Designing Web Usability - The Practice of Simplicity.
Jakob Nielsen, 1999
Indiana, New Riders Publishing
ISBN: 1-562-05810-X
List Price: $45.00
"..usability has become a core competency that is necessary for business survival in the network economy. Only usable sites get any traffic. If customer's can't find a product on an e-commerce site, they are not going to buy it."Reviewed by Maya Venkatraman
Jakob Nielsen's book - Designing Web Usability - The Practice of Simplicity was the top-ranking seller (#1 or #2) on Amazon.com's computer and Internet list in January (although it ranks #174 on Amazon now.) The book has also been amongst top hundred sellers in the overall listings. A somewhat unique phenomenon given that the book is about Usability! The surprise is heightened when one reads the book and finds that contents are a list of opinions that are, for the most part, already available on line in the alertbox columns authored by Nielson.
A possible explanation comes from a paradigm shift in customer experience that Nielsen himself outlines. In the conventional model the customer buys a product, pays for it and brings it home before first experiencing product usability. On the Internet, customer experience with a product begins as soon as they click on the company's web site in search of the product. Further, on the Internet your competition is only one click away - and the usability of web site directly impacts sales and market capture figures. Players in the Internet arena have come to realize that providing a good user experience is on the critical path to success. Nielsen is regarded one of the ten most influential people on the web, and is the best recognized voice of usability on the net. New usability enthusiasts from the dot.com world are flocking to read the book. Usability professionals, read the book perhaps to make sure they stay aware of what now forms the collective usability consciousness. So, it is no real surprise that Designing Web Usability is selling - well - better than hot cakes.
The nucleus of the book is dedicated to guidelines on page design, content design, and site design. The chapter on page design contains material on optimal division of screen real estate between content and navigation, creating good links via the use of appropriate labels, titles and color, the use of frames (<NOFRAMES> but aye to <IFRAMES>) and style sheets, software and hardware limitations of most users and the implications of high response times. Content design focuses on writing for the web and includes the importance of page titles and headings and writing for web users who tend to scan through pages of information. This chapter also covers the use of images, animation, audio and video. The site design chapter begins with hints for home page design (Splash screens must die etc.). The advantages of breadth focused, depth focused and combination models are presented in the context of the three main goals of navigation - helping user answer the questions: Where am I, Where have I been, Where can I go?. Search design (search box, advanced search, search algorithms and result presentation) and URL design are also discussed in some detail. The final chapters address intranet design, designing for accessibility and internationalization, but lack the depth of the earlier chapters. The intranet chapter calls out the primary differences between designing for the intranet and the internet and presents insights from designing the intranet site for Sun Microsystems. The chapter on internationalization mainly focuses on methodologies for conducting international user tests. The final chapter contains Nielsen's prediction for the web in the future.
If the summary of contents rings familiar, it could be because this book is a compilation of Nielsen's online columns alertbox published on his site - useit.com. The book provides the material in these columns with an organizational structure. The content itself is augmented by many more illustrative images of screen shots. A few of the guidelines are backed by data from usability tests and experimental studies. A few of the guidelines come from extending proven principles from GUI design while most others are the opinions of a usability-oriented web-watcher.
Scanning other online reviews of the book reveals the enthusiasm of readers who have discovered Nielsen through this book. "Finally a reference to point to", says one online reviewer, "every member of your web design team should be required to read this." Howard Tiersky on Amazon.com says that the book has heightened his awareness of usability issues and likens the book to a reference book "you might not follow every rule on every occasion, but you need a good reference to know what the rules are". Many such readers of the book are likely to start reading the online columns and will be able to access more up to date information on designing usable Web sites. However, one cannot help but agree with Nelle from Amazon.com who laments the absence of evidence - experimental or anecdotal - for most of the pronouncements in the book.
The book is written using a clear and direct writing style. The illustrations are very useful. However, the presence of several "side bars" and illustrative examples through out the book makes for a rather choppy reading experience. This aspect of the design of the book would work better with hypertext rather than regular text.
This is the first book of a two part series. The second book will focus on the methodologies used to abstract the guidelines presented in this book. This second volume (perhaps subtitled discount usability testing for the internet?) promises to contain some interesting techniques that the readers of this online journal in particular are likely to find interesting.
Related Links
- Useit.com: http://www.useit.com
- Reviews on Amazon.com: http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ISBN%3D156205810X/useitcomusableinA/103-0717894-8109467
- Reviews on epinions.com: http://jakob.epinions.com/book_mu-3324680
- A summary of the guidelines: http://www.webreference.com/new/nielsenbook.html
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Last update: April 30, 2000
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