Conference Keynotes

These talks by Jakob Nielsen, Donald Norman, or Bruce "Tog" Tognazzini are typically presented as

• Conference keynotes, including company-internal events
• Kick-off or inspiration at management off-sites

Presentations are typically about one hour long, often followed by Q&A and a discussion period.

The typical lecture fee is $20,000 in the United States (more overseas).
 

Future Trends

The Invisible Computer: Why the computer industry doesn't work the way you think it should
Donald A. Norman

Thomas Edison was a great inventor, but a crappy businessman. Consider the phonograph. Edison was first (he invented it), he had the best technology, and he did a brilliant, logical analysis of the business. As a result, he built a technology-centered phonograph that failed to take into account his customer's needs. In the end, his several companies proved irrelevant and bankrupt.

In the early part of a technology's life cycle, the customer segment is comprised of enthusiasts who nurture the fledgling early products and help them gain power and acceptability. Technology rules the day, guided by feature-driven marketing. Everything changes when products mature. The customers change, and they want different things from the product. Convenience and user experience dominate over technological superiority. This is a difficult transition for a technology-driven industry. This is where the personal computer industry stands today. The customers want change, yet the industry falters, either unwilling or unable to alter its ways. Edison didn't understand this.

If the information technology is to serve the average consumer, the technology companies need to become market driven, task-driven, driven by the real activities of users. Alas, this is a change so drastic that many companies may not be able to make the transition. The very skills that made them so successful in the early stages of the technology are just the opposite of what is needed in the consumer phases.

This talk addresses the changes we might expect to see in the information technology world. And the process by which they might come about.

The Future of User Interfaces
Jakob Nielsen

Current user interfaces were developed for small personal computers that managed dozens or at most hundreds of documents. Computer use is evolving to encompass a variety of devices (desktop, portable, handheld, carphone, etc.) that integrate to form a user's total computational environment. Also, with the Web, people have to deal with millions (and soon billions) of information objects in systems that coordinate the actions of millions of concurrent users. It is clear that a new user interface paradigm is needed. The future of user interfaces is likely to be a content-oriented design rather than the function-oriented windowing systems in common use today. Computers are not about numbers or computation any more. Only by moving to a rich object representation with extensive meta-data on a WebTone server can we hope to handle a world with hundreds of millions of websites. This talk will discuss some likely directions and also argue why some commonly hoped-for panaceas will not work: future UIs will not be the ones shown on Star Trek.

Web Design: Big Picture

The Struggle for the Soul of the Web: Television Versus Telephones as Web Metaphors
Jakob Nielsen

We are in the middle of a struggle for the soul of the Web: should it be a traditional broadcast environment with one-way communication from a small number of branded media properties or should it be a narrow-cast two-way medium where a hundred million flowers bloom into a richly diverse set of services that users can navigate freely? Many consultants, media pundits, and "push" vendors prefer television as the metaphor for Web communication, aiming at advertising-funded business models and bland but glamorous broadcast content. Because of bandwidth limitations, the Web cannot deliver the necessary production values, so more successful designs will utilize content that has high value for a targeted range of users, ideally learning from the one-to-one communication model symbolized by the telephone.

Evil, Stupid, and Lazy Design: Why the Web is so Bad
Jakob Nielsen

There are three fundamentally different reasons for sub-standard user experience online. Luckily, evil design is rare. Fighting stupid design is currently our main way of attack, but it'll soon be necessary to focus more on the third explanation.

You Are Doomed
Jakob Nielsen

In ten years of lecturing about Web design at events in thirteen countries on four continents, we have met Web staff from hundreds of companies who have almost all made the same mistakes in their projects. Worse; we have made these mistakes ourselves. We finally came to realize that the reason for these mistakes is not that we are stupid or that every single company is clueless. Companies are faced with a systemic problem: the Web intrinsically leads you down the wrong path if you approach it without understanding its special characteristics. The natural way people run Web projects based on their non-Web experience leads to fundamental mistakes at all levels: business model, budgeting, project management, information architecture, page design, content authoring, and linking strategy.

Web Design: Operational

Designing Useful Websites
Jakob Nielsen

With a choice between millions of websites, users are not going to waste time on sites that are poorly structured, confusing to navigate, difficult to understand, or just plain unattractive.

The design of a website is the design of a dynamic and interactive user interface which requires very different skills from the design of traditional one-way media like brochures and even television commercials. Because of the need for highly usable dialogue design, many sites designed by traditional advertising methods turn out to be miserable failures when they go on the Web; luckily it is relatively easy to fix this by applying usability engineering methods from the software field.

The Web is not a marcom tool: it's the fundamental substrate upon which you will run your business in the next century. Lack of proper management direction often leads to confusing intranets that wastes millions of dollars in lost employee productivity and to "cool" but useless public websites that turn off customers. Only by embracing usefulness and human-centered interaction design as new strategic directions can companies fully participate in the Internet revolution and become players in the network economy.

Content Usability
Jakob Nielsen

The future of computing will be content-driven to a large extent, particularly on the Web where "content is king." In study after study our test users focus their attention on the information contained in Web pages and pay considerably less attention to navigation elements and graphic decorations. Instead of command-oriented interfaces with their focus on features and profusion of button-bars we will get content-oriented user interfaces that focus on the communicative aspects of computing and maximize the value of the attention economy.

Most user interface work (whether research or practice) has concentrated on application usability; this is true even when it comes to Web studies which mainly look at navigation and search. Content usability raises a whole new range of issues, most of which are poorly understood. What we do know from our studies indicates that:

• most current Web content violates the guidelines for good content
• following simple guidelines for Web writing increases measured usability dramatically (124% and 159% in two of our studies)
• the natural way most companies manage their initial Web projects is guaranteed to lead to poor results
• many usability findings regarding Web content have changed little through our many years of Web user studies (despite drastic changes in Web technology during this period)

This talk will survey a range of studies and experiences regarding content usability, summarize findings, and point out directions for future work.

User Advocacy

The Psychology of Everyday Things
Donald A. Norman

One of Don Norman's most popular talks. This is an updated condensation of Norman's best-selling book, "The Psychology of Everyday Things" (the paperback title is "The Design of Everyday Things"). Designed for the non-technical audience, this lecture provides powerful motivation for the role of usability in design. Never again will you open a door, use your stove, or even turn on a light switch or water faucet without thinking about design.

But the talk is more than fun, more than motivation: it also provides some solid, scientific principles for design, especially the role of conceptual models, the role of perceived affordances, and the power of constraints. The talk is currently being updated with new examples from today's modern world of ever-frustrating technology, whether it be doors, refrigerators, microwave ovens, or computers.

"You haven't seen anything yet," says Norman, "wait until digital and high-definition TV hits homes, coupled with DVD, new set-top boxes, and built-in web browsing. Some companies will get it right: most will get it wrong." The ones that get it wrong clearly didn't read the book or go to the talk.

Why Is Everything So Difficult In The Digital Age?
Donald A. Norman

"The use of the Phonograph must be learned, the same as anything else. ... (One needs) a few days to learn everything about it and only a few weeks practice to acquire all the dexterity in its use."

Why does everything have to be so difficult? We spend far too many hours coaxing our technology into submission, however briefly. We spend time installing it, learning it, restarting it, and then updating it. We are constantly setting the time, changing batteries, re-entering information. We live in the age of digital information, a world that promises multiple blessings. That doesn't mean we are going to like it.

In this talk I take aim at the causes of our frustrations: poor design. It doesn't have to be this way. It is possible to make technology that fits people, but so far, few companies have paid much attention to this problem. I cover the deadly design sins that lead to difficulty: featuritis, over-cleverness, inconsistency, cuteness, being different just to be different, arrogance, technical superiority, and failure to understand human needs, psychology and behavior. I argue for simplicity and elegance, for the adroit use of a cohesive, coherent conceptual model, perceived affordances, constraints, and conventions.

We already know the solution: human-centered design. But human-centered design requires a very different approach to design than is commonly done. It requires paying attention to the needs of customers and everyday people. It requires a multidisciplinary approach, where social scientists work together with engineers and computer scientists to create the products of tomorrow.

What we need is a new design profession. And some good old-fashioned advocacy, advocacy for the right and needs of people.

Technologies always get more complex over time, but complexity can be hidden. Indeed, if we want our technologies to be simpler to use, they might very well have to be more complex inside. Witness the modern automobile, ever more simple to use, ever more complex inside. Contrast this with the modern computer: every more complex inside, ever more difficult to use. The computer companies don't seem to understand.

The double-edged sword is a technology, and technology is like a double-edged sword. It can enhance and diminish our lives. And a good part of the diminishment simply comes from the complexity, a complexity that is unnecessary.

• The time course of a technology.
• The distinction between internal complexity, which is OK, and difficulty for the user, which is not.
• What makes things hard to use? What makes them easy?
• The role of the designer
• The solution: human-centered design
• User advocacy: a new profession.
• There are many problems