Peter Merholz does freelance info architecture design and consults for companies like Scient, iXL, Wired Digital, and Organic Online. He's also something of a self-absorbed roustabout who abuses the Low Barrier of Entry on the Web to publish his own vanity press.
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Noted Usability Guru™ Jakob Nielsen claims that "speed
must be the overriding design criterion," and his statement is backed up by the GVU's
WWW User Survey, which indicates that slow downloads are the biggest problem in the Web experience. (GVU is Georgia Tech's Graphics, Visualization, & Usability Center, which seeks to develop new technologies in computer visualization.)
Dutifully, Web developers have
done what they can to work around this problem, but unfortunately, this goal of "speed no matter what" is often achieved at the cost of all other successful design criteria. "Fast download times" becomes a mantra, Yahoo a role model, and, well, soon everything (www.cnet.com)
starts (www.netscape.com) looking (www.excite.com) the (www.amazon.com)
same (www.barnesandnoble.com).
Let's reconsider the "speed rules" notion. It's no
secret that pornography sites attract phenomenal traffic. But everyone knows that porn sites are excruciatingly
slow. Even so, hoards of people are willing to not only wait for them but pay for them as well. How is it that the usual speed limits simply
don't apply to these blue sites? Obviously, sex sites have a key motivator - hormones - that typical sites lack, but that's not the only thing that they have going for them. Other elements
contribute to their success.
