WebWord has an great discussion of Jakob Nielsen’s latest screed — “Homepage Real Estate Allocation“. The consensus seems to be that he hasn’t had a new idea since the nineties and that he’s more concerned with selling books and seminars than on increasing usability.
Jakob is a force for good on the Web and it’s hard to argue with the idea that most home pages have too little information on them. But his ruthlessly reductionist approach ignores design as a source of humanity and pleasure as well as information. As Adam Greenfield says, “Poor Jakob. What a cold universe he must occupy.”
Finally, Jakob illustrates this piece with a pie chart, the worst information graphic in the known universe. I defy you to guess the absolute or relative sizes of the OS, Navigation, and Content slices in Jakob’s chart without refering to the the text.