Interview by Adriana de Barros and Nuno Martins

• Jump to: Jordan Nielsen Weinman Mullenweg Finck Purgason Sodaplay WWFT

Eric Jordan:
I don’t know if I can break it down into 3 nicely organized issues or thoughts (am I breaking any accessibility issues here?) ?

I suppose I would like people to take away the following thoughts:

Is it useful to implement proper usability and accessibility standards for a website? Of course, in certain cases it can be extremely important for the client, their audience, and their success as a company.

Does that mean that every website should adhere to certain compliant standards? Of course not. Compliant standards are great, but if it means sweeping all emotional and sensory response under the carpet, then we may be faced with having to co-exist with a very drab Internet. The need to reduce everything down to a "usable, organized, and accessible" state will only hinder us in our pursuit of what is truly possible.

Jakob Nielsen:
In my answer to the first question in this interview, I pointed to two big groups that are ignored by most websites: low-literacy users and old users. Together they are almost half the population. This is where most of the growth of the Internet will come in the next decade, because most young and well-educated people are online already. We need to work harder on making the Web attractive and useful to a larger audience, and not just design for college students.

A second issue is globalization, which has at least two components: First, websites must cater to an international audience, and yet there's not much known about how to make a good multinational website. There's also not much work on specific problems like multi-lingual search.

Second, design and development itself is becoming globalized with offshored teams scattered around the globe. This has some positive aspects, because the cheaper it becomes to develop stuff, the more we can get built, which again increases the hope for more advanced features in the future.

Usability may suffer, however, because it requires frequent direct contact with the users, which is hard to get when you are sitting in an offshore country. Of course the usability specialist should stay in the main country and conduct user research there, but that's not enough. It's always been a recommendation that the development team should observe a bit of user testing so that they can get a more vivid impression of their users than simply reading the report from the study. Communication between the usability specialists and the rest of the team will be much harder when they are based in different countries. Onshore usability staff must learn be much clearer when they communicate with their offshore colleagues.

As a third issue, we need better business models for websites. There's a large number of services that we are not getting because there is not an easy way for users to pay for the services they consume. Instead, we have a lot of sites trying to build services that they can give away for free, but that's not the way to create true value in the long run. It's more important to invent things that are so valuable that customers are willing to pay for them.
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Lynda Weinman:
I think user-generated content denotes a new revolution – YouTube and Flickr show the power of sharing content. Online is going to rule more tomorrow than it does today – things that are not wired and internet enabled are going to suffer – TV, books, movie theatres will be some of the casualties – life as we’ve known it is going to go online. More and more people will get their needs met online – kind of scary! We better make a point of moving our bodies and being out in the world or we’ll likely turn into human potatoes. I look forward to more choice and less propaganda – power to the people!

Matt Mullenweg:
1. The more you link out, even to competitors, the more people come back.

2. It's cheaper than ever to get a new idea started on the web, there are no more excuses.

3. Launch with the simplest thing that could possibly work, you can always add more later. (But you probably won't have to add 99% of what you thought you would.)

Nick Finck:
All to often, and sadly enough, the user is overlooked. We used to call this process user-centered design or the user experience but businesses are beginning to prefer the term "people" over "users" so now it's people centered design. I don't think that enough businesses or web companies are taking enough vested interest in the people that have to use their sites be it for information gathering, transferring funds online, buying tickets to a concert, or just entertaining themselves with a game or trivia.

Todd Purgason:
Well I thing the answer to the last question is one. Two I think is link code in the OS basically allowing me to add content/functionality into computing and work using shared content and functionality.

Video email, the biggest problem with email is that it lack all non verbal communication coupled with the fact that we are all so slammed for time and attention emails are all quick and often ripe for misunderstanding or miscommunication. Plus when you reach a certain point of getting 100-200 emails a day reading long emails is an impossibility and you can not keep up with the dearth of it all. So in the future I video a personal message and send it. When receiving them I can get the tone of the message instantly in addition al can hit a 2x 4x speed button to have the message spoken to me faster than I could read it. It is effective to keep it a left message as it cuts down on idel chit chat that there is no time for we get to the point, in fact you probably will be able to get auto filters that auto trim unnecessary portions for you to focus on the meat of the message.

Ha..ha.. can you tell I’m kind of a busy guy

Sodaplay:
Historically many of the greatest expressions of creativity took at least one generation before they were widely appreciated. Is our medium’s apparent lack of longevity preventing us from contributing our creations to subsequent generations?

Interpersonal sincerity is easier to judge when making eye contact; even with a webcam ones gaze is slightly oblique and fractionally later than real-time.

Sometimes we don’t know what we want, let alone what’s best for us.
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WeWorkForThem:
Design can create function in forms. Design is often thought of as illustration or form now-a-days. It used to have roots in communication and ease of use. It is possible to harness this information through books like Grid Systems by Brockmann and Typography by Ruder, etc.

How peope read type online with ease and how to apply it to the web should be something to research. Maybe it has. It should have been done in 1996.

Relax and listen to people.

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