Nielsen’s Weblog Usability Design Mistakes
Posted on | October 17, 2005 at 6:32 pm | 12 Comments
Jakob Nielsen just came out with his list of the Top 10 Design Mistakes for Weblogs. I have to admit that I’ve probably made most of these at one time or another, but I was surprised that I actually didn’t make some of them. However, I’m not sure I’m that concerned, since this blog is mostly just read by friends and I have no illusions about becoming a more widely-read web presence with this drivel. To be fair, Nielsen does make exceptions for this sort of “personal diary”.
The mistake I was most surprised about was Nondescript Posting Titles. I’ve spent all this time trying to come up with amusing, sometimes in-jokey, titles for my posts, and now I find out it’s wrong. Ah well, that’s one less place to try to be clever. It will be interesting to see if I can make the titles relevant. Though, again, I’m not sure there’s much of a point to that in my case.
The one that people need to pay more attention to is Forgetting That You Write for Your Future Boss. This is true whether or not you’re doing a personal blog or something wider-ranging. It’s probably even more important for a personal blog. You can really give a potential employer the wrong idea about yourself with just a few words. And it’s so easy these days for anyone to find your blog, no matter how anonymous you try to be. And stuff on the web sticks around forever.
I can just see my future job interview…
Potential Employer: “It looks like you won’t be able to do any overtime, since you watch way too much TV. So what’s with this obsession with women’s breasts? And the comic books and video games? Just what is your mental age anyway?”
Me: “On the plus side, I have no personal life to speak of, and so can devote myself fully to the company.”
Potential Employer: “Hmmm. And how come you never learned how to spell later? ”
Latre.
Comments
12 Responses to “Nielsen’s Weblog Usability Design Mistakes”
October 17th, 2005 @ 7:03 pm
“So what’s with this obsession with women’s breasts?” I think you could just say, unless such information is prohibited by law, that you’re a male human person. That oughta get you off that hook.
Nowhere near as fun and exciting as back in the day, when the concept of creating “amusing” answering machine messages was appealing, when Rose theorizes that one of my messages – which began “I dreamed the Butthole Surfers broke into my house and painted the walls an appalling shade of mustard yellow” – cost her a job interview. Fortunately, she found a better job.
Good thing – or I would have to hunt down and shoot Gibby Haynes.
Also: Boobies!
October 17th, 2005 @ 7:21 pm
Does Nielsen say anything about posting two comments in a row? Anyway: I see his points, but I think they’re geared entirely too heavily toward quasi-journalistic or business-like sites. My favorite blogs (including several written by people I actually haven’t met!) convey primarily a sense of what the person or people who run them is/are like. I don’t need to know real names, see pictures so I can ID them in real life, etc. (And Nielsen also fails to recognize that if you’re a female blogger, putting up a picture invariably leads to masher-spam. Go to any blog at which a woman’s put up a picture of herself, and if she’s even remotely attractive, you’ll find a bunch of “U R way sExXeE HOT!!!!” posts. At least, I always post comments like that at hot babes’ sites.)
Uh, anyway…same thing with non-obvious headlines. I like trying to get the joke (or even if I don’t have to try, getting it). I like blogs that read like conversations among friends (first names, nicknames, etc.) even if I don’t know them. Reading a blog, I don’t want to feel as if I’m at a business conference and people are going to hand me business cards; I want to feel like I’m at a party and I’m circulating the room looking for interesting conversation.
Maybe it’s because I’m not 24, or maybe I just figure the odds are vanishingly low that people would bother to troll the web for any possible websites, but…I really don’t give a rat’s ass whether some future boss reads my site and is offended. Frankly, would I even want to work for anybody who (a) bothered sniffing out old websites for insight into a potential hire, and (b) was put out enough by rude jokes, political commentary, or posting both Metal Machine Music and “Billy Don’t Be a Hero” that they wouldn’t hire me? What kind of work environment is that going to be? (Another argument for not including real names, pictures, etc. Yo-ho-ho, I’m a rappin’ Santa pirate!)
That said, if my goal were to create another Daily Kos or something like that, I’d agree with most of his points. Then again, what’s generally hailed as one of the first, most successful mp3 blogs – Matthew Perpetua’s Fluxblog – violates about half of Nielsen’s rules, I think (off the top of my head: no pix, non-obvious headlines, and at least at first his full name was hard to find).
October 17th, 2005 @ 7:41 pm
I read Unkle Jakob’s latest top 10 today, too, and finished with the exact same thoughts, Messrs. F. and FF. His advice is sound for those pubishing more business-oriented blogs. However, if your weblog is a personal journal and the goal isn’t to lift your position in Google results, your post titles don’t necessarily need to contain trigger words and neatly summarize the rest of the entry. You should also take some risks beyond what you would like a hiring manager to read about you 10 years from now.
I also think he has a point on the “About Me” page, even if it’s just a quick couple of sentences. That tends to be one of the first things I look for and read when I come across a new weblog, but I’ve never managed to come up with anything that’s not completely gagworthy.
October 17th, 2005 @ 8:07 pm
You don’t have to be writing for your future boss if you set the “robots.txt” to not let Google or Alexa cache your site. Then you can take it down whenever you need to without worrying (much) about stuff coming back to haunt you.
I had a similar issue crop up once – I was writing software and putting it online in my website account so that I didn’t have to try to mail a .ZIP past their Email screeners. I’d send the links to my employers, who have known me for years, and counted on them to pass the software to the clients. One time he just sent the link directly to the customer, who had trouble for some reason and decided to see if the homepage had any info.
Well, my homepage dates back to my comedy-writing days (1998, has it been that long already?) and has lots of “misc” relating to former business ventures, party pictures, and whatnot…nothing for public consumption really. Her reaction was to call it a “rather tacky website”, so I put that up on my homepage like a review.
October 17th, 2005 @ 8:41 pm
Thanks for the heads-up on the Robots thing, InfK. I see it can also be done with a Meta tag, which I’ve done.
I doubt much is going to change here based on the List, but it’s interesting and (obviously) stimulates discussion. I almost see it as exercise, rather than a necessity, to try implementing some of his suggestions. I doubt that I can keep from doing snarky titles for long!
Editrix, I’m with ya on the “About Me”. I wish I could think of something non-lame to write for that.
Boobies.
October 17th, 2005 @ 9:03 pm
I’ve had quite a few potential clients who have checked out my weblog while surfing interbridge.com. That’s one of the reasons I so seldom complain about my work on my blog
Of course, I’m already careful about making any political statements, to avoid riling my GOP loyalist relatives. Somehow, I manage to still find things to write about. And there’s no WAY I’m ever posting a photo of myself on my blog — people who don’t know me can just assume I look like the girl in the martini glass! 
October 17th, 2005 @ 9:03 pm
OK, that does it — I am never posting a “smile” on this blog ever, ever again.
October 17th, 2005 @ 10:17 pm
Bwah ha ha!
October 18th, 2005 @ 8:48 am
Hmmm, it occurs to me that if you thought you were going to be shopping for a job in the future, you could create a (fictional) blog that emphasizes your extreme dedication and legendary skills. “I went back to the office after giving birth last night and was able to build a new motherboard for our mission-critical web server out of staples and AOL CDs.”.
October 18th, 2005 @ 9:16 am
Hee!
Giving birth would be a legendary skill on my part.
October 18th, 2005 @ 12:41 pm
Which of course is another obvious problem for Stupid Bosses Who Think Digging Up Dirt on the Web Is an Effective Employment Strategy: people lie. I, for instance, am actually a 97-year-old Portuguese immigrant who’s a rabid stamp collector and an avid, seal-clubbing member of the Republican Party, Federalist Society, and Joe McCarthy Deification Society. (We also believe in clubbing people who whimsically misspell “Deification” just in case you were thinking that.)
October 18th, 2005 @ 1:10 pm
2fs, I know you’re not Portuguese…