Eyetracking Web Usability [Paperback]

Jakob Nielsen (Author), Kara Pernice (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: December 14, 2009 | ISBN-10: 0321498364 | ISBN-13: 978-0321498366 | Edition: 1

Eyetracking Web Usability is based on one of the largest studies of eyetracking usability in existence. Best-selling author Jakob Nielsen and coauthor Kara Pernice used rigorous usability methodology and eyetracking technology to analyze 1.5 million instances where users look at Web sites to understand how the human eyes interact with design. Their findings will help designers, software developers, writers, editors, product managers, and advertisers understand what people see or don’t see, when they look, and why.

With their comprehensive three-year study, the authors confirmed many known Web design conventions and the book provides additional insights on those standards. They also discovered important new user behaviors that are revealed here for the first time. Using compelling eye gaze plots and heat maps, Nielsen and Pernice guide the reader through hundreds of examples of eye movements, demonstrating why some designs work and others don’t. They also provide valuable advice for page layout, navigation menus, site elements, image selection, and advertising. This book is essential reading for anyone who is serious about doing business on the Web.

Editorial Reviews

About the Author

Jakob Nielsen, Ph.D., is a principal of Nielsen Norman Group and founder of the “discount usability engineering” movement, emphasizing fast and efficient methods for improving the quality of user interfaces. Dr. Nielsen has been called, “the world’s leading expert on Web usability” by U.S. News and World Report and “the next best thing to a true time machine” by USA Today. He is the author of numerous best-selling books, including Prioritizing Web Usability and the groundbreaking Designing Web Usability, which has sold more than 250,000 copies and has been translated in 22 languages.
 
Kara Pernice is the managing director of Nielsen Norman Group, where she has led several global Web usability research studies on a variety of topics, such as intranets, accessibility, senior citizens, and emotion and design. She has developed and taught numerous seminars on product life cycles, field studies, usability research, and eyetracking. She has also written and published many reports on Web design and usability methods.

Product Details

• Paperback: 456 pages
• Publisher: New Riders; 1 edition (December 14, 2009)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0321498364
• ISBN-13: 978-0321498366
• Product Dimensions: 6.8 x 0.8 x 9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.8 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.1 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (16 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #557,805 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Jakob Nielsen, Ph.D. is a principal of Nielsen Norman Group. He is the founder of the "discount usability engineering" movement, which emphasizes fast and efficient methods for improving the quality of user interfaces. Nielsen was noted as "the world's leading expert on Web usability" by U.S. News and World Report and "the next best thing to a true time machine" by USA Today. Nielsen's Alertbox column on Web usability has been published on the Internet since 1995 and currently has about 200,000 readers. From 1994 to 1998, Nielsen was a Sun Microsystems Distinguished Engineer. His previous affiliations include Bell Communications Research, the Technical University of Denmark, and the IBM User Interface Institute. See his biography page at useit.com for additional biographical information.

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful

4.0 out of 5 stars A Very Academic Book - Not for Beginners September 3, 2010

By Sheldon Chang

Format:Paperback|Amazon Verified Purchase

As one of the other reviewers said, there's not a lot here that will break new ground and most of the points made are things that experienced UI designers already understand. Two exceptions for me were the findings about the attractiveness of text as a design feature and the exact degree that banner blindness can affect a user's experience.

Although a lot of the findings in this book will be more profound for those with less experience, it doesn't mean that this book is ideal for beginners. Quite the contrary, I think the people who can make the most use of this book are people who already understand just about every UI guideline in this book. I say this because this is a book that's all about data and evidence of things a lot of us already know, but can't convince others of. It's a book that might help you persuade someone who's insistent that things need to be done a certain way that perhaps a different approach would be better.

This book really covers a niche topic and will probably bore anyone who doesn't have a high level of academic curiosity to tears. For rookies looking for design tips, there are far more concise and easier to understand volumes of work. In many ways this is a very long research journal article produced in the form of a book. The tomes of data and explanations overwhelm the scattered number of important design points in the book. If you just want to skim the big take away lessons from this book, you can do it in one sitting. Just look at the pictures and read the captions. If you need more background info, then read a few pages around the illustrations for more info.

My one critique of the book and one that might knock half a star off my rating if Amazon did half stars was that the book was difficult to follow in some stretches.... The way they wrote the narratives about their subjects' behaviors and motiviations were often hard to understand and in many cases, it may have been better to simply use more bullet points and illustrations instead of full text narratives of how the subjects were navigating. They often mention their subjects by first name and it gets hard to keep them apart in your memory. Read more ›

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful

2.0 out of 5 stars Overly Verbose, Under-Delivers, Too Much Space on Irrelevant Topics February 20, 2012

By Michael Brenner

Format:Paperback|Amazon Verified Purchase

Although many of the web usability observations presented in the book will be helpful to web and ecommerce designers, the authors really could have said much, much more using far less space. Follow Steve Krug's style: be concise! The book under delivers in the sense that much has been left out which was researched but was not adequately covered in the book, such as usability issues as they pertain to ecommerce sites. Many, many pages were spent going into minute detail on how a particular user utilized a given web site rather than summarizing and following with concise conclusions, making the book onerous to get through. Irrelevant topics were also covered, such as web users' attention paid to dog's crotches (I kid you not, this is an actual topic, covered in depth), making it difficult to take the book seriously and compromising the authors' credibility.

In addition, the writing style was a bit immature. The impression I received from their writing was that of a group of undergrads who were given money and let loose in Manhattan and required to produce a paper to account for their efforts.

I had really looked forward to this book, and unfortunately it fell far short of my expectations. Although, there is a lot of good usability information in the book, I would not recommend the book on that basis, because the information must be ferreted out from all the excess prose.

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Comprehensive, interesting, & engaging January 19, 2012

By Kay

Format:Paperback|Amazon Verified Purchase

This is a great book! Kara Pernice and Jakob Nielsen did a fine job of making this potentially very dry topic interesting, accessible, easy to absorb, and funny. I found the heat map pictures most helpful in illustrating key themes. The authors go into great detail on how to interpret eye tracking results to optimize electronic displays and user interfaces. I especially appreciated the practicality of this book - they describe not only what eye tracking is, but how to apply it to your work.

2.0 out of 5 stars Not a lot of actionable conclusions for web designer/developers May 20, 2012

By Nora Brown

Format:Paperback|Amazon Verified Purchase

I agree with another reviewer who mentioned that the in-depth, step-by-step descriptions of specific users' fixations on a web page are tedious to read, and do little to support any actual design guidelines. At times the conclusions the authors draw seem contradictory, or so general as to be obvious. ("In sum, a combination of layout and content almost always dictates what draws or repels users eyes. (p. 58). I did not need a $40 book to tell me that.)

The examples in this book demonstrate that eyetracking data is too specific to each context (user, task, website, environment) to be able to draw many widely applicable conclusions from it. Though a few interesting phenomena that have design implications are revealed through eyetracking (banner blindness and gaze following, for example), the tool seems better suited to diagnosing specific website problems.

I was definitely disappointed by the scarcity of practical design recommendations in this book.

5.0 out of 5 stars Eye-opening April 8, 2011

By Ernst Zill

Format:Paperback|Amazon Verified Purchase

This is a very insightful book about a topic that most people overlook. The analysis in this book can really offer great insight into website architecture. I've used several of Nielsen's recommendations to my advantage.

4.0 out of 5 stars Great new insights thanks to Eyetracking October 20, 2010

By WVergeer

Format:Paperback

I have read the usability books of Steve Krug and Prioritizing Web Usability of Jakob Nielsen, and this book is a great addition to them. It is easy to digest, offers many visual examples and offers valuable new insights based on what Eyetracking can do but normal usability testing can't. They broke down their conclusions in general guidelines which can be used for practically all sites.

Like the other usability books, this book is a must ready for anyone (designer, developer or manager) involved in webdevelopment.