If e-commerce is to work, web sites have to be easy to use. That's a common-sense message, but the path to online selling is littered with abandoned virtual shopping trolleys. And Nielsen has a warning for those who still scorn his lean, mean approach to web design. He has formulated his own version of Moore's Law, the theory first articulated by the founder of Intel, which says the power of computers doubles every 18 months. By this reckoning, it will be at least five years before a standard web page responds at less than a second, which is what most people find pleasant to use.
Web design is big business.
Earlier this month, Online sat down with four of the world's foremost net design gurus, who had gathered in London for the Design For Usability conference. Their CVs are impressive. Jakob Nielsen is behind the Alertbox website which reviews web design. He worked at Bell Research Labs and Sun Microsystems and co-founded the Nielsen Norman group. Professor Ben Shneiderman, is head of the University of Maryland's Human-Computer Interaction Laboratory and was one of the earliest pro ponents of hypertext linking.