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Homepage Usability: 50 Websites Deconstructed Jakob Nielsen, Marie Tahir, 2001 New Riders Publishing ISBN: 073571102X List Price: $39.99 |
"I do think that this book has done a good job in identifying the most common -- although minor -- usability related issues on a variety of homepages. They help us realize that perhaps the first step in evaluating a Website is performing a heuristic evaluation and take care of the minor issues before doing a formal usability test. At the minimum, the list of guidelines offered by the authors can be used as a checklist to ensure that commonly used design conventions are not violated in your design. But, don't consider the written word in this book as gospel! Put the recommendations through the filter of published research and, of course, your own experience."
Reviewed by Pawan Vora
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@ the reviewer |
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Pawan Vora is VP of Information Architecture at XOR.
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Is the usability of your Website's home page much more important than the usability of the rest of its pages? Jakob Nielsen and Marie Tahir, authors of Homepage Usability, think so. After all, your home page is your company's face to the world and as such, is your site's most frequently visited page. With this in mind, Nielsen and Tahir focus upon improving usability for this particular page.
Nielsen and Tahir divide their book into two major sections:
- Homepage Guidelines and Design Conventions, a collection of 113 homepage usability guidelines, as well as design conventions compiled from the homepages evaluated
- Homepage Evaluations for 50 prominent companies
The first section is the book's strongest and makes it an interesting read. It presents homepage usability prescriptions within several categories: for example, communicating the site's purpose, content writing, links, navigation, search, graphics & animation, and so forth. Website developers would do well to follow these guidelines. Nielsen and Tahir also offer homepage design conventions, based upon an analysis of the Websites evaluated for the book. The authors contend that such analysis is important because of the Nielsen's Law of the Internet User Experience: "Users spend most of their time on other sites than your site." The authors then offer statistics and corresponding design conventions for criteria such as download time, page layout, typography, page design elements (e.g., logo, search, navigation), and frequency features (e.g. sign-in, About Us, Privacy Policy).
The book's second section, however, is a disappointment. In deconstructing the homepages of "leading" Web sites, Nielsen and Tahir provide analysis of homepage real estate and a laundry list of usability cheers and jeers (along with a few embedded recommendations for improvement). I don't disagree with most of the usability violations identified by the authors. Instead, given this area's potential, I found it lacking for several reasons:
"Conventional" deconstruction
In the first section, the authors lay the foundation for homepage design by presenting guidelines organized into specific categories. Although the authors recommend that homepage usability be evaluated along similar lines (p. 5), they contradict themselves within the deconstruction section by presenting usability comments in a conventional left-to-right and top-to-down manner.
Missing task context within deconstruction
In evaluating page usability, especially homepage usability, it is important to understand users, as well as their goals and tasks. Without this context, evaluation often amounts to merely personal preferences and many minor usability issues. Although the authors identify valid usability problems, their recommendations would have carried more weight if they had identified users and their tasks as well. (The authors do admit that smaller usability issues dominate their reviews in terms of sheer volume.)
No citations
Homepage Usability has no references or citations, and without these, it is impossible to know when the authors base a recommendation upon existing research or simply their own opinion. Here are a few maxims calling out for citations:
- "Two things that users often look for first on a homepage are the logo and the search feature."
- "It's a general usability principle to minimize duplication."
- "….the median number of ads was three, which seems to be an absolute upper limit from a usability perspective."
Also, I am concerned that the authors do not provide citations for ideas advanced by other researchers. For example, in referring to "banner blindness," they do not refer to the original research presented by Benway and Lane (1998) at the 1998 Human Factors & Ergonomics Society (HFES) annual meeting. (See the article on Banner Blindness published by ITG in the December 1998 issue of Internetworking.) Thus, many readers may mistakenly assume that the authors coined this term.
Incorrect information
Some of the information presented within Homepage Usability is plain incorrect. For example, Nielsen and Tahir state that most of the sites they reviewed used 12 point Sans Serif font. However, this table of home pages and corresponding fonts (as well as a review of the site screenshots provided by the authors) reveals that the most common font size used is 10 point.
Questionable usefulness of screen real estate analysis
Though the authors indicate that the most common screen resolution used by Web users is 800 x 600 pixels, they analyze screen real estate based upon screenshots of 800 x 800 pixels (without offering any justification for doing so). This discrepancy makes their screen real estate analysis appear dubious.
Inconsistent application of design guidelines
Unfortunately, Nielsen and Tahir prove inconsistent in applying their own usability guidelines. For example, the authors identify the underlining of text links as a "strong" prescription (p. 53), yet in analyzing several homepages where text links are not underlined (e.g., accenture.com, microsoft.com, mtv.com), the authors make no mention. Also, the authors condemn the practice of linking homepage logos to the same page on some sites (e.g. barnesandnoble.com), but not on others (e.g. mtv.com, microsoft.com). On newsnow.co.uk's homepage, the logo links to the "About Us" page; the authors do not identify it as a usability issue. Such inconsistencies would not have arisen if the authors had presented their design analyses along the design guideline categories presented in the first section.
Conflicting recommendations
Some of the authors' recommendations in Homepage Usability conflict with recommendations made in other books. For example, Nielsen and Tahir write: "It's fine that a relatively simple site like this one (fewer than 100 pages) doesn't have a search feature…." (p. 201). But how do users know how large the site is? If users immediately start browsing the site, that would contradict Nielsen's assertion in Designing Web Usability, where he states that when visiting a Website to locate content, more than half of all users demonstrate "search-dominant" tendencies by going straight to a search engine.
Lack of solutions
While Homepage Usability is exhaustive at pointing out the faults in Websites, the authors should have demonstrated how such sites (perhaps popular sites such as Amazon.com, CNNfn, and FedEx) could be redesigned (and improved) by applying their usability design guidelines. To show improvements attributable to usability, the authors could run usability testing sessions on both a benchmark site and a redesigned site.
Should you buy this book, then? Despite my reservations, I would say yes. Homepage Usability does a good job at identifying the most common -- albeit minor -- usability issues pertaining to a variety of homepages. In doing so, the authors help remind us that in evaluating a Website, it is best to perform a heuristic evaluation and correct minor issues before conducting formal usability testing. At minimum, Nielsen and Tahir's guidelines can be used as a checklist to ensure that your design does not violate design conventions. Do not consider this book gospel, however! Run its recommendations through the filters of published research and, of course, your own experience.
© Internet Technical Group
Last update: February 3, 2002
URL: http://www.sandia.gov/itg/newsletter/dec01/vora_review.html