Jakob Nielsen’s Three Digital Divides
Regardless of what you think of Jakob Nielsen’s site design, when Jakob talks, a lot of people in the HCI community listen. His latest AlertBox identifies what he calls three stages of the digital divide: the Economic Divide, the Usability Divide, and the Empowerment Divide. I think we can agree that economics, usability, and user empowerment are all issues on today’s web… but are they all really “divides,” and are they really coming in “stages”?
Aside from the self-serving use of his AlertBox to push the Nielsen Norman Group’s various reports (which are nevertheless often useful and in my opinion reasonably priced), I’ve got some nitpicks with this characterization.
First let’s identify the non-issue: The Economic Divide. It’s real, but as Nielsen points out it is shrinking fast in the developing world as PC costs come down. Nielsen cites a $379 Dell system, well within reach for most American families. Businesses and governments are both working to lower costs even more so that people in impoverished countries have a chance to join in (see all the hoopla about the $100 Computer Project for instance).
So far I agree with Nielsen. Having money makes a difference in gaining access to technology, though this divide is rapidly shrinking. (Hopefully we on the design side won’t erase these gains by bloating sites and software that are intended for the masses, making them unusable for lower end machines and slower networks. No, Jason, I’m not critiquing your post on bigger downloads, since you’ve got an audience on the higher end of technology.)
But then we come to his Second Stage, the Usability Divide. This he describes as “far worse than the economic divide” because most computers remain “so complicated that many people couldn’t use a computer even if they got one for free.” I don’t argue the point that usability is a problem. But for a problem to be a “divide” it must be an issue of “haves” and “have nots”; some people must “have usability” and others must “not have usability.”
Forgive an old English major, but what Nielsen describes is not a usability divide; we’re all plagued with the poor usability on the desktop and on the web. Don’t get me wrong—usability is a barrier to entry for people without experience or education, and we in the industry should lower that barrier. But the fact is that everybody needs (or at least wants) better usability, and not just the uneducated. This is not an issue that divides us. Furthermore, it’s been a problem for a long time; if it’s a stage, it’s been concurrent with the economic stage all along.
Similarly, Nielsen’s Third Stage, the Empowerment Divide, is neither a divide nor a stage. Nielsen states: “Even if computers and the Internet were extraordinarily easy to use, not everybody would make full use of the opportunities that such technology affords.” True enough. People don’t customize their homepage. They don’t sign up for blogs that they might be interested in. They use default services and applications they find on their desktops. They lurk on online communities without contributing. They don’t do a lot of things that we in our wisdom know would be good for them.
But where is the Divide? Are some people unfairly targetted? Are the oppressed masses really unempowered once everything is easy to use? Or is it really the Laziness Divide or the Don’t-Really-Care Divide or the Don’t-Have-Time-to-Optimize Divide? I myself am currently in this last camp; I have a brand new Macbook, chock full of usability and fabulous design, but my transition from my beloved tablet is slow, and not just because I used to work for Microsoft. (Did I just shoot my credibility?) Optimization and personalization and a switch to anything new takes time and energy, which are in short supply right now. It has a cost. Other things (namely my pregnant wife, my two projects about to launch, and my other kids) take precedence over learning a new (if incredibly desireable) OS.
So I guess at this point, if optimization is easy and obvious, there is still such a thing as personal choice, and people will choose to exercise it or not. That’s as it should be. It is not the job of the design or HCI or business community to force people to do good things for themselves. Provide sensible defaults, good value for the money, and a great experience out of the box, all based on sound design and usability principles.
And then to paraphrase Joseph Smith, who knew nothing about computers but a lot about choices, we can only let them govern themselves.