Jakob Nielsen recently wrote an article “Web 2.0 Can Be Dangerous…” In it he proposes that many Web 2.0 trends are not only useless for web users but can actually cut into your profits.

He covered a lot of ground (definitely check out the article) and made a lot of good points. But a couple things don’t sit too well with me.

Nielsen Bashes AJAX

Nielsen argues AJAX and rich user interfaces are too complicated for the average user. Even though AJAX makes it easier to get more done on one page without reloading, it’s easy for people to miss the subtle changes on the page and think nothing happened. This could be a problem for “add to cart” and “checkout” processes. He recommends you stick with the old-school, page-by-page way of doing things.

“Users often overlooked modest changes, such as when they added something to the cart and it updated only a small area in a corner of the screen. It’s deadly for e-commerce sites when users can’t operate the shopping cart, so it’s usually best to stick to simple shopping-cart designs that everybody understands.”

Kudos to Howard Kaplan over at GrokDotCom for pointing out the fallacy of Nielsen’s arguments.

“Aren’t websites “more usable” today than they were then? Absolutely. So, a better question for Jakob would be, with so many of the top sites focusing on usability for so many years, why aren’t Conversion Rates any higher? According to the latest Shop.org numbers, they’re not even trending upward.

If he’s right, and the “web is a tool” users, as most usability practitioners would like to call your site’s visitors (can you think of any positive meanings to the word ‘users’?), attempt to accomplish tasks, Conversion Rates (the ratio of actions taken per total visitors) should have risen each-and-every year (until, naturally, the big-bad Web2.0 trend came to bring them crashing down).”

Continue Reading:
Jakob Nielsen Thinks Web 2.0 Sucks. Is He Right? »