Creating Web sites is easy. Creating sites that truly meet the needs and expectations of the wide range of online users is quite another story. In Designing Web Usability: The Practice of Simplicity, renowned Web usability guru Jakob Nielsen shares his insightful thoughts on the subject. Packed with annotated examples of actual Web sites, this book sets out many of the design precepts all Web developers should follow.
This guide segments discussions of Web usability into page, content, site, and intranet design. This breakdown skillfully isolates for the reader many subtly different challenges that are often mixed together in other discussions. For example, Nielsen addresses the requirements of viewing pages on varying monitor sizes separately from writing concise text for “scanability.” Along the way, the author pulls no punches with his opinions, using phrases like “frames: just say no” to immediately make his feelings known. Fortunately, his advise is some of the best you’ll find.
One of the unique aspects of this title is the use of actual statistics to buttress the author’s opinions on various techniques and technologies. He includes survey results on sizes of screens, types of queries submitted to search portals, response times by connection type and more. This book is intended as the first of two volumes–focusing on the “what.” The author promises a follow-up title that will show the “hows” and, based on this installation, we can’t wait. –Stephen W. Plain
Topics covered: Cross-platform design, response time considerations, writing for the Web, multimedia implementation, navigation strategies, search boxes, corporate intranet design, accessibility for disabled users, international considerations, and future predictions.
Customer Reviews
Outdated and no news at all:
You wont find anything in this book what general common sense already told you.
Besides it’s outoutdated and for this reason all examples are useless.
Very nice book:
this is a very good book about web usability and its not a complex kind of book, you start reading it and u dont want to stop it untill you finish it!
Not quite what I expected..:
As an avid read of Mr.Nielsen’s blog and his website, I figured this book would comprise the “Bible of Web Design”. Unfortunately, I was a bit let down.
His book does cover many aspects of web design and usability. In fact, he does a very good job at pointing out examples of bad web design. He uses full page pictures analyzing pages and their faults. Additionally, he lays out some ground rules for website design but many of them are redundnant and obvious to those who have designed sites in the past and read his blog/site.
Today though, this book is getting a tad out of date. It was written prior to the Web 2.0 boom and the usability gains included with AJAX and similar technologies.
This book does a good job at educating you that you ought not make websites like many people make their myspace pages (moving backgrounds, sounds onload, etc) but does not really provide any new information on how someone ought to approach new ideas in usability. For a beginner in web design and page layout, I would recommend this book. For someone who has been doing it for a long time I would pass this by.
Simple IS usually better:
Please people don’t design incredibly complex sites with over the top graphics that take an hour(feels like) to download even on broadband! I encounter this everyday and can’t imagine what it must be like for those on dial-up, which is still most of the internet user base. Designers like to design and justify their high paying jobs by these crazy sites that simply drive me nuts. I recently tried looking for sunglasses on the Ray Ban site and Holy […]! What a pain in the […]! I finally went to a small reseller site where I could actually see the glasses quickly and make a purchase. The Ray Ban site I’m sure cost a fortune and is pretty but NOT user friendly. Web site designers need to remember that these sites are for people to find products and services, not to win design contests. My ex is a graphic designer(excuse me…User Interface Experience) for a very well know company and I know how they think. The more elaborate the better, we can charge clients more! KISS
It’s outdated but you can skim through it:
He offers some good pointers for web standards and usability such as providing more user content and less fluff. Making it easier to navigate around a website, helping the user realize where they are within a website makes sense. Even if you have a search engine, if the website is poorly designed/described, a search option won’t be of any use to the user at all.
There were some points that I didn’t agree with and it was because this book is outdated. Some points such as leaving links blue, removing search capabilities on extranet websites but having this feature is essential for intranet websites is a bit contradictory. Having the option to search is beneficial to web surfers of extranet and intranet sites. “Web design still needs to be grounded in a strong sense of structure and navigation support.” (224) Using a wider search box to illicit users to enter more words in their query, it’s actually better to focus on specific keywords when searching.
If the information were “common sense,” then there wouldn’t be a need to write a book about it. Bad websites wouldn’t exist and we would live in a dandy world, chock full of great navigational websites. But that’s not reality and there does need to be a set of updated web standards out there for web designers/developers to go by. There is some chaos out there but at least this book provides a foundation for people to begin developing user-friendly websites. “Overall usability is increased by consistency.”
