Nielsen and the Problem With Thinking About the Present.
Nielsen recently released guidelines about mobile websites, triggering an outburst of the UX community causing him to explain himself. Unfortunately, Nielsen is thinking about the “now”. How we are going to satisfy the user now, what will work given the technologies that are in our disposal now. This could have been a great post for everyone to read and a basis for a healthy exchange of opinions. But, when you turn it into guidelines for everyone to follow, then you limit and conform user experience, suppressing innovation. What Nielsen basically proposed, is that we categorise the features of a mobile site to useful and less useful, and prioritise the former to the smartphone user, creating a trimmed-down version of the site. As a result, this creates two different experiences. One for the mobile user, and one for the desktop user.
“If users do want the longer and more complex information, they are always able to click through to the full site”.
It’s like cleaning our room by dumping the stuff we don’t need at the moment to a drawer or hide them under the bed or the carpet. Our role as UXers is to provide the BEST experience possible. Telling a user that I’m giving you less because that’s what I think you need now and if you want to see more then bummer, is not a guideline I would want to follow. If there is content that can or should be accessed from a limited device (in terms of screen size) then our job is to find the right way to present it without overwhelming the user. If we are going to fix something, then we should do it right. Take apps for example. They are designed to provide a full (as in not crippled or restricted) website experience in limited screen real estate, and they are successful in doing it. In the not so far future, the app experience and mobile web experience could be indistinguishable.
Then, there is that guidelines overload. Every single aspect of the user experience seems to have a guideline one must use. If you violate it, you mess with the natural order of things or something. Don’t get me wrong, I strongly believe that guidelines help us design great experiences and are proved to work but there is no need of death by guidelines. They are a starting point. A “ten commandment” kind of metaphor. It’s the music notation a pianist learns in order to be able to play the instrument in order to start writing his own pieces afterwards. Restrict him too much, and it will be hard for him to be creative and innovative.
What I believe we should start considering, is how to design for the future. Users are increasingly relying on mobile devices (smartphones or tablets) for information and content consumption and ought to have if not the same experience, at least the same features as everyone. Right now, designing the mobile version of the website as an afterthought is the cheap and easy way of “going mobile”. This strategy needs to be changed, not accepted and encouraged by even more guidelines.
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Since i started using Google Reader for mobile, i spend less time skimming the huge amount of my rss feeds. Even when i am on a desktop computer, i use the mobile version of Google Reader because it’s better designed for my needs. However, whenever i find a post that i want to read thoroughly, i put in my “starred items” to process it from my larger screen.
So, what do i exploit from the mobile version? Different needs and requirements which guide different design. I still have all the features there, even the option to switch to the desktop site.
As i interpreted Nielsen, he is trying to propose a “less is more” approach in terms of the interface not of the features. But some features should be more obvious than others. This happens in the desktop sites too. Not all features are in the same level. He states clearly that the mobile site should offer all the products the desktop site offers (otherwise you lose customers who can’t find features they want)…but in different way (otherwise you lose customers who can’t use the site from the mobile device).
Of course a “less is more” approach is always hard to think and decide, especially for our community that does not have a deep design heritage like the industrial design. It requires experience, good analysis and an open-minded team. It requires more (maybe double) work from the team’s side too.
Nielsen’s guidelines drive our design thinking more than our detailed decisions, so i don’t find them restricting or possible to tame innovative design.
Nielsen makes (false) assumptions “I would assume that most industrial-scale sites would be generated from a single back-end product database and content management system…” about implementation and argues about UX contradicting himself “.net: Why have you made no mention of using Responsive Design? JN: Because I was writing about user experience, not implementation.” showing that in this single case, certain factors have not been thoroughly analysed or well thought of.
As his own mobile usability report states, (http://www.useit.com/alertbox/mobile-usability.html) users are becoming more aware of otherwise difficult to grasp interactions (like the horizontal swiping). This means that users evolve as their interaction with the mobile device is a daily event.
Nielsen is talking about the context of use. But, as Josh mentions (http://www.netmagazine.com/opinions/nielsen-wrong-mobile) there is also the intent of use that has to be taken into account. Some people might not want to save an article for later, so we need to provide the best reading experience on the device they are reading it from. These are new factors that need to be taken into account and it seems that in this case, are left out.
I agree that:
A. you have to provide the best reading experience anywhere anytime, but in mobile devices you always have the physical constraints (screen size), which are the most difficult to overcome. That’s what Nielsen says by proposing a guideline: change the way you write the text! Write text for mobile devices! (and there are more detailed guidelines to do that)
B. Users eventually learn and practice on all those hidden interactions, they don’t have another choice, do they? (but this is another great discussion…)
Reading the comments in the .net post about the implementation of the responsive design, there are contradicting views and i do not have the technical knowledge to argue about, but in terms of interaction, what i would to see is this condition:
“if the users browses content from a mobile browser, load the mobile site.”
with the notes below:
– give the option to go to the desktop site
– provide links to the desktop site for features that are not main (here are the hard design decisions and trade-offs, that can be driven from the requirements’ specification)
However, i think that in the near future only one version will be proposed and this will be optimised for the mobile. This will improve what we browse from our desktop computer too. But we need some guidelines for that and i find Nielsen’s proposals rational.
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