic" (a.k.a. conservative) about new technologies, so it comes as no surprise they're cautious with web 2.0. But later in the article, Nielsen gets feisty about the hype...
Intranets and News Feeds
I was intrigued by what Nielsen meant, in his summary, by "an editorial approach to news on the homepage". Here's what he said about news feeds:
"Many intranets have long offered news feeds, but this year's winners have taken extra steps to make their news offerings more relevant to employees, both for internal news and for industry-related external news. Labeling and categorization are more extensive than before, and several intranets let users rate and comment on stories."
He then compares the user ratings to Amazon and weblogs, but takes an unnecessary potshot at the latter by saying that intranet user ratings won't be "degraded by the Bozo effect". Not content with that, he concludes: "ratings and comments from colleagues are likely to be much more useful than those of random blog readers". Charming.
One way around information overload issues is editors filtering the news - and that is what Nielsen meant by an editorial approach to homepage news. He references an intranet by AEP, on which an editor reviews news feeds and "posts only those that will be of most use to the company's employees." Nielsen says this increases employee productivity. He even comes up with a new metric system to test this... employees:
"For example, at JPMorgan Chase, the intranet homepage is viewed 620,000 times per day, so even one superfluous headline that required one second to scan would cost the company the equivalent of 22 full-time employees in lost productivity."
Google Rising
Other trends noted in Nielsen's article: multinational intranets, standard UI (as a lot of intranets are template-based), but no standard CMS (most are homemade). He also states that multimedia continues to grow on Intranets - from photos to videos.
I also thought the list of most used products was interesting, for one main reason - the inclusion of Google products. The most used products were: Windows Server, Google Search Appliance or Google Mini, SharePoint, SQL Server, Google Maps, Omniture, and Vignette. This shows that Google is making headway into the enterprise, as all the other products have been around for years on intranets. Google's products have only started proliferating on intranets in the last couple of years.
Request: Nielsen Without The Anti-Hype
I'm afraid that Jakob Nielsen has a reputation for being, well, annoying. He seems to have a bee in his bonnet about "web 2.0" and continues the cynicism with a section entitled 'Web Trends Without the Hype'. While this is a worthy cause (who needs hype in the enterprise, after all), Nielsen makes some pretty silly comments. e.g.:
"Intranets tend to avoid the over-hyped fads that wash across the Web. Several winners have weblogs this year, but the blogs are restrained, emphasizing useful information instead of "what I did on my last date.""
The unfortunate thing is that managerial people are likely to believe that kind of nonsensical statement, because it comes from a "guru". This is about as bad as the 'what I had for lunch' view of blogs we see on network TV news.
Nielsen also mentions Ajax ("with an emphasis on utility rather than glitz"), employee directory search (a.k.a. the people finder), and wikis - which Nielsen thinks are particularly hyped... and he has a point there.
There's a lot more useful information in the article, so well worth a read if you work on an Intranet. Despite being annoying and occasionally just plain silly, Nielsen does offer a lot of sound - if conservative - advice for Intranets.
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Jakob Nielsen has been irrelevant for quite sometime now. Not only has he missed the whole usability revloution that came with "Web 2.0" techniques, he has failed to embrace it even after some of its concepts have made it to the mainstream already. His opinions are often just a matter of, well, opinion and it's very sad that some people take them as words to live by. Let's not forget that at the very height of his "usability guru" status he was resposnilbe for Sun's website which was utterly un-usable at that time (ever try finding the link to download a Java product circa 2002?)
Posted by: WebDeveloper | January 15, 2007 12:38 PM
I can't take seriously any analysis that uses examples like the JP Morgan one above.
Yes, I'm sure that 620,000 times 1 second totals up to that number of person hours, but that does not mean that they represent the same amount of productivity. Such a comparison ignores that 22 people working full-time bring flow and continuous attention to their tasks. By contrast, one second per person has no real productivity value - the comparison is merely a parlor trick by someone with Excel on their laptop.
A better question would be why the employees of Morgan hit the main page of the intranet 620,000 times each day. Is it just the default home page and they get it each time they run their browser before they go where they really need to? Or are they not finding what they need and spending not second, but several minutes looking for information? Do they find that information or not? THOSE are good questions... obsessing over a single lost second is merely silly.
Posted by: rick gregory | January 15, 2007 1:20 PM
Rick's comments above about the 620,000 hits and theoretical "lost productivity" are right on, a "parlor trick" indeed. Come on Jakob, are we counting lost productivity when those employees have to wait one second more for the elevator, or when they forget their lunch in the fridge and have to walk down the hallway twice?
I hope this isn't the model that Nielsen's fans use in communicating the results of their own studies--"90% of tested users took one second to scan the page! This translates to a waste of four person-months of productivity per year!" This is the kind of absurd statistical nonsense that's gives usability a bad name.
Posted by: Andrew | January 15, 2007 1:42 PM
An executive once responded to such an argument about staff hours saved by an intranet redesign by saying that his staff was salaried so if tasks took slightly longer, the employees would simply have to work slightly longer. I disagreed with this reasoning, but it did show me that these back-of-the-napkin ROI calculations aren't going to convince everyone.
Posted by: Mark Alves | January 15, 2007 7:01 PM
I used to think Nielsen was the god of usability but then I visited his site...
Posted by: Juha | January 15, 2007 7:10 PM
What are you talking about Juha, he has breadcrumb trails and uses blue underlined links! What more do you need?
;-)
Posted by: Richard MacManus | January 15, 2007 7:26 PM
So, what is the conclusion? Shall we implement Intranet based on Web2.0 technology?
Posted by: PohEe.com | January 15, 2007 7:48 PM
Well I think there are elements of web 2.0 that are useful to Intranets, but enterprises do require a bit more control.
Web 2.0 technologies have their uses on an intranet, e.g. a wiki for KM, or an online spreadsheet or Word file for better collaboration. So it would be good if Nielsen recognized this, without turning up his nose and taking ill-informed potshots.
Posted by: Richard MacManus | January 15, 2007 8:04 PM
I think Jacob's advice on News rating needs a serious look in to.
Are news ratings over-hyped?>
http://mediavidea.blogspot.com/2007/01/are-news-ratings-over-hyped.html
Posted by: pramit | January 15, 2007 10:46 PM
I also have followed Nielsen for some time and have found his recommendations obvious, he as pedantic, and his usability directions disconnected.
The telling aspect for me is that not ONE person I know in a leadership role in user interface, design or site creation even knows who he is. I'm talking people at Apple, Adobe and Microsoft as well as Vignette and Documentum.
One look at his site shows that -- if Nielsen had his way -- all magazines and publications would be Courier font on a white piece of paper...doubled spaced for readability of course.
Posted by: Steve | January 16, 2007 6:15 AM
I am glad that people are starting to question Jakob. He reminds me of an old man, crowing in the background that "change is a bad thing". As this article points out, he has some valid comments, but he really has missed the boat. His website, for example, reminds me of a small turd.
Posted by: stu | January 17, 2007 3:24 AM
IMHO, as Web 2.0 could mean chaos determined by consumers disseminating content without limits, an Intranet will need some form of control over users and content, therefore will be somewhat Web 1.5 - 1.75. As I am using Sharepoint 2007 a lot it gives the right balance of user control (with security, policies, logging, auditing etc etc), business processes (workflow), but also allows users to create new sites, subsites and content(docs, wiki, blogs) so to create no impediment. Therefore I believe the way to Web 2.0 is one of "software configuration" rather the software capabilities.
Posted by: stefan demetz | January 21, 2007 7:35 AM
Totally agree with 'web developer' that Jakob Nielson is outdated and behind the times and Over rated.
Posted by: Jermayn Parker | February 8, 2007 12:05 AM