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
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