Stop Being Boring

I understand what Nielsen is trying to accomplish by telling readers that certain types of media must be either be compressed or not used at all on a site. We need to keep in mind the users whose machines do not possess certain speeds or capabilities. However, I am not totally in agreement with this attitude. It seems to me that by continually resorting to the lowest common design denominator, we are halting the possibility of progress in the field of Web design. If everyone followed the rules laid out by Nielsen, we would have a Web full of extremely usable, but super boring, carbon copy sites. This is not in the best interest of the field because to do this would be to eliminate the presence of competition and ingenuity in content for sites.

Even though a certain content interface may not be the most effective way to get a person directly to where they think they want to be, there is the possibility of pulling users into other unintended parts of sites. If we strive to make all sites purely as tools to find information as quickly as possible, then we will actually be contributing to the problem of short attention spans of users. The more the user expects to find any and all information immediately, the quicker the user will exit the site when they do not find what they are looking for. In essence, by creating sites purely for usability, we are cutting our own windows of time to keep a user’s interest shorter and shorter.

By no means do I purpose to stop the design of sites for this purpose. Obviously we need to continue to let our information sharing techniques develop onward and upward. However, I do disagree with Nielsen that there is a set frame or template that a web designer should use when building. We need to maintain a creative relationship between the designer and the user on some level to keep people interested and demanding more.