This installment of Champions of Web publishing features Jakob Nielsen, author of Homepage Usability: 50 Websites Deconstructed, and principal and co-founder of the Nielsen Norman Group. Nielsen is perhaps the best known advocate for simplifying the online user experience. He has invented several usability methods and holds 71 patents in the U.S., primarily surrounding the ways to make the Internet easier to use. His column on Web usability has been published since 1995 and as he moves into issues surrounding writing Web sites for low-literacy readers, it looks like his full range of influence on the Web publishing world is yet to be discovered.

Publish: What got you started with Web usability?

Jakob Nielsen: From 1983 to 1993, I had been working on usability and hypertext, so when the Web started to become big in 1994, it was natural for me to combine my two interests and do Web usability. From my very first user tests of websites and intranets in 1994 it was clear that there was great potential in theory but major usability problems in the actual designs that were imposed on the poor users.

Publish: What role do you think usability plays in Web design? Can the two be compatible?

JN: Usability has two roles: to set the direction for the design and to check that the design works. The second has gotten the most attention since it is the simplest: just run a user test of any Web site and you will quickly have a long list of things that must be changed to make the site easier to use. But it would be better if we didn't get these problems in the first place, and that's why usability also needs to set the direction for the design. Before any design has been done, a development project should conduct a series of user research to discover users' needs and the types of designs that work well or that cause problems for users. These findings can then be used as the starting point for your own design, thus making it much more likely to succeed and much less likely to need major changes once you subject it to user testing. It should still be tested, of course, because there is no such thing as a perfect user interface, even if it has been designed through reliance on the best usability data.

Publish: It's pretty safe to say that Web publishing has changed the way that most companies communicate with the outside world. Do you think that this is a communication revolution on the scale of Gutenberg or just the most recent thing?

JN: I think the Internet as a whole will be a communications revolution on the scale of Gutenberg, but we are nowhere close to having that impact yet. Web sites as currently construed are a pale shadow of the types of interactive communication that will permeate the world in thirty years. Before we get too disappointed, we should remember that Gutenberg himself wasn't that hot either: just printing a few expensive Bibles didn't change the world. It took some time from the invention of the technology until it was widely used and had a revolutionary impact. For example, we had to get writers to invent such concepts as the novel and the newspaper.

Publish: Look into your crystal ball. What do you see for the future of Web publishing?

JN: Bigger. I expect all information to be available on the Web. We will need micropayments and other forms of payment solutions, but once we have that, you should be able to find anything you want on the Web. Currently, much of the best information is still locked up because it doesn't pay to just give it away.

Publish: What is your next usability project?

JN: I just finished a project on enterprise portals. That report should be out soon. Even though portals have a bad name after the fiasco of Excite et al., they actually have a role in publishing company information.

I am currently researching how to write Web sites for low-literacy readers. That is, people who do not read very well - often much below high-school reading levels. In the early years of the Web, we didn't see many such users, so it was not very important to design for them. In the beginning, you had to be a geek or rich to use the Web, but luckily computers are getting ever more widely used, as are Internet connections. So now we are starting to see much broader segments of the population come online, and this trend will only strengthen in the future. We need to make Web sites dramatically simpler if we are to serve low-literacy users.

Publish: What is your background in Web publishing?

JN: I have been publishing my column (the Alertbox) on the Web since 1995. There are actually very few Web publications that have maintained a regular schedule for that many years. Too many people crank out a whole bunch of near-real-time writing on their weblogs but can't keep it up because they burn out.

One of my big principles is that information that has been placed on the Web should continue to be available, and I still have all of my original columns on my site. Because I mainly write about usability, which is derived from human behavior, most of the old articles are well worth reading. Many of my original predictions have proven to be fairly accurate, but there are certainly some things that didn't happen at all like I predicted in 1995 or 1996. The point is, though, that all this stuff is available for anybody to check as they please. Very few other pundits dare keep their old material online.

Publish: What technology, innovation or development could take Web publishing to the next level?

JN: The biggest thing we need in the short term is better tablet computers: thin and lightweight, but still with a long battery life, and with a much higher resolution screen than we currently have. We probably also need some improvements over Microsoft's Tablet PC operating system to make it easier to browse through a gestural interface. Combine this technology with the high-speed wireless networking that many people and offices are already installing, and the way you access the Web will change dramatically.

Publish: What is your biggest pet peeve about Web publishing?

JN: That people still write for print instead for online. It is now six years since I documented how people read on the Web and the basic writing guidelines for Web content (http://www.useit.com/papers/webwriting/), but most sites still don't follow these guidelines. This despite the finding that measured usability usually doubles when writing for online instead of print. So even if you write less text, people will usually remember twice as much after visiting your site.

Simply repurposing big PDF documents is the worst example of using print content for online. Often these reports are very well designed for print and it would be fine to use the network to distribute the files for printing, but many sites use PDF files as online content and encourage users to browse them, even though this makes for a horrible user experience. We recently completed two very different research projects, and PDF files caused some of the worst problems in both cases: We tested a range of internal company intranets (http://www.nngroup.com/reports/intranet/guidelines/) and employees had big difficulties finding HR information when it was only available in PDF format. We also tested the investor relations areas of Web sites(http://www.nngroup.com/reports/ir/) and investors had just as big problems finding financial information in annual reports that had been repurposed as PDF.

It really irks me that big companies that spend a fortune on their annual reports can't spend a few extra dollars on making a version that is easy to read for investors who want to research a company on its Web site.

Publish: In what way has Web publishing made the most positive impact on business?

JN: It has become the standard way of researching vendors and business partners. The first thing most people do when they hear about a new company is to look up its Web site. This ability to get information instantaneously about anybody is a great improvement over the old days when you had to go to trade shows and schlep home multiple heavy bags of brochures.

Publish: What is one company that you think does an excellent job with Web publishing? Why?

JN: News.com. They have defined a niche, and the Web is all about specialized information. They update frequently, and yet keep all their archives alive forever at the same URLs. They also make good use of these archives to present additional background information for the stories. Most other sites don't really use hypertext and often don't have any archives.

Publish: What is one company that you think does a terrible job with Web publishing? Why?

JN: Most federal agencies, with a few honorable exceptions. For example, ready.gov fully follows the guidelines for writing for the Web. But mainly government information is very densely presented using a lot of internal terminology and an agency-centric information architecture.