Homepage Usability by Nielsen & Tahir
I love it when usability experts who write professional books organize their own book according to usability principles. This book is one of those. The first thing you see as you open is “How this book works” including text and images. Nice.
So, hopefully this is the first of similar reviews which are not actually reviews but me sharing my experience with you as I read on through the wealth of usability books out there.
This book was published in 2002. In website years a decade is a century. The sites reviewed in the book have changed considerably, as some of the principles. Still most of the guidelines specified here are worth learning.
The first part- of the book is great. It lists over 100 guidelines grouped by subject. Some of the explanations a more detailed, some very concise. This is followed by an excellent section about statistics of home-pages, such as size, design, navigation types, width of search boxes, features, contents etc. This section is summed with a shortlist of recommendations.
The rest (most) of the book is dedicated to the deconstruction of home-pages of famous and important sites. To me this section wasn’t as informative. First the sites are outdated. Second, there was a lot of references to the contents of the home-pages, which has to do more with content strategy and management than classic usability. Lastly, the tone of the “deconstruction” was a bit too negative for my taste. I think UI experts have evolved since. In the past we used a critical negative tone to accentuate the ridiculous things designed in sites and systems. Today, I feel the tone is changing towards a more constructive criticism and a less “black & white” approach of “this is bad” and “this is good”.
My 2 cents: Worth reading the first sections and enjoying the usability of the book itself. Find a used copy or a good friend (thank you Dana).
