Jakob Nielsen has made a considerable career and consulting business advising corporate clients about how easy (or not) it is to use their web sites. And, back in 2000, he shared some of this wisdom with us in the book Designing Web Usability (published by New Riders ISBN 156205810X). Here, along with Hoa Loranger, who’s also a partner in his consulting practice, he continues the theme in another well written book.
Basically if you have any kind of interest or control over the content of a commercial web site you should make reading this book a priority. Web design agencies are ten a penny and range from those that will charge just a few hundred pounds to produce you a site all the way to those where you’re looking at a major investment costing hundreds of thousands. Also there are no end of “do it yourself” tools (like Serif Web Plus used to create this site) and also no end of books, of various quality, on how to make a web site look pretty.
According to Nielsen pretty counts for nothing if you get a few basics wrong – and he shows plenty of example sites that must have cost a fortune where you can see what he means. His basic contention is that most initial visits to sites come from search engines of one kind or another and that when you do land on a new site most users will make up their mind whether to stay or leave for a better organised alternative in less than a minute. The number of things that will put you off are many and varied – mostly to do with how easy, or otherwise, it is to get the information you want rather than how the site looks.
He comes to these conclusions from years of research. Not from asking users questions, mind you, but observing what
Basically if you have any kind of interest or control over the content of a commercial web site you should make reading this book a priority. Web design agencies are ten a penny and range from those that will charge just a few hundred pounds to produce you a site all the way to those where you’re looking at a major investment costing hundreds of thousands. Also there are no end of “do it yourself” tools (like Serif Web Plus used to create this site) and also no end of books, of various quality, on how to make a web site look pretty.
According to Nielsen pretty counts for nothing if you get a few basics wrong – and he shows plenty of example sites that must have cost a fortune where you can see what he means. His basic contention is that most initial visits to sites come from search engines of one kind or another and that when you do land on a new site most users will make up their mind whether to stay or leave for a better organised alternative in less than a minute. The number of things that will put you off are many and varied – mostly to do with how easy, or otherwise, it is to get the information you want rather than how the site looks.
He comes to these conclusions from years of research. Not from asking users questions, mind you, but observing what
they do when faced with particular tasks. As we all should know survey questions can be rigged (unwittingly or otherwise) to produce the answer the researcher wants whereas watching what people actually do gives a much better picture. Especially if you watch enough people – which Nielsen & Co do.
The main chapters cover………
The main chapters cover………
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The Web User Experience
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Revisiting Early Web User Findings
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Prioritising Your Usability Problems
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Search
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Navigation & Information Architecture
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Typography : Readability & Legibility
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Writing For The Web
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Providing Good Product Information
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Presenting Page Elements
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Balancing Technology & People’s Needs
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Final Thoughts – Design That Works
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While the whole book is full of thought provoking stuff my favourite bit (probably) is Revisiting Early Web Usability Findings where they explore in depth some of the basic mistakes that some major sites make. This is essential reading for anyone who’s going to be held responsible for the results a site produces. Read this & reduce by tenfold your chances of failure.
Highly recommended.
October 2006
Prioritizing Web Usability by Nielsen & Loranger
ISBN 0-321-350316Published by Addison Wesley
Price £35.99 or £23.75 from www.compman.co.uk
ISBN 0-
