SAN FRANCISCO -- If the Salt Lake Olympics website were a student in school, it would be of the Bart Simpson variety: a solid-D underachiever.
That's the opinion, at least, of Jakob Nielsen, an expert on "Web usability" who held forth Friday on the Olympics site during a media luncheon.
Nielsen was speaking at an event to promote his new book, Homepage Usability: 50 Websites Deconstructed. The book -- written with co-author Marie Tahir -- proposes 113 design guidelines that Web builders should abide by to make their sites easy to use.
Salt Lake 2002 sticks to only 66 percent of those guidelines. "That's not a total disaster," Nielsen said. All the site needs, he thinks, is a complete redesign.
But the Olympics site is not alone in suffering from unfriendly design. Indeed, one of its main problems -- the site's distracting advertisements -- is typical of many Web pages these days, Nielsen said.
Nielsen thinks that during the past year, Web advertising has become a serious impediment to Web usability. Pop-up ads now pop up at virtually every site, and many money-losing dot-coms are going even further, some to the point of covering up content with ads.
Nielsen believes that such ads are a sign of "capitulation" on the part of content producers; the trend is so "disgusting," he thinks, that it holds the long-term possibility of "driving people away" from the Web.
For example, some of the Olympics ads have scrolling text -- "which is of the devil," according to Nielsen. Also, designers have configured the ads to flash on and off depending on where you move the mouse, which Nielsen and Tahir find distracting.
If website builders would do some simple usability studies to see how ordinary people use the Web, Nielsen says they would see how strongly people react to badly designed pages.
"Just do it," he said, invoking Nike. Doing a cheap test is better than doing no test at all, Nielsen said.
Among the other problems with the Olympics site:
- There's no search field, and the navigation buttons are extremely cumbersome, loaded with "buggy" drop-down menus. "You really can't get that much information without doing a lot of digging," Nielsen said.
- The photos on the site need improvement. "They have a photo editor who's almost good enough," he said, explaining that photo editors often forget to appropriately crop pictures for small spots.
Additionally, the site hasn't been optimized for search engines, so when it comes up in Google, the only description for it is: "This site requires javascript enabled on your browser."
