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Designing Web Usability The Practice of Simplicity
by Jakob Nielsen. Indianapolis: New Riders, 2000. 419p. $45 (ISBN 1-56205810-X).
I came to Jakob Nielsen's book, Designing Web Usability, with a certain amount of trepidation. I have been a sometime visitor to Nielsen's Web site on usability, http://useit.com. It is very spare and sparse in terms of visual feel. There are no graphics whatsoever, with all features that would normally require graphical elements provided through variations in font size and use of color. I half-expected that his book would include some sort of diatribe against overuse of graphics. In point of fact, when you do a quick page-through of the book you will find actual Web pages, with plenty of graphics, sprinkled on almost every other page. This provides your first hint of a book prepared with a great deal of care and attention to detail.
Designers on the Web face a virtual tabula rosa, the ultimate in blank slates. There is a lot of flexibility, and with that flexibility comes an almost infinite number of ways to screw up. Nielsen has probably seen and identified them all. He masterfully proceeds through page design, content design, and site design, reinforcing his suggestions for doing better with examples, both good and bad. Particularly interesting are examples where a site has gone through a number of generations of redesign with consequent improvement. Seeing this sort of evolution is much better than viewing dummy mock-ups illustrating the same points.
You may think that I have gotten sidetracked from the get-go by starting out discussing the examples and illustrations that Nielsen provides, but they are extremely important in a book of this sort. The Web is an inherently visual medium, and all of the principles of design that apply in other visual media, and more, must be brought to bear. Therefore, it is essential to provide numerous screen shots to illustrate the good, the bad, and the ugly in the Web world. Nielsen does this admirably.
Nielsen has all of the requisite credentials to discuss usability. For many years he worked for Sun Microsystems, dealing with user interface usability issues on a number of hardware and software platforms. His role was expanded to include Web usability upon the wildfire spread of...