Homepage Usability: 50 Websites Deconstructed
by Jakob Nielsen, Marie Tahir

List Price: $50.00
Our Price: $24.99
You Save: $25.01 (50%)
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
Buy Used: from $0.93 (click here)
Category: Book
See more book details and other editions

Book Summary Information

Book Reviews of Homepage Usability: 50 Websites Deconstructed

Book Review: Homepage Guidelines from Gurus
Summary: 5 Stars

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 <name of company>," 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.

Summary of Homepage Usability: 50 Websites Deconstructed

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.

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.

Graphic Design Books

• Books > Subjects > Computers & Technology
• Networking
• Web Development > Web Design
• New & Used Textbooks > Computer Science