Once upon a time, there was a man dressed up as a corporate Isaac Asimov, infinitely more boring and infinitely more pedantic, who shot the WWW 27 years ago. It’s 1998. The Internet is a Pandora’s box: it’s the web of Tim Berners-Lee and GeoCities, the web of Hillman Curtis, Joshua Davis, and Yugo Nakamura, the web of Flash, Fireworks, and hand-coded HTML.
And out of nowhere comes Jakob Nielsen with his lazy heuristics, his grandiloquent airs, and his breadcrumbs, and he convinced us all. Or almost all of us. And the web, which used to be a beautiful place full of things to discover, turned into a library of endlessly regurgitated templates, and we designers became sausage factories. Sausage with breadcrumbs. Breadcrumb on breadcrumb. All very UseIt, and insufferably boring. Jakob Nielsen was the champion of web commoditization, and we were the suckers who bought into it: it gave us an air of maturity and importance, keeping us far away from those Flash hippies making things that were increasingly complex and hard to imitate.
Today I read an article, from 2025 already, where this guy, not content with putting a bullet in the web 27 years ago, predicts that in a couple of years web user interfaces will disappear, and the web itself will become a data layer for “intelligent” agents, with no humans in the loop. From guru of mediocre standardization to agentic snake-oil salesman with non-stop flights. I don’t know why he isn’t selling crypto-babble.
Thank you so much, Jakob. I forgive you, it must be horrible dreaming of electric sheep.