Product Description

The book begins with a briefing on Jakob's web usability principles, themselves culled from years of research. The 50 sites fall under such categories as Fortune 500 Sites, Highest-Traffic Sites, and E-Commerce Sites.
The content is simply presented: Four book pages are devoted to each homepage. The first page is a clean screenshot of the site's homepage (for readers to make their own, unbiased judgments), followed by a page that explains the site's purpose and summarizes its success--or failure--at usabilty. The third and fourth pages are devoted to crtiques, where Jakob and Marie present no-holds-barred commentary for specific usability practices, as well as suggestions for improvement. Although only the homepage of each site is analyzed, many of the critiques can be applied to overall website design.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #91581 in Books
• Published on: 2001-11-14
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 336 pages

Amazon.co.uk Review
Most authors leave a significant gap between the theory and practice--a gap that it is left up to the reader to fill. Homepage Usability: 50 Websites Deconstructed boldly steps into that gap with specific observations and suggestions backed with solid quantitative analysis. This book focuses only on homepage design as the most important point of presence for any Web site.

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

From the Back Cover

Quick! You have 10 seconds to show your face to the world! What does your homepage say? In a world of information overload and dying dot.coms, your homepage must grab the attention of visitors, tell them where they are, and let them know where they can go. Does your site pass the test? Homepage Usability is all about making that first impression. Is your tag line effective? Can visitors find your search box? How difficult is the page to navigate? What percentage of your homepage is devoted to actual content? By putting 50 of today's top sites to the test, web usability experts Jakob Nielsen and Marie Tahir show you what makes for goodmdand not so goodmdfirst impressions. This book contains hundreds of examples that you can employ on your own homepage. Apply the best. Avoid the worst.

About the Author

Dr. Jakob Nielsen

Jakob is principal of Nielsen Norman Group; he was previously a Sun Microsystems Distinguished Engineer. Nielsen's Alertbox column about web usability has been published on the Internet since 1995 (http://www.useit.com). Nielsen has been called "the world's leading expert on web usability" (U.S. News & World Report), "the guru of Web page usability" (The New York Times), and he "knows more about what makes web sites work than anyone else on the planet" (Chicago Tribune).

Marie Tahir

Marie is Director of Strategy at Nielsen Norman Group, where she has focused on B2B and B2C user experience redesign. She previously managed the Human Factors group at Intuit, Inc., where she introduced and taught user centered design methodology and oversaw the user experience of the TurboTax, ProSeries, and QuickenLoans product lines. Prior to Intuit, Marie was at Lotus Development Corp., where she pioneered field research and user profiling methodology and was responsible for the usability of the SmartSuite product line. She is the co-author of "Bringing the Users' Work to Us: Usability Roundtables at Lotus Development" in Wixon and Ramey's Field Methods Casebook for Software Design.

Customer Reviews

A good starting point, should go further
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.

Useful but there are better ways to spend the money
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.

Easy reading, good practical advice and guidance
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.