- Hardcover
- Publisher: Tandem Library (Nov 2001)
- ISBN-10: 0613917340
- ISBN-13: 978-0613917346
- Average Customer Review: 3.8 out of 5 stars See all reviews (9 customer reviews)
- See Complete Table of Contents
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Customer Reviews
Most Helpful Customer Reviews
43 of 45 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
Jakob is really trying to hurry the web forwards into useful maturity, and who can blame him. Many designers who come from a purely artistic background will hate Jakob and this book, because they will think it amputates their creativity. They would be right, and Jakob would make no excuses for that. One of the reasons why the web is such a nasty place to be most of the time, is that different sites do the same things in different ways. In this book, Jakob and Marie attempt to identify the common components that most websites share, (such as company logo, navigation area, news area, about us link, search function, legal wording etc) and recommend a consistent way of displaying these common components. These recommendations are based not on what they think you should do, but based on what most other websites are doing already. If 84% of sites have their company logo in the top left hand corner, that is a pretty good indication that a similar percentage of users will expect to find the company logo to appear in the top left hand corner, which is a pretty good indication that it's a good idea to put your company logo in the top left hand corner.
It's a handy book. Yes it's quite repetitive, but in way that illustrates the point's he's making about standardisation. Jakob should go further. The Victorians started standardisation, and created standard time and weights and measures. Jakob should use his position to push web standardisation. He should examine sites deeper that the homepage. He should provide examples of information architectures that although will need to be adjusted from site to site, follow a similar structure that users will recognise and be able to navigate intuitively.
When users go to a site, they go there to achieve something. A significant proportion of the time taken to achieve their goal will be taken up by learning how to use the site. If sites are more standardised, the learning curve will be flatter, and the user will achieve his goal more effectively, more efficiently, and more satisfactorily. This book starts to set out those standards, and should be read by people designing sites.
34 of 36 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
Jakob Nielson has set out his stall to be the voice of science and reason in web design and, in the past, I have found a lot of his advice helpful. However this book strays into dangerous territory because he exposes his detailed thinking and there are enough cases where his prescription misses the point about the message and audience for a particular website to convice me this emperor is only half-clad.
The approach to the book is very much a box ticking exercise, you can't help feeling that this is a cheap way to fill a few hundred pages and get another title out.
Nielson and Tahir analyse a lot of (relatively similar) websites and reading soon becomes a grind, each page I turned I hoped I would learn or see something new but after a while I realised I was on a bus tour of the ordinary and I was unlikely to find any significant insights.
The approach to the book is very much a box ticking exercise, you can't help feeling that this is a cheap way to fill a few hundred pages and get another title out.
Nielson and Tahir analyse a lot of (relatively similar) websites and reading soon becomes a grind, each page I turned I hoped I would learn or see something new but after a while I realised I was on a bus tour of the ordinary and I was unlikely to find any significant insights.
36 of 39 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
Very easy to use practical advice about constructing a homepage. Lots of the 113 guidelines will be familiar to people who've read Designing Web Usability by Jakob Nielsen, but some are new.
The guidelines are based on the assessment of 50 homepages from the internet. Each of the homepages is shown with comments on how they might be improved. This is the sort of useful exercise you'd do if only you had the time. Thank goodness someone has done it for us.
My favourite section is the strength of recommendation against each guideline. It allows you to view quickly which are must dos, and the ones you might consider ignoring in your particular circumstances.
Look at your homepage with new eyes, I did.
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Most Recent Customer Reviews
Perfect and good price!!! AAA+
Jakob Nielsen explains usability for home pages perfectly. It's an old but interesant book in these days. And so cheap actually. Give it a chance!
Published 3 months ago by Manuel Mas Candela
Still useful, but...
... it has8 years and it shows at times. Most standards are still commom and making the web more usable is certainly a valid effort. Read more
Published on 14 Nov 2008 by Yoko
Very usable
I've read about 10 books and tutorials about site design. This was the best of them in terms of usability. Read more
Published on 19 May 2002 by Balai Zsolt
Good - but repetitive
I like Nielsen. He talks common sense. His first book on Web design ('Web Usability') should be the bible of Web designers - but as as this new book shows, the same old mistakes... Read more
Published on 6 Feb 2002 by Bobby Elliott
Very good, but possibly too long.
This is an excellent book giving guidelines for communicating the purpose of websites, communicating information about the company whose site it is, revealing content through... Read more
Published on 25 Jan 2002
What an amazing book!
This is a very good book. It starts with an extensive list of good design principles then moves on to the review of the home pages of 50 websites. Read more
Published on 15 Dec 2001
Listmania!
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