Nielsen’s Ratings
Jakob Nielsen’s official title at Sun Microsystems is “distinguished” engineer. But “supreme guru” better describes what he actually does at the Silicon Valley computer company, he says.
A native of Denmark, Nielsen worked at the advanced research laboratories of IBM and Bellcore before coming to Sun four years ago to help design easier-to-use computers. With the emergence of the Web, Nielsen was put in charge of designing Sun’s Web site.
Today, Nielsen is part of Sun’s five-person science office, which is charged with looking at how people will use technology in the future. Nielsen’s task is to study how people use the Web today and how it will evolve.
Nielsen will be participating in the Conference on Computer-Human Interaction (CHI 98) at the Los Angeles Convention Center running Saturday through April 23.
He spoke with Cutting Edge about the growth of the World Wide Web and the issues surrounding it.
Question: Is the Web over-hyped?
Answer: I don’t think so. There is a huge, huge untapped potential. The Web can be compared to the telephone or electricity. Today people wouldn’t feel it if they suddenly didn’t have the Web anymore. But that won’t be true in the future. Like electricity, it’s a foundation. . . . Once you are connected all the time, no matter where you are, everything will be different.
Q: How soon will that happen? Can the Web maintain its current growth rate?
A: While the rate of growth is slowing, the absolute increase is dramatic. In 1993, the Web grew by about 18 times from 34 Web sites to 623 sites. This year, the Web will grow by only three times but it will grow from 2.2 million sites to about 6 million sites. That’s nearly 4 million new sites. In 10 years, there will be 200 million Web sites. In that time, we will go from 50 million to 100 million people worldwide [on the Web] to 1 billion people. Once you get to a billion people continuously connected on a single system, that is completely unprecedented.
Q: Does the world really need 200 million Web sites? What will they be used for?
A: I think that every single company will have a Web site. Most people will have a Web site. The personal Web site will be like your face to the world. Every time you hire somebody, you will go look at their Web site. It’s like an online resume. You might also have a truly personal Web site with family pictures for friends and relatives.
Q: What about privacy?
A: There will be a control agent that determines how much you will reveal to whom. That control agent could also decide who is allowed to contact you [by phone or e-mail]. It will be like having a personal secretary, except it will be cheap enough to give it to everybody. It will drive a huge productivity increase because it will help you manage your time. Today computers are time wasters to a large extent, but [with the Net] they will become time managers and time optimizers.
Q: What kinds of changes do you foresee in the economy as a result of the Web?
A: Most Web sites now are like an online business card. But in five years, when 70% of the people [in the U.S.] are online, then the Web becomes your primary way of doing business. In five years, the Internet will be a $1-trillion economy. It will restructure the way you do business. There will be a lot of unbundling of businesses. Right now, if you go to a shop, you get advice about a product and you pay for the advice through the price of a product. In the future, there could be a one-person bookstore [on the Web] that recommends books. The site would provide a link to Amazon.com that would be the fulfillment service.
Q: But isn’t there a problem with the business model? Not many people are making money on the Net today.
A: Oh, yeah. The only way [to make money] today is to aggregate people’s eyeballs and charge for advertising. But advertising doesn’t work on the Web except for search engines. A user reading an article on one of those online magazines is very unlikely to click on the ads. The overwhelming number who do click on an ad bail out immediately by clicking on the back button, because they don’t find what they want.
The current business models don’t work because they lack a micro-payment system. That’s where you pay per page view or per transaction. Without that system, [Web sites] lack the ability to extract value from [attracting] people to their Web site.
Q: So how would the micro-payment system help?
A: In principle, it is ridiculous to have a network like CBS. What you should have is 10,000 different editors, each of whom will assemble a package of recommended stuff for you based on the films, news or shows they like and have seen. Each editor produces a Web page that has links to each of the shows they recommend. You click on them if you want them. That goes to the production studio and it downloads to you that show. The production studio gets a certain percentage of the payment and the editor who recommends it gets another percentage. You need a system for all those payment streams.
Q: Doesn’t this model assume huge communication pipes into each home?
A: Yes. This specific example with television is at least 10 years away. But the same general principle could apply with newspapers. Each reporter could have a Web site.
Q: How do you see this medium affecting the way people communicate?
A: Most people today just take stuff written for printed material and put it online. But the reading situation [on the Web] is different. One issue is printed screen quality and [another is] long wait times. In 10 years, most people will have a fast connection and a high-quality screen.
But another difference is that when you are online you are in control. What you do online is information foraging. If you are reading a newspaper at the breakfast table, you are likely to just go to the next article or the next page. Online, there are [millions of Web pages] that are one click away from where you are now. Therefore, you will be motivated to skim it fast and move on.
Q: So how do you adapt to that?
A: Well, when you write for online, you are not really writing a story. You are contributing to an experience, a navigation space. Rather than writing one long article, you split it up into smaller pieces and have them linked together in meaningful ways. Rather than having a linear progression of arguments, you state your main points. If you want to see [supporting arguments], click here and we’ll give you another page full. Click here if you want to see the counter-arguments. If you already know something, or you don’t care, you just skip it.
Q: And you believe schoolchildren should be taught to write this way?
A: I really think they should, because it will be the dominant means of communication in the future. I think print will go away, telephone will go away, television will go away. There will be video and telephone but it will be over the Internet.
Books will survive the longest because of the pleasure of sitting there and reading. The form of the novel doesn’t lend itself to hypertext [jumping from page to page].
We need to teach kids skills they will need 20 years from now. It’s not about how to use a spreadsheet, because before they graduate, hopefully, there will be much better ways of doing calculations on the computer.
Q: So what would a student assignment be like?
A: Say you are doing a project on tigers. You do a Web site rather than write a report about it. It includes your own writing, but it links to appropriate resources. Learning how to link will be very important. What you then do is test the site with other kids to see whether they are able to use it, whether they understand it and like it. Is it persuasive? That’s very important. There is so much information in the world, so how do you get people to worry about your stuff? You need to do [the Web site] in such a way that it is appealing.
Q: Many people are skeptical of how much computers have added to productivity. Will the Web change that?
A: Computers have added very little to productivity so far because they aren’t easy to use. There is some reason to remain skeptical with the Web, too. We’ve just reached the stage where each computer company has usability experts. All products today are far better than products five years ago. But now the responsibility is moving to everybody in the world who does a Web site. And most people don’t have a clue how to design interactivity into a site.
But on the Internet, people move right to where the quality is. Web sites will mainly have links to other good sites, and they won’t have links to bad sites. I call it design Darwinism. It’s survival of the best design. You get lots of traffic on good sites and little traffic on bad sites. That will drive up the overall usability of the Internet.
Leslie Helm can be reached at leslie.helm@latimes.com
