How to Weave a More Useful Web

Content Rules in Site Wars

Web sites continue to draw visitors because of useful content. But content presentation is a challenge, according to Nielsen. Visitors scan, rather than read, when online. PC screens are difficult to read, and online content is too often flat, poorly catalogued, and out-of-date.

Using the example of a newspaper site, Nielsen showed how a headline could appear in a search without its descriptive paragraph. Taken out of context, the headline is often meaningless. Other material, like product descriptions, suffers from marketing jargon. As a reader, you have no idea what the product does.

For instance, IBM.com's shopping section describes one ThinkPad notebook as "the new ideal balance of performance and portability." The next model is described as "the ideal balance of performance and portability." What's the difference between the notebooks? Nielsen says online content must be meaningful to its audience and should express the interactivity of the Web.

The E-Commerce Challenge

E-commerce sites achieve better usability than the rest of the Web. That's because you won't buy anything if you can't get through the site, Nielsen says. But there is still much room for improvement.

Overall, e-commerce sites usually fail because you just can't find the product you want.

Assessing Disney.com, Nielsen points out Disney's success with good product descriptions and resizable photos. Where the site fails is when you get to the buy page and see in fine print that an item is out of stock. In contrast, Nielsen says Jcrew.com is a usable site where clothing items appear large on a white background with color options to the side.

"People give up if the item is not found where it's expected to be," Nielsen says. E-commerce sites need better category pages, and simple, reliable search tools that search both product and customer support databases.

And above all, "anything that looks like a banner ad, people will not see," Nielsen says.

In the end, Nielsen concedes a few decent sites are out there. You'll know them, because that's where you spend your money and time, he says. Sites like Yahoo provide mostly relevant content in a usable manner.

But it's also a matter of evolution. The Internet was text-only. The early Web was just a repository of text, not distinguished with pages, Nielsen says. He expects that someday specific functions and user tasks might dissolve the boundaries of the Web site.