This definitive work is co-authored by Jakob Nielsen--the accepted industry expert in Web usability--and Marie Tahir, an expert in user profiling. Their collaboration has produced a guide of such rare practical benefit that Web designers will likely wear out their first copy scouring the pages to savour every last morsel of wisdom.

The book begins with a chapter of precise guidelines that serve as a checklist of the features and functionality to include on your homepage. The specifics found in categories such as "revealing content through examples" and "graphic design" will quickly hook you and whet your appetite for more. These guidelines are followed up with hard statistics and an examination of the ominous Jakob's Law: "users spend most of their time on other sites than your site." Here you'll find some interesting statistics about how various conventions like search, privacy policies, and logos are used.

All this leads up to the showcase element of the book--a systematic deconstruction of 50 of the most popular homepages on the Web. The authors painstakingly pick apart each in an uncompromising autopsy of usability. Each site is graphically analysed for its use of real estate and summarised with the frankness only found from true experts. Then each section of the homepage is bulleted and analysed for potential improvements.

It's a bold move to offer a critique of industry standard Web sites such as Yahoo, CNet and ebay but the authors have done such a fine job that the designers of those sites will surely make reading this book a high priority. For the rest of us, this work will serve as an invaluable gospel. --Stephen W Plain

Book Description
The book begins with a briefing on Jakobs Web usability principles, themselves culled from years of research. The fifty sites fall under five categories of ten each- Media sites; entertainment sites; technology sites; business sites; and etc. The content is simply presented- Fifty, two-page spreads, each dedicated to a specific Web sites homepage. Only the homepage of each site is analyzed. On the left-hand page is a large image of the homepage accompanied by a brief summary of the sites context. On the right-hand page are arrows pointing to each component of the home page with Jakobs comments. There will also be a summarizing few paragraphs where Jakob explains his analysis and offers suggestions for improving the design for usability

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