Mastery, Mystery, and Misery Summary
This segment discusses the wonderour ideologies of web design. In it the author, Jakob Nielsen, divides these ideologies into three categories. First of all, he speaks of Mastery design, then Mystery design, and finally Misery design. Nielsen discusses the positive and negative aspects of each of these design mindsets and then determines which design is most universally applicable.
Nielsen describes Mastery design as the type that used familiar conventions and and design standards to make a site easy to navigate and put the user in control of the information at there fingertips. Search engines are a good example of Mastery design. Without much explination at all average people are able to go to these sites and quickly sort through billions of web pages to find the information they are looking for. Users like this type of site because they are easy to use and they put the user in the drivers seat.
The next type of design is Mystery. This design ideology makes websites that are tricky to use because they purposefully break modern conventions and design standards in order to hide things within a websites many pages. On te whole, sites of this nature are agrivating, but they do have there place. For example, jkrowling.com, the website of the author of Harry Potter, is a site designed to hid clues to unlocking secrets in the famous books. In this case usability is not the formost concern. These sites take on a much different feeling from Mastery sites, acting less like a car with the user in the driver's seat and more like a video game with the user at the controler.
The final type of web design is Misery design. This type produces websites that take power away from users. This is accomplished through splash pages, pop-ups and breaking the back button. They constrain user's choices unnecessarily and users don't like to use them because of this. In the end there is little or no place for Misery Design in Web development and the smart developer will exchange this method for Mastery design.
I plan on using this information to help me keep in mind what a webpage is actually for. It is not supposed to be a television. It is not supposed to be on constant autopilot. It is supposed to put users in the drivers seat and hand them the hypothetical informational keys.
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March 31, 2008 12:06 PM