Finally someone says it: "I find his site unreadable. It hurts my eyes." Jakob Nielsen is the Danish-born former Sun employee who gained substantial alpha-geek cred as a Web usability expert in the 1990s — less for his admirable research than for his contempt for graphics-clogged websites. Today, though, Nielsen's dismissal of Ajaxy user generated content comes across as more crank than critic. His own site challenges visitors with a garish yellow-and-white design, pages that lay out too too wide for easy reading (newspapers figured out a long time ago that people prefer to read narrow columns), and a tiresome refusal to use images to convey information and ideas. In short, he's rejected any post-1996 advances in browser capabilities to deliver a better read, bragging instead about his low bandwidth bill. Jakob, why don't you just make us download your essays via FTP? That seems easier.

Ignoring customers still using modems is officially all the rage. Usability and accessibility guru Jakob Nielsen to shake fist at you all. [WebSiteOptimization, via Slashdot]

Jakob Nielsen, perennial usability and interface design guru, made hay again yesterday with renewed criticism of Web 2.0 design. This is not the first nor will it be the last time Nielsen attacks Web 2.0 for a little press. Of course, there is wisdom and validity to his concerns. The Web 2.0 aesthetic and feature set are like obscenity: you know it when you see it. There is always good and bad design, and statements like "The idea of community, user generated content and more dynamic web pages are not inherently bad [...], they should be secondary to the primary things sites should get right" always ring true. However, as H.L. Menken said, "Criticism is prejudice made plausible." Let's consider the design and interface of some noteworthy Web 2.0 sites: