100 Million Websites

Jakob Nielsen's Alertbox for November 6 is now online at:
  > http://www.useit.com/alertbox/web-growth.html
		
Summary:
The early Web's explosive growth rate has slowed, but even the mature Web
is still expanding and recently crossed the 100 M websites mark.

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Breadcrumbs and Windows Vista

If you heard Tjeerd Hoek's talk about Windows Vista at our Seattle
conference (or if you're going to hear him in London on Wednesday), you
might have noticed a small interface element that he didn't even discuss
much: breadcrumbs.

For Web designers, this means that the time is over when you had to
discuss whether to use breadcrumbs. The answer is clear now: yes, use
breadcrumbs if your IA lends itself to hierarchical navigation. Most users
will become accustomed to using breadcrumbs to navigate their own files,
so they will know and expect this feature on websites as well.

Hopefully somebody will release a Web-widget to give online breadcrumbs
the same cross-hierarchy menus found in Vista. But even plain breadcrumbs
will gain increased usability next year, simply from people's experience
on their PC.

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Science Museum, London

Our conference hotel is 10 minutes' walk from the Science Museum, so while
getting over jet lag before the event started, I spent several hours at
the museum. Just the ground floor takes you from some of James Watt's
first steam engines to a Cray 1. That supercomputer was the fastest in the
world when I started in the field, and now it's in a museum. But Watt's
machines were actually more fascinating - partly because you could see
some of their functionality from the outside. (Whereas the Cray just looks
like a couch.)

Several of the first steam engines had been kept in operation for 70 years
at the factories where they were first installed. My first thought was
that our current inventions don't last so long. But my second thought was
that some of them do, particularly in the user interface field. For
example, scroll bars are more than 20 years old and still in good use
(indeed a prime guideline for scrolling is to stick to standard scrollbars
and not invent your own). Some usability guidelines like progressive
disclosure are getting close to 30 years old and we're going to be
teaching them in the course on application design later this week. (Worse:
30 years after it was determined that progressive disclosure was a good
idea, there are applications launched that don't follow the guideline.)