I enjoyed Zeldman's A List Apart, and had no idea that he was so old at a time that we were all in our mid-twenties, I thought he was our cohort :D
Nielsen I can honestly leave, maybe he did help millions of people have easier to use sites, but I found him rigid and boring; especially rigid with his prescriptive approach to sites - "the home page should have these links". I think Philip Greenspun skewered him at some point.
I understand why a lot of this was like this, as people wanted answers and direction, and were prepared to pay a lot of money for it, and he was a consultant doing consultancy. People have always wanted answers and direction, and will pay for it, but in a rapidly-changing world, the answers have a short shelf-life. Maybe that's why he took his site down a long time ago, aware that his maps were getting very out-of-date.
Still, fun times, what a great age it was.
The users were also different back then. It was not only about putting it all on one page, but even about putting it all above the fold, based on the today astonishing fact that many users did not scroll down. Because they did not know they could, with later experiments observing a tipping point when scrolling became normal.
Think about that, what a different environment the sites had to work in. Not only technically, but also socially. Completely normal that details like that don't carry over into today.
I'm not sure that realization was great, given how often I have to scroll and scroll and scroll to find information on a business web site that should be front and center -- things like location, phone number, hours, etc.
Do you remember how low screen resolutions were as well?? :D
That early 2000s CSS/design blogosphere was such an interesting place; I was just in high school at the time but loved following Dave Shea, Andy Budd, Doug Bowman, Shaun Inman, Mike Davidson, and probably a whole bunch more I'm forgetting now.
All those guys. Also, the daily visits to lnkedup.com k10k.net, designiskinky.com, newstoday.com were so influential and informative to me (wow, just did an archive.org lookup of some of those and got a nostalgic chill - https://web.archive.org/web/20050303092717if_/http://www.lin...).
K10k! “Newstoday” - Miss that jingle!
Made a friend on k10k back in, maybe 2001, still friends. Texted her a few days ago. Never met yet.
There was also this guy, don't remember his name, whom you could email your questions/issues etc, reply with great detail and post the discussion on his website for others to learn from. Like a one on one precursor to stackoverflow.
I remember email him and asking about why my photo gallery didn't work when I tried to save the "currently selected image" as a cookie. He replied and explained to me that cookies contain string values and that you can't save a reference to a DOM element as a cookie. So, cookie = document.getElementById('image0') will not work, but cookie = 'image0' will :)
A group who never seem to be mentioned in these threads are Jason Arber, Richard May and Rina Cheung. Pixelsurgeon was enormously influential in its day.
I remember Shaun Inman, did he do Mint?
Yeah, the website stats thing; I was a paid user of it heh.
As I recall, Greenspun skewered Siegel. Siegel advocated a two- or three-stage "entry portal" to your site in one version of his "Killer" books, and Greenspun thought that was daft.
I appreciate Nielsen's approach quite a lot. We could do a lot worse than a return to "usability" on the Web. We've gone to a lot of effort to recreate a substantial subset of what Flash brought to the table, but do you really want your photos and text blocks flying in as you scroll? It's cool the first time you see it, but after that? Does anybody ever say "man, this site has great information, I just wish it would bounce around my screen like a Jack Russell terrier."
> Does anybody ever say "man, this site has great information, I just wish it would bounce around my screen like a Jack Russell terrier."
I always find myself thinking "man if only this website would hijack my native browser scrolling...but terribly". Websites that don't hijack scrolling are just too useful and easy to use. Even better is when paragraphs fade-in as I scroll! Oh man I just love seeing shit jump around as I'm trying to read. It's so calming and doesn't induce seasickness at all!
Maybe the people implementing such things never accidentally saw off their fingertips. /s
Wow - just visited A List Apart for the first time in some years and it looks vastly different. Also, there is a post on the home page from a year ago tomorrow that has a new tag on it. Times have changed I guess.
I used to run a usability testing service way back in the day and had the same feelings about Nielsen - way too rigid and pedantic for my tastes and the reality of the tests I was running every day.