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Jakob Nielsen the guru of web page usability (New York Times) was recently in the UK presenting as key note speaker Internet Magazine's "Building Successful Web Sites" conference at the QE2 conference centre in London. Catriona Campbell CEO of The Usability Company also spoke at the conference where subjects raised and discussed were aimed at introducing SMEs to the importance of usable sites in the pursuit of profit. Jakob Nielsen continued his crusade against "evil" by berating the still common errors of designers and content suppliers on the internet. Nielsen described the worldwide web as "Evil, lazy and Stupid" he cited the pop up ads that mimic error boxes as evil.
Laziness was to be found closer to Nielsen's home, his own page in fact, he berated the chronological arrangement of articles stating that users seldom searched for his articles by date, but by subject matter. Stupidity on the Web was possibly the most commercially hazardous area, businesses consistently neglected to tell users when their trial period on a piece of software would expire and more annoying to Jakob Nielsen, service agencies who gave little indication of price. The conclusions of Usability's Godfather was that Web evolution would soon sort these problems out as their stupidity, laziness and evil would be their own undoing, in his own form of electronic Darwinism, it seems that Nielsen believes, only the usable will survive.
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