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The flame bait of the moment, usability must die has a page on why AlertBox is nothing but […]

The flame bait of the moment, usability must die has a page on why AlertBox is nothing but NNG propaganda: The Day Alertbox Died.

Unfortunately his statistical evidence is based on a poor assumption… that how many links and where they link is a representation of how effective an objective critique of usability Nielsen is. That would be like saying Metafilter is more objective than the New York Times, because it has more outward links. A link clearing-house is not the same as a content producer, and alertbox should not be judged on the same scale as the very excellent but very different webword.

None the less, alertbox has been all over the map lately, from wildly inaccurate to insightful and useful. not sure what is going on in the head of Nielsen.

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  1. 1
    ralph

    >not sure what is going on in the head of nielsen

    I just had this ridiculous vision of the scene from “Being John Malkovich”, where Malkovich goes through the tunnel into his own head, except it’s from “Being Jakob Nielsen”.

    Nielsen Nielsen Nielsen? Nielsen Nielsen Nielsen Nielsen Nielsen.

    It’s late. Please forgive me.

  2. 2
    Keith

    I agree that “a link clearing-house is not the same as a content producer”, but I can’t help but notice that for some time now, the purpose of many of Nielsen’s articles seems to have been promotion of NNG reports or seminars, not providing useful or insightful comment. I did a quick and dirty analysis of my own back in March this year.

  3. 3
    Chris McEvoy

    > Unfortunately his statistical evidence is based on a poor assumption…

    If you look at the ten most popular alertbox articles, you can see that “Let Users Control Font Size” is the most popular article of the ones published this year. This article is much more like the ‘classic’ alertbox articles of the late 90’s. I think that alertbox would be better served if less articles of a higher quality were published and that the ‘buy me’ articles were highlighted as being teasers for nngroup reports.

    It is also interesting to note that Readers Comments have not been published on Alertbox since October 2000.

    I am not trying to compare WebWord with Alertbox as they are completely different beasts, but I was trying to make the point that there are now much better places to find articles, discussions and debates about usability.

    Note: My measurement of ‘popular’ is based on the number of backlinks to the article according to google. Whilst this is not the best measurement of popularity, it is the best I can come up with without having access to useit.com log files.

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