Nielsen Snipes E Comm Sites Teams With Macromedia
Adrian Roselli
Member info
User since: 14 Dec 1998
Articles written: 85
Jakob Nielsen, in a busy week, releases a report criticizing e-commerce sites, and teams up with Macromedia to help them make Flash 99% less bad.
E-commerce Is 51% Bad
The first report, from
News.com, describes a study released by the Nielsen Norman Group. The study claims that, from a field of 15 e-commerce sites, in total they met 49 percent of the usability guidelines developed by Nielsen's consulting company.
The L.L. Bean web site scored highest by meeting 66 percent of the guidelines, while Home & Garden had the lowest score, meeting only 38 percent of the guidelines. Amazon.com was left out of the survey, for reasons unknown, even though it ranked in first place two years ago.
Flash May Become 99% Somewhat Bad
Also this week, as covered at
News.com, Macromedia and Nielsen announced that they would team up to create usability guidelines that can take advantage of the UI improvements offered in Flash MX. Of course, these are just guidelines, and there's no guarantee they'll be followed by anyone, but there is at least acknowledgment from Macromedia that improvements can be made in Flash.
Some of us here should be familiar with Nielsen's article,
Flash: 99% Bad, written way back in October of 2000. Well, as of June 3, it's been updated with a sub-heading,
Flash Now Improved, even though NNGroup hasn't actually started working on Flash yet.
Macromedia also has a
press release on their site.
Other Reading
A founder of evolt.org, Adrian Roselli (aardvark) is the Senior Usability Engineer at Algonquin Studios, located in Buffalo, New York.
Adrian has years of experience in graphic design, web design and multimedia design, as well as extensive experience in internet commerce and interface design and usability. He has been developing for the World Wide Web since its inception, and working the design field since 1993. Adrian is a founding member, board member, and writer to evolt.org. In addition, Adrian sits on the Digital Media Advisory Committee for a local SUNY college and a local private college, as well as the board for a local charter school.
You can see his brand-spanking-new blog at http://blog.adrianroselli.com/ as well as his new web site to promote his writing and speaking at AdrianRoselli.com
Adrian authored the usability case study for evolt.org in Usability: The Site Speaks for Itself, published by glasshaus. He has written three chapters for the book Professional Web Graphics for Non Designers, also published by glasshaus. Adrian also managed to get a couple chapters written (and published) for The Web Professional's Handbook before glasshaus went under. They were really quite good. You should have bought more of the books.
