Finally I can totally understand Nielsens practice of beating things into our heads. My parents have had dial up forever and still are using it today. The only use there computer gets is my mother checking her yahoo mail once a day. I am convinced this has been the slowest computer in Connecticut for the last 8 years, but it was my only internet access throughout middle school and high school. Getting my own PC my senior year of high school was like an epiphany for me. The speed and ease of everything was amazing, until some sites started loading up with multimedia and my 400$ Dell couldn't handle it. I know what it is like to try to get one piece of information on a site and have to wait 20 minutes for it.
I do think that there should be options for the people with dial up and low speed connections, but I also believe that in a couple of years, everyone will have service that will be able to support streaming media. The price of high speed service will be widely affordable, and the sites will be able to pack on the content. I think that the points Neilsen makes in Chapter 11 are definitley valid, but I think that if someone has high hopes for a website, than multimedia needs to be present. The way we look at the Internet is changing and dial up users are going to get left in the dust.
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When Nielsen said that a large number of people still have dial-up internet connections, I found it hard to believe (because I worked with a bunch of computer geeks, and we all had the latest and greatest equipment). Now, however, that I'm in a different job and sort of in the "real world", I'm shocked to find more and more every day that Nielsen was actually right! My sister actually just got DSL last year, which is better than what she had before, but still much slower than my cable modem. You also have to take into account the speed of the computer - if you have a cable modem on a PC with a clock speed of 450 MHz, it's not going to make much difference. In any event, Nielsen has opened my eyes (and my mind). I found myself really thinking about this when I started to design my site for the final project.
You have to take into account what the user has for speed when building your website.
Honestly...if it wasn't for me, my parents would still have Dial-Up. It's unbelievable that people still have dial-up and even more absurd that we should provide them options for low-speed internet. If you don't even have DSL...why bother being online in the first place? It just doesn't make sense to me.
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