The Widget Apogee

This article on the BBC from Jakob Nielson re Web page usability struck 2 chords with me - firstly:

Instead, many are "hot potato" driven and just want to get a specific task completed.

Now, when people go online they know what they want and how to do it, he said.

"Web users have always been ruthless and now are even more so," said Dr Nielsen.

"People want sites to get to the point, they have very little patience," he said.

This is impacting the CPM rates of pages, so rates on pages where people do very specific tasks (like social network pages for example) tend to be valued at lower rates than more generic pages. Jakob notes that:

"I do not think sites appreciate that yet," he added. "They still feel that their site is interesting and special and people will be happy about what they are throwing at them."

I think this is true of some sites, but other smart sites are doing a lot of work in testing varying site design configurations to see what works - one of the benefits of the internet is that you can try lots of options and see what works best - and get the feedback fast.

The second thing that resonated with me, though, was this:

Web users were also getting very frustrated with all the extras, such as widgets and applications, being added to sites to make them more friendly.

Such extras are only serving to make pages take longer to load, said Dr Nielsen.

I resemble that remark! I am increasingly frustrated not just with the impact of loading widget-filled sites, but once they load they have a noticeable effect on my computer's performance, and I'm thinking increasingly that widgets are at risk of being the new popups - I think sites are going to have to be fairly moderate in widget usage until bandwidth is quite a lot higher for the average user.