Masterful websites

04 September 2004 · 0 comments

Shirley Kaiser’s invaluable Brainstorms and Raves points to a good read: Mastery, Mystery, and Misery by Jakob Nielsen. He puts forward the cleverly titled notion of three types of sites. Masterful sites get out of the way and allow users to achieve their goal: finding information or making purchases. Mysterious sites use “novel interaction elements”. [...]

Shirley Kaiser’s invaluable Brainstorms and Raves points to a good read: Mastery, Mystery, and Misery by Jakob Nielsen.

He puts forward the cleverly titled notion of three types of sites. Masterful sites get out of the way and allow users to achieve their goal: finding information or making purchases.

Mysterious sites use “novel interaction elements”. These sometimes arouse the user’s negative feeling and tend to get in the way of the user.

Miserable sites oppress users with intrusive ads, broken Back buttons, pop-ups and splash pages (and presumably other annoying features). These sites prevent users from achieving their own goals in the interest of imposing the site’s goals.

Shoot on over to his article now – it’s a quick read, and worth the few minutes.

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