Jarvis v. Nielsen

Jeff Jarvis tees off on Jakob Nielsen, Nielsen replies in comments and Jarvis shoots back. Let's see if we can summarize:

• Jarvis points: Nielsen dissed blogs in a Wall Street Journal interview, instead hawking his own e-newsletter usability guidelines while maintaining his own site in an ugly, unusable state.
• Nielsen counterpoints: Jarvis' usability concepts are based on personal experience, not user testing, so they may not apply to average users. His remarks in the WSJ interview were distilled from a much more detailed report on e-newsletter usability.
• Jarvis counter-counterpoints: Nielsen's usability concepts are based on old research, and his site is still ugly and unusable.

You can read the whole thread if you want the gory details.

Now I respect both these guys and follow their work pretty closely. I get Jarvis' stuff via RSS and Nielsen's stuff via e-mail.

They're both right, but not about the same things.

I know well I do not represent an "average" or "typical" Internet user, so I wince when I see people try to assign their personal usage behaviors to any more than an audience of one. Point to Nielsen.

When designing anything online, one must differentiate between "target" users of a particular service (characteristics of whom might be developed using personas) and setting the low common denominators of usability. Those common denominators are what I think Nielsen's heuristics are all about, but Jarvis is right: you can't design everything for an "average" user, especially not until you narrow the user base to something smaller than, potentially, the whole Internet. Point to Jarvis.

E-mail spam definitely diminishes the effectiveness of even the most honorable e-mail marketing and communications efforts. Better usability of legitimate messages does no good for people who get fed up and shut down their attention to the whole channel. Point to Jarvis.

But antispam measures at the Internet service provider and end-user levels seem to make the spam problem at least tolerable enough that e-mail remains the No. 1 thing people do online. Yes, RSS comes closest to replicating its subscribe/request/deliver functionality, seems less vulnerable to spam, and may catch and pass e-mail someday. Someday. Not today. Point to Nielsen.

Blogs, RSS, podcasts, vodcasts and social media all represent emerging and encouraging communications channels. Done well, they're informative, entertaining, efficient, educational or some combination. Sounds like a legitimate marketing channel to me, too. Point to Jarvis.

Done poorly, they're wastes of bandwidth, just like a poorly crafted e-mail message. And spam may have at least as much effect on the signal-to-noise ratio of blogs and socialware as it does e-mail. Point to Nielsen.

Nielsen's Web site is not visually attractive. OK, it's ugly. As such, excellent graphic designers all over the world have proposed new faces for it. Point to Jarvis.

But it is very usable. The text is big and clear. The writing is direct. The search engine and link navigation both fetch results from everything Nielsen has ever posted, and the low-graphics format makes it super-fast and inherently printer-friendly. That's probably why he's in no hurry to accept all the free design advice he attracts. Point to Nielsen.

OK, everyone's a winner here. Guys, grab your stuffed tigers from the prize wall and move on down the midway, please. :-)

Update (1:43 p.m. EDT 6/21): The Slashdotters have their say about Nielsen's WSJ interview. Some signal, some noise; set your thresholds accordingly.