By Jakob Nielsen and Marie Tahir
Review by: Alex
Making your website usable is one of the key things of importance when designing how your pages will look. This book takes into account many usability tips which people in website design should follow. What makes this book different from other classics such as "Don't Make Me Think!" or Neilson's other book "Designing Web Usability" is that this book uses visual examples of 50 of the best known websites on the internet and through numbered examples shows you exactly what is wrong with how the site was developed and using concise comments explains the good and bad points of those pages. For those who find theory work hard to swallow and prefer practical real world examples, this book is most definitely for you. A criticism of the book is that after you read the first 10 or so examples, mostly everything has been covered and the book tends to be repetitive as many of the sites make the same (or similar mistakes). However for those sites which do show you original information, this book is worth it, just for them. The first section of this book issues some guidelines which tell you exactly how you can make sure your site at least meets the most basic of usability principles and each site has an index which shows the distribution of content for those who want to understand what are the most common elements to have on a website page. The book may get repetitive but this only drums into your head how simple mistakes can affect users in a major way and helps you to meet the guidelines for both the benefit of the user and yourselves. Also as the book is about homepages it takes into account the most important part of the site which often determines if a user will stay or leave. The book covers the statistics of the most common areas for placement on a website of certain elements such as logo placement, navigation and the search function; this helps you as it tells you that users expect certain things of your site in certain places and if you keep to those placements users will feel more at home.
The chapters of this book include the following... Chapter 1 is the preface which explains what usability is, what the book covers and what the book does not cover. Chapter 2 explains the homepage guidelines which give the most fundamental principles which every developer should know before starting to design a website. Chapter 3 covers homepage design statistics and details the statistics of where certain elements are used on a homepage such as where the most common place for a search the website section is. Chapter 4 which is the final chapter lists the websites themselves and the deep analysis of each of their homepages, both what is good but more importantly, what is bad and what could or should be improved.
This book is suitable for the following types of people interested in website development:
- People who wish to understand the importance of website usability.
- Website designers who want to see real life examples of when usability goes wrong.
- Anyone who works in website design and wants an introduction to website usability.