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.
While there is a plethora of books available that provide tips on Web design, most authors leave a significant gap between the theory and practice--a gap that 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 home page design as the most important point of presence for any Web site.
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.
Customer Reviews:
Avg. Customer Rating: 4.0 / 5.0
Detailed Oriented Examples for Good Content:
It was a while ago when I read this book, about 3 years ago and I still remember how extremely informational and what an eye opener it was to learn all sorts of content do's and don'ts along with the usability guidelines it has.
Learn more things than you ever imagined could be wrong with a website...so you can fix them:
Until you have pointed out how popular websites have horrible flaws you just don't notice it. We rarely see good sites (and the distinguish quality of a good site is you don't get distracted and notice it is good) so it is hard to expect better. But this book insightfully shows what is wrong with websites. Once we see what's wrong we can recognize it and then we can FIX it. Even though a lot of this is on what not to do, getting those basic errors fixed may make this the best book I've ever seen on how... more info
One of the better books available on Website Usability:
Homepage Usability presents 50 major websites to artful analysis and thoughtful design criticism much in the way a well written art history overview would examine and catalog an exhibit. I found the book impressive in its exquisite rendering of the visuals, clarity of the markup of items and the writing clear and professional. The greatest compliant this reviewer has with the book is a keyword in its subtitle - deconstructed. The book would have been more useful if a set of guidelines and conclusions were... more info
Excellent Resource!:
For that homepage that snaps and attracts design in Internet 'real estate': covering navigation, music, content, identity recognition employing elements of type, pictures, spacing, priority signals, coloring-- looks at the MOST visited sites such as Disney, ebay, amazon and MTV. 50 different sites with several pages devoted to each site. 320 pages all in color in beautiful book layout with points of reference for easy-to-compare pros and cons one site to another.
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