Don Norman, Jakob Nielsen, and the wolves
By Oli
At 11:34 PM · Tuesday, 25 May · 2004
To Design · The ‘Net
I’m presently reading Don Norman’s most recent book, the excellent “Emotional Design: why we love (or hate) everyday things”. It’s a great read, and details the central place Design (the real deal, rather than the common perception of “prettifying”) has in making usable and lovable objects. However it also seems quite ironic that such a compelling book is written by Jakob Nielsen’s business partner. Mr Nielsen seems to delight in infuriating designers with blanket rules for web design that come straight out of 1999. His attitude seems very anti-designer, and definitely the opposite to what Don Norman’s book discusses.
Recently this has lead to several unofficial UseIt redesigns events; ReUSEIT (open submissions of nicely designed and usable redesigns for UseIt.com), and now Design Eye for the Usability Guy (5 excellent designers do an alertbox makeover). Neilsen has said he has no intentions of using any ReUSEIT designs, and he hasn’t changed his site design in years.
However, I wonder what will happen if the Neilsen wolves see that Don Norman is publicly looking for help with a redesign?
This website is out of control, but so is my travel schedule. [SNIP] I could use help in redesigning and then maintaining this site.
Surely giving Neilsen’s senior partner’s website a modern redesign (on top of a weblog/CMS) has to be tempting, right? ;-)
