‘All right, stop, collaborate and listen.’

So go the opening lines to Vanilla Ice’s (or Rob Van Winkle as he’s known to his parents) 1990 anthem, Ice Ice Baby.

And while Rob may not be known for his usability consultancy skills (although I’m not sure, maybe nobody’s ever asked him), Jakob Nielsen, on the other hand, is widely regarded as one of the world’s leading web usability consultants – he holds a Ph.D in human-computer interaction from the Technical University of Denmark in Copenhagen. (Thanks, Wikipedia.)

Nielsen has polarized the web design community by generally bagging any kind of rich media (animation, Flash, large graphics etc) in favour of the ephemeral ‘ease of use’ thesis.

Of course, things should be easy to use – what a novel idea – however, the issue becomes somewhat clouded when ‘ease of use’ is used to (or more often as an excuse to) destroy a website’s personality.

What do I mean?

I mean people will sit through anything if the content is relevant to them even if the usability sucks. They’d rather not, but they’ll do it if their desire is strong.

If I have a fetish for dressing as a llama and throwing cheesecakes at pictures of Yanni then I’ll tolerate any amount of crap usability and idiotic navigation to get to the content. And if that’s what I’m after and you use rich media (plus ease of use) to enhance the experience (Yanni Tetris anyone?) I might even smile a little, laugh, tell the cheesecake-wielding community and start blogging all about www.yanniridesllamas.com (that’s not real by the way, but if it were, I’d be there).

Of course, Mr Jakob Nielsen (let’s call him J-Nizzle for consistency’s sake), seems to overlook so many intangible human factors when creating ‘golden rules of usability’.

So, how does all this inane rambling relate to Vanilla Ice?

Well, he had a line for usability testing and content creation that’s better than anything I’ve heard from J-Nizzle. Let me know if you find a better one:

‘All right, stop, collaborate and listen.’

Huh?

All right, stop what you’re doing.

Get together (collaborate) with your audience in any number of formal and informal settings. Eavesdrop amongst them on the bus; it works for me. Go drinking with them. Play Jenga with them if it’s relevant (thanks, Will).

And listen to what they have to say. Make your designers listen. Make your developers listen. Hell, make the cleaners listen if you think it’ll rattle the collective dags of your ‘users’. Or people as we sometimes like to call them.

Simple.

So sorry, Jakob, (subtle backtrack alert) while you really do have a lot of good things to say, and I’m sure you can do the running man too (I’d sit through any Flash animation to see that), you need to remember that sometimes, popular culture (cue: song lyrics) will tell you a lot more about they way people tick and what they want than you’ll ever find from hiding behind one-way mirrors, wearing a lab coat and dutifully scribbling down notes while your users ‘casually use’ a website in ‘normal relaxing conditions’ with tinfoil cones strapped to their heads.

And anyway, who would you rather have dinner with?

‘Word to your motherboard.’