Jakob Nielsen is a doyen of Web usability, and his site (www.useit.com/) is a compulsory stop in any reading related to the topic. Nielsen has consistently spoken out against bad Web design, particularly that produced by “user hostile” designers from advertising agencies who confuse the Web with TV advertising. In this book, Nielsen and his associate Marie Tahir set out their theories of Web page usability with detailed critiques of 50 well‐known homepages.
In this book, the term “homepage” is used for the entry page of an organisation, as opposed to the whole site, or content at lower levels of the site. In the introduction, Nielsen discusses the role of the homepage, and the commonly made analogies with magazine covers, building lobbies, and brochures. He points out that while these metaphors have some truth, homepages have significant differences from these other organisational entry points.
There is an introduction describing 113 usability guidelines, grouped under headings such as “communicating the site’s purpose”, “archives and accessing past content”, “navigation”, etc. The guidelines are illustrated by examples from the homepages described in the main part of the book. It is an indication of Nielsen’s influence that, at the time of reviewing, most of the examples of bad practice had been fixed! There is also a section on homepage design conventions (slightly confusingly headed “design statistics”) that have evolved on the Web, such as page layout, navigation tools, etc. It is a truism that users spend most of their browsing time at sites other than yours, so, if you flout the established conventions, users will avoid your site. This section identifies common conventions, and analyses the proportion of sites that follow different conventions.
The writing is often unequivocal, such as in guideline 85: “Splash screens must die” (it’s good that this message has finally got through to the National Library of New Zealand!). Many of the guidelines seem obvious, but are surprisingly easy to forget. Number 17, “Use customer‐focused language”, seems obvious, but on most sites you do not have to go very far before you find corporate jargon.
Of course, Web site evaluation is to a degree subjective, and everyone has their own views on what’s acceptable. The current reviewer would not agree, for instance, with part of guideline 38: “show that things are links by underlining them and colouring them blue”. To determine how links are presented is is one function of the brower, not of the Web site designer. However, the overall point is a good one: that describing something as “links” is not useful on a Web page (any more than describing part of a book as “words”), and that the standard colours for links should be respected.
There is no specific guideline on currency of information, which is a common failing of corporate homepages: the homepage is least visited by those in the organisation, so out‐of‐date information often stays well past its use by date (at the time of writing, this reviewer’s own organisational homepage was advertising 2002‐2003 summer courses!).
The main part of the book is the detailed analyses of the 50 homepages. These are mainly commerce sites, such as Disney, Amazon.com, etc. but including news sites such as CNN and BBC, and government sites such as the US Federal Highway Administration, and the Florida Department of Revenue. Sites include US, UK and Australian companies.
The analysis is partly graphical, using a pie chart illustrating the relative area devoted to different parts of the page: navigation, content of interest, advertising, etc. A significant feature is that the proportion of “content of interest” is rarely more than 50 per cent, although this is a subjective judgment: About.com’s home page has its subject categories classed as “navigation” rather than “content of interest”, although the categories are the point of this subject directory. The analysis numbers features of the homepage on a screenshot, and provides detailed commentary linked by the numbers.
Appropriately, some thought has gone into the usability and layout of the large format, highly designed book. The book arguably breaks its guideline 18 (“avoid redundant content”) by repeating each page‐size screen‐shot three times, but this does avoid having to flip back a page to identify the area to which comments relate.
There is a very comprehensive index, useful for identifying specific guidelines and examples. The associated Web page (www.useit.com/homepageusability/), includes additional study guide exercises, and an errata section. Homepage Usability makes a good companion to other sources of advice about Web design, for example, Rachel McAlpine’s (1999) Web Word Wizardry.
Unfortunately no library pages were included, unless Amazon.com is counted. The directory services Yahoo! and About.com are included. Although libraries have had a long history on the Web (the first Web site outside of CERN was the library Web site for the Lawrence Livermore Laboratory), it is sobering that they have not achieved wide recognition as sources of information on the Web. Nielsen and Tahir suggest that you assess your own home page according to their guidelines. Possibly if we all vetted our library homepages from a usability point of view, library Web pages might achieve the recognition they deserve.
