16.3 World Wide Web

• Dystopian versus utopian view of the flood of information
• Web page design guidelines
• parallel early user-interface writings
• advice is typically incomplete or lacks generalizability
• paucity of empirical data to validate or sharpen insights offered
• Guidelines typically based on personal experience
• Nielsen's usability-testing approach
• Sun Microsystems web site design
• studied nine different designs
• revealed problems and highlighted key principles of design
• empirical testing needed to verify findings