che Usability?

Way back in 2000, Nicolas Cage starred in a movie called Gone in Sixty Seconds. In the movie Cage and his crew needed to steal 50 exotic cars in just one night.

Think of web surfers as Nicolas Cage and his crew, breezing through homepages looking for the exotic cars to steal — except instead of 60 seconds your homepage only has 30 seconds to catch their interest.

It’s estimated that users with low web experience spend just 35 seconds on a homepage, while savvy web users spend as little as 25 seconds.

With only 30 seconds to capture a visitor’s attention, your messages need to be lean and to the point. You can’t afford to take up space with long, puffed up paragraphs. Realistically, you have to make your point with approximately 20 words. As users spend their time trying to figure out where to go next, they’re certainly not reading your content word-for-word.

The four most important things your homepage must communicate to your visitors are:

• What site is the person on
• What benefits your site offers
• Information about your company, latest products, or developments
• How to get to the most relevant sections.

Peter Morville and Louis Rosenfeld are back with an updated Third Edition of Information Architecture for the World Wide Web.

Keeping most of the organization of the Second Edition, the Third Edition addresses emerging web technologies and features such as:

• Tagging 
• Folksonomies
• Social Classification
• Guided Navigation.

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Teaming up with Hoa Loranger, a user experience specialist with the Nielsen Norman Group, Jakob Nielsen has come out with Prioritizing Web Usability, his follow-up to his 2000 book, Designing Web Usability: The Practice of Simplicity.

Using research gathered from general usability testing of 716 web sites and 2,163 users around the world, as well as more targeted testing of 69 users for purposes of creating the book itself, Nielsen condenses thousands of usability findings into a small number of key principles by emphasizing the ones that will have the most impact on your web site.

Some good points of discussion in the book include searching, prioritizing your usability problems, navigation, and writing for the web.

Must read chapter
If you don’t have time to read the book cover-to-cover, reading Chapter 3, “Revisiting Earlier Web Findings” is a must.

In this chapter, Nielsen lists 34 of the most prevalent usability issues and guidelines for addressing them. In addition each issue has a skull rating, indicating how important the problem continues to be.

Some issues that continue to cause web usability issues are:

• Links that don’t change colour when visited
• Breaking the back button
• Opening new browser windows.

This chapter is a great source for evaluating how well your site is doing in regards to its usability.

Who should read this book?
Prioritizing Web Usability is a must-read for both novice and seasoned web designers that develop news sites, e-commerce sites, corporate sites, non-profit sites, and government sites.

Prioritizing Web Usability
Authors: Jakob Nielsen, Hoa Loranger
ISBN: 0-321-35031-6