Homepage Usability: 50 Websites Deconstructed

Author: Jakob Nielsen, Marie Tahir List Price: $39.99 Our Price: Click to see the latest and low price ISBN: 073571102X Publisher: New Riders (05 November, 2001) Edition: Paperback Sales Rank: 5,666 Average Customer Rating: 3.7 out of 5

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Customer Reviews

This book narrows the field down somewhat by only concentrating on homepages. The first part of the book consists of a chapter on "Homepage Guidelines" which encompasses the first 52 pages. The following 250 pages or so show screen shots of various homepages from large organizations. Some examples are Citigroup, ExxonMobil, FedEX, General Motors, and Microsoft. There is some satisfaction however in seeing some large company with a richly funded web program stumble or just plain get it wrong. It makes my mistakes a little more tolerable.

The first page of a typical "deconstruct" is a screen shot of the company's homepage. This is followed by a description of the company, a short critique, a color map of the page showing areas devoted to content of interest, self promotion, advertising, navigation, filler, browser controls etc. A breakdown of the actual percentages is illustrated with a pie chart. The third page shows the homepage with numbers representing each of the points (mostly mistakes) that the author is trying to highlight. Yes, as other reviewers stated some of the mistakes he points out can be a bit repetitive, such as logo placements, taglines, and redundant navigations buttons, in general he (along with Marie Tahir) he gives you specific examples with which you can learn from.

Both his books have helped me, if only in thinking of web pages as one avenue of communication. Is your webpage communicating to others in a straightforward, consistent matter in the least amount of time as possible? Two main themes do shine through in both his books; make the file size small and the presentation clear so that users have to spend the minimum amount of time navigating your site, and don't over sell your links. Once users click to a link and it is not what they expected they just might not come back to your site in the future.

At the beginning of Homepage Usability is a big list of informative guidelines for creating a a useable homepage and a few pages devoted to homepage design statistics -- showing what other people are doing, but that's not this book's raison d'etre. It's the usability critiques -- I found it absolutely invaluable showing these 50 websites next to eachother. Some of the advice seemed unbalanced and a lot was repeated, but the authors really dissected each site thoroughly. At times the authors seemed to dispense anti-graphic design, lowest common denominator advice which may get you fumiing like it did me...but fortunately that is kept to a minimum.

Two gripes: One, something that was missing from the book that I would have liked to have seen is perhaps a simple chart or scale showing from 1-10 how "usable" each website is, to complement their critiques. Second, one of the sites that were reviewed was going out of business -- what's the point?

Repeated at least 20 times are these themes:

* Title your pages appropriately
* Get a good tagline
* Provide example content on the homepage, not just links
* Write headlines as succinctly as possible, while retaining greatest possible meaning
* Have a search box available
* Categorize links and sections appropriately
* Use good labels
* Use images wisely, and not gratuitously
* Beware of ads, and anything looking like them

Readers of "Designing Web Usability" won't find nearly as much substance in this book, but Nielsen fans won't be disappointed. He certainly is consistent!

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