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Technology is interesting, exciting stuff and you can easily get carried away with the intensity of it. Most times that's OK, because the grind of daily life such as having to do the laundry or -- horrors! -- staff meetings drag you back down to earth. But you do need to be reminded of the hype of it all, every now and then, in order to separate the real from the fluff.
I wish that kind of mentality had been more prevalent at the start of the dotcom craze. Then, hype stacked on ridiculous hype and reality got buried by some outrageous stuff, and it's taken nearly a decade to shake that off. Now we have Web 2.0, social networking, interactivity everywhere and the same feeling that hype is starting to lead sense.
Huzzah, then, for people like Jakob Nielsen, who remind us that the Internet and the Web are no good if people can't use them. As he recently pointed out, dynamic Web 2.0 pages may be the height of fashion but they aren't what most users want from the Web.
He believes such sites are neglecting best practices in Web design and usability that have been built up over the years. He actually says that the proliferation of personalization tools associated with Web 2.0 sites resemble the "glossy but useless" sites that defined the dotcom boom.
The vast majority of users don't want to contribute to or interact with Web sites, he says, they just want to get in, do what they need to do, and get out. Only a small number of people are ever likely to make use of the fancy Web 2.0 tools, and most of those are teenagers or twenty somethings.
The Pew Research Center says much the same thing in a recent report on how people use the Web. Though the majority of American adults legitimately claim to be technology users and make regular use of the Internet and such things as cell phones, it says, those that actively participate in Web 2.0 activities are a distinct minority.
What the Pew report seem to be saying is that most adults use the Web and other technologies with a varying degree of reluctance, as necessities. In other words, as tools rather than as part of their lifestyles.
Lessons for health IT?
By Brian Robinson, GHIT Contributing Writer
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