Jakob Nielsen’s latest Alertbox post “Bridging the Designer-User Gap” is almost a follow up to the “Myth of the Genius Designer” which I consider one of my favorites from him.

Red emphasis mine.

….There’s a big gap between designers and the majority of users. …. Generally, if you’re a member of a design team, you are not representative of the target audience. I don’t care if you’re the interaction designer, the graphics artist, the information architect, the writer, the programmer, or the marketer. All of these people:

• know too much about the product (be it a website, intranet, application, phone, whatever);
• are too skilled in using computers and the Web in general; and
• care too much about their own baby (so they can’t imaging visitors bouncing after scanning the homepage for 30 seconds — but that’s what outside users do).

- Jakob Nielsen

(more…)

I thought I’d look at buying some shelves.  But when I looked at how many pages this site had, I was suddenly feeling pretty exhausted.    By page 16, I think I’ll need a nap. Oh, in case you’re wondering, searching didn’t help, you had to know the SKU.

Advice:

• You should improve your server performance so it can handle more products on a page, and have fewer pages.
• You should insert an intermediate grouping by “type” or “color” or “price point”… no, I don’t mean a search box.
• You should be more aware of the customer.   We are not going to spend 30m on your site.