This definitive work is coauthored 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 savor 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 home page. 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 home pages on the Web. The authors painstakingly pick apart each in an uncompromising autopsy of usability. Each site is graphically analyzed for its use of real estate and summarized with the frankness only found from true experts. Then each section of the home page is bulleted and analyzed 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

Topics covered: Design guidelines, convention usage, screen real estate, navigation, content presentation, search facilities, links, graphics and animation, advertising, news, customization, and customer feedback.

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.

What happened on page 66? .......... What happened was that I came to the deconstruction (criticism) of THIS site (amazon.com) and discovered that things were not as they seemed. Having purchased regularly from three of the amazon sites over the last five years, and having written over 200 reviews on this site alone, I think I know the site as well as any other customer. Thus I was surprised when I saw some of the criticisms levelled by Jakob Nielsen and Marie Tahir. I'm not saying that everything is perfect - and fair criticism is wholly constructive - however, the authors have left themselves open to the charge of superficiality.

Take as an example their criticism of the page tabs (they say that users can make use of the other navigation tools on the page). Personally, I ALWAYS use the tabs at the top of the page. It seems that Nielsen and Tahir haven't considered user preferences.

They say that 'Friends and Favorites' is a meaningless category name. Not to me, it's not. Nor to hundreds of thousands of other site users.

They say that 'Free e-cards' should be in the 'Gifts' category. WRONG - Gift Certificates are in the gift category. e-Cards are e-Cards. Gift Certificates are Gift Certificates.

They say that 'Hello' is an unnecessary level of friendliness. Is it? I LIKE being welcomed to the site (even though I know it's only an electronic gizmo). What Nielsen and Tahir failed to understand was that, after signing-in, the message says 'Hello, Graham Hamer' (or Hello, Father Christmas if that's who you are). As I say, the authors have been too superficial in drawing their conclusions.

They say that Photo albums and Photo frames is an odd and seemingly random combination of items. Eh? Doesn't the word 'photo' conjure up a link?

They say that 'Kitchen' should be grouped with 'Lawn and Patio'. Why? I don't grow flowers in my oven.

In Nielsen and Tahir's specific examples, they criticise 'A Painted House' as being a poor description of John Grisham's 'A Painted House'. ... What planet are these people from?

They criticize the fact that there is more than one place on the page to sign in. I LIKE that feature since both my wife and I have accounts with Amazon, I often find that I am 'signed in' on her account. Having a convenient location to click is a useful addition.

Nielsen and Tahir have completely misunderstood the meaning of the heading 'New Releases'. If they had bothered to click on any of the categories below, they would have understood its function. (Superficiality again.)

I could rant on and on for pages, but I think you're probably getting the gist of things. Having discovered that the authors had made such a poor job of deconstructing a site I know well, I now don't trust their judgement on the remaining 49 sites. That's a shame, because the idea behind the book is good - just poorly executed.


Homepage Guidelines from Gurus   November 8, 2001
 48 out of 59 found this review helpful

Jakob Nielsen is out to change the Web, one page at a time. His latest book, "Homepage Usability" coauthored with Marie Tahir, takes on the most important page of your site, the home page. Now that Nielsen and the usability community have "defeated bad design" by reducing "user-hostile" design practices they are fighting for good design. What better place to start than your own home page? The authors present 113 homepage usability guidelines that will make your site easier to use, and apply them mercilessly to 50 popular sites.

This book is part of a strategic campaign against the "enemies" of usability. The members of the Nielsen Norman group, a veritable who's who of usability and design gurus, realize their Fortune 500 fees are too high for most small to mid-sized companies. They are leveraging themselves accordingly to spread the usability gospel by giving world tours, seminars and tutorials, writing books, granting interviews, and teaching other designers about usability so design teams can help themselves.

The home page is a company's public face to the world, and is often the most popular page on a site. Spending more time to get it right is time well invested, as usability improvements can yield two or three-fold increases in conversion rates. The problem is, there is only one home page for each site, so conflicting forces like sales, design, and marketing invariably vie for its attention. The challenge is to design a homepage that allows access to all of your important features without cramming them all onto the page itself, overwhelming new users.

>Homepage Usability Guidelines

The guidelines are distilled from the authors' combined 14 years of Web usability experience, and countless hours testing actual users. They are grouped by topic area, and show examples from the 50 website reviews. Here are some highlights:

Communicate the Site's Purpose

Tag lines should be brief and concise. TITLEs should begin with the company name for bookmarkability, followed by a good tagline. Avoid using "online" or unnecessary articles ("the" etc.) Don't include "hompage" or "online" in the title. Limit titles to less than 64 characters.

Content Writing

Optimize content for easy scanning. Be clear use consistent capitalization. Hire a copy editor. Avoid exclamation marks!!

Revealing Content Through Examples

Use examples to reveal the site's content, rather than just describing it. Examples instantly communicate what the site is about. Be specific.

Search

Search is one of the most important elements of the homepage so make it visible, wide, and simple. Provide a wide (25 char) input box on the top right or left of the home page. Use a "Search" button only. Search the entire site by default, users are confused by scoped searches. Don't search the Web, that's what search engines are for.

News and Press Releases

In order for them to work, you need to craft effective headlines and decks (story summaries). Give specific information, don't tantalize with hype. Headlines should be succinct, yet descriptive, to give maximum information in as few words as possible. Write and edit specific summaries for press releases and news stories that you feature on your home page. Don't just repurpose the first paragraph of the full article. Link headlines, not decks, to the full story.

UI Widgets

Use them sparingly as they invariably draw users attention. Never use widgets for parts of the screen that you don't want people to click. Make graphic bullets clickable. Avoid using multiple text entry boxes, users confuse these with search.

>Homepage Design Statistics

The authors also quantify homepage design conventions by tallying up the design stats on the 50 sites reviewed (page width/length, download time, search, wording conventions, etc.). Since most users spend most of their time *off* your site, the authors advise us to follow common Web design conventions. Don't fight your users' mental model unless you have a very good reason, and can back it up with user testing.

I found this to be the most useful part of the book, as the authors quantify things that usability experts heatedly argue about. I'd like to see a larger sample size however. Things like search placement (35% upper right, 30% upper left), navigation location (30% left rail, 30% tabs, 18% top), and naming conventions (55% use "About ," 21% "About Us"), contact info (89% use "Contact Us"), and privacy policy (47% use "Privacy Policy").

A handy table of recommendations based on these statistics sums things up. Some highlights:

* Download time at most 10 seconds at average connection speeds, < 50KB
* Page width optimized for 770 pixels, but with a liquid layout
* Page length of one or two screens is best
* Provide a white 25 character simple search box in upper right or left corner
* About us - always include this, helps establish trust
* Body text color - black 12 point (relative units) sans-serif font, on white background for maximum contrast

At $10,000 per home page review, Nielsen says this is a 1/2 million dollar book. I wouldn't put the price quite that high, but it is invaluable. You only get one chance to make a first impression, this book will help you ensure it's a good one. Highly recommended.


Heuristic evaluation in a coffee-table book   February 12, 2002
 29 out of 31 found this review helpful

Web site usability has come a long way. For proof, just consider the strange case of Dr Jakob Nielsen.

Back in 1995, Dr Nielsen was a Sun Microsystem Usability software usability expert with a string of published papers and books on topics such as "heuristic evaluation". Nielsen had spent a chunk of his career analysing the benefits of quick-and-dirty usability methods such as heuristic evaluation, where a group of experts rate a system's compliance with established usability norms. But such methods remained generally underappreciated, and Dr Nielsen's books and papers were read by a relatively small group of fellow specialists. In 1995, with Web sites becoming a popular new type of "software", Dr Nielsen started publishing his thoughts at his own Web site, useit.com.

Now move forward seven years, and here is Dr Nielsen again, peering out of the front of a book through neat glasses, wearing a red tie and perfectly mismatched greenish-blue shirt, with hair just long enough to mark him as a child of the 1960s. Except now Dr Nielsen is famous and runs sell-out executive lecture sessions on Web site usability. And the book out of which he is peering is not a scholarly tome but a big, glossy, full-colour 320-page compendium of heuristic evaluations on some of the world's best-known Web sites. It's called "Homepage Usability".

Yes, it's the world's first coffee-table usability book.

And if you can get over the price, "Homepage Usability" is both a useful contribution to the discipline, and more fun than you'd think. It's a set of design rules centred around an examination of the home pages for 50 major sites, including the highly-valued (Amazon, Yahoo, eBay, Google), the worthy (PBS, Art Institute of Chicago) and the famous (CNN, Google, BBC Online).

"Homepage Usability" is particularly useful because Nielsen and collaborator Marie Tahir use these 50 sites not just as a gimmick but also to help define the "standard" treatments of elements on a Web page. They do so in the belief that rather than learning a new interface on every site, users prefer your site to work the same way as the last dozen they were on.

Others, notably Michael Bernard from the Software Usability Research Laboratory at Wichita State University, have researched the placement of basics like navigation and search. Nielsen and Tahir analyse their 50 pages statistically and confirm and extend Bernard's work. For instance, their analysis of links to privacy information suggests that people will expect to see such a link on a site's home page (43 of the 50 had it there), and that it should be labelled "Privacy Policy" (20 of the 43 did this).

On top of the 15 pages of statistical analysis, Neilsen and Tahir also offer 25 pages of heuristics - rules - on eveything from displaying logos to communicating site problems. Many of these rules will be familiar to Web design veterans and to readers of Nielsen's last book, "Designing Web Usability".

Once the rules are finished with, Nielsen and Tahir take you into the instructive and oddly entertaining 240-page dissection of those 50 sites. They seek out and pull apart every misplaced button and vague label. The label "MTV news gallery" obscures the richness of the MTV site's feature articles. Drugstore.com probably thought the term "shopping bag" appropriate, but "shopping cart" has become an accepted term. And ExxonMobil might have thought their front page oil rig photo looked arty, but "oil companies would best avoid photos that show large shadows in the water next to their rigs". Heh, heh.

The home pages themselves are displayed at full-page size. Some of the comments verge on pedantry, but there's praise too - the informative headlines on CNN, the well-described sign-in at Amazon. And the sheer weight of commentary eventually starts pushing you to think more rigorously about how users see your own pages.

Many Web designers, especially the less pragmatic and those without formal training, hate Nielsen's approach. They can see it leaching the originality out of Web design. Neilsen makes no apologies for this; he believes the content should outshine the look, and he once wrote an essay entitled "The End Of Web Design".

Commercial operators may see a different reason for suspicion. The likes of Amazon and Yahoo have been around long enough, and have experimented enough, to know exactly what produces commercial results for them. Heuristic evaluations never ask what is working in a particular case; they just apply standards. As Graham Hamer notes in his review below: if Amazon wants to label a link "Friends and Favorites", it's probably because the link is known to provoke the desired book-buyer behaviour - regardless of what Jakob Nielsen thinks. Heuristic evaluation has its limits.

Within those limits, heuristics have real power. Usability commentators like Steve Krug, author of the excellent "Don't Make Me Think", argue that the average user is a myth and all Web use is essentially idiosyncratic, so the only way to design is to test. But the truth is that almost every designer uses heuristics at some point, adopting elements because they are familiar and because there isn't the time or the budget to test. They're too useful to resist. So is this book.


I Want My Money Back !   April 3, 2002
 29 out of 36 found this review helpful

In spite of the attractive cover and being publiehsed by New Riders, this book is a great disappointment. My advice for any current webdesigner is to look elsewhere for ideas. The first 33 pages of this book contain advice that seems more appropriate for a text book on writing, such as using standard capitalization, spelling out the name of a month and using standard abbreviations.

The next section of the book describes statistics collected by the authors. Here, the statistics are presented in a way that strongly encourages primarily cookie-cutter websites. For example, the authors found that 84% of the websites they looked at had the company logo in the upper-left corner of the homepage. And follow this finding with "We recommend that your site include a logo on the homepage placed in the upper-left corner." As another example it criticizes sites (and even excludes them from their analysis) that do not offer a search feature. With statements such as "Unbelieveably, 14% of the homepages didn't have a search feature." seems to make no allowance for small sites where a search feature would be unnecessary and even foolish.

The final section of the book provides full-color screen shots of popular website homepages and an analysis of those pages by the authors. Here, the authors "critique" pages with frequent trivial comments that seem more appropriate to a scolding teacher or parent with comments like "There should be..." or "This is odd..." or "It's never good.."

I really enjoy good web design books and frequently recommend them to other designers and even clients. But I could not recommend this book even to a novice.


nice try   November 28, 2001
 24 out of 32 found this review helpful

For authors with the skill to note every flaw in a website, they certainly didn't put this book through any rigorous review process. The idea is good and the treament is nice, but the books biggest problem is that it isn't subdivided into problem areas. It's just 50 web pages with the problems of each cited in it's own list. Why 50? Seems arbitrary. (because 20 wouldn't make a whole book?) This book is just begging for more structure.

Want to know the most drastic problem on each page?
Want to know where the concept went wrong?
Want to know what has the potential to do the most damage or give the most frustration?
You're on your own, because whether a button is off by a pixel or the whole idea is bad, the items are just run together in long unprioritized lists. Beyond that... If a site has (say...) 24 problems, 12 of the items will be trite and nit-picky things you'd fix without even wasting your clients time. Got time to read through over 1000 call-outs to find the 50 pivotal problems? Set aside a lot of time to weed through the dross.

Smells like padding.