Utterly bogus pseudo-scientific drivel masquerading as research results, used as a sales pitch

[pyesetz]

Jakob Nielsen generally knows what he's talking about, especially when he's talking about eye-tracking studies (you know, the ones that show straight males staring at the crotches when looking at photos of male ballplayers).

Nielsen knows many things, but apparently he doesn't know as much about cavemen as he thinks he does.  Hold your nose while reading this:

Many of the skills needed to use computers aren't highly useful in slaying mammoths. Such skills include remembering obscure codes from one screen to the next and interpreting highly abbreviated form-field labels. It's no surprise that people are no good at these skills, since they weren't important for survival in the ancestral environment.

Did you notice all the citations of peer-reviewed work in that paragraph?  That's because there aren't any!  Highly-abbreviated form labels?  Obscure codes?  Does Nielsen have any idea at all how relevant these were for mammoth hunting?  Hint: the animal's traces don't have neon signs on them announcing "the thing you want to eat took a dump here".  The codes are obscure and abbreviated.

I don't think I'll be signing up for his seminar on how to build websites for cavemen.  Nielsen doesn't know the subject matter.

Comments

[jordan179.livejournal.com]

There is an unfortunate tendency for people to assume that technologically primitve means technologically simple. In fact, hunter-gatherer technology is quite complex, and includes massive amounts of knowledge as to the signs, behavior, strengths and weaknesses of all the local game and the locations, seasons and best harvesting methods of all the local plants. This are not trivial disciplines, and mastering them takes many years of hard study and practice. And the price of a mistake, especially hunting big game like proboscideans, can be considerably more serious than the generation of error codes!

[pyesetz]

Indeed.  Nielsen was using "caveman" to mean "moron", which is an insult to all who are described by Furry Code FprH.  This is both everyone (since we are all anthropomorphic apes) and no one (since code FPrH is not on the official list, apparently because some people can't tell the difference between apes and monkeys).

Thank you for writing again, but I still think your journal contains too much infighting for my taste in furiends.