Customer Reviews

Eyetracking Web Usability

5 star:		(8)
4 star:		(5)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

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.

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.

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.

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.

There are many designers out there that hate Jakob Nielsen with a passion. They don't like the fact that he "gets in the way" of their creativity. You know what? He only says what he says because he and his staff have observed way more web users using websites than probably anyone else in existence.

Those that hate the guy need to grow up and read this book, and his others, to ensure they aren't one of the many designers that continues to propagate the web with designs that frustrate users.

What I like about this book is that most other usability books have what some people would call "subjectivity". However, this one talks about where users' eyes fixated and traveled on a page. There isn't much subjective about that. For example, when someone doesn't even take a peak at one of those huge images a designer put on a page to make it look cool, you can pretty much say that image is useless.

Some may think the material repeats suggestions from his past books or other books, but I think it is nice to now see even more backing/support for those suggestions.

I was hoping there would be a few ground-breaking discoveries, but the book turned out to be more of reinforcement of what one good usability professional would have assumed already.

1. On websites people do tasks, not just browse around. So design for tasks characteristic of the website at hand and then test for it.

2. A little thing can speak volumes when put in the right spot on the page.

3. Men pay too much attention at other men's crotches.

While, as I said, what I learned from the book didn't come up as a big revelation, one very consoling thing is that, well, if Jakob and Kara thought that's all there's to it for now, that's bound be all there's to it. And as Seth Godin rightfully noted: "...if Jakob Nielsen and Kara Pernice have something to say about the way the Web works, you should listen."

@emironov

There has been one recent prior book about the use of eyetracking, Eye Tracking Methodology: Theory and Practice. It came out in 2007 and its author spent considerable time explaining the hardware and the usages. The latter included the design of web pages and websites. However the current book by Nielsen and Pernice specialises to this very important case. It does not spend much time on what types of hardware you might need to do your own testing. Instead, it goes into a lot of details about the merits and flaws of web pages, as indicated by studies they made using eyetrackers.

It should be said that almost certainly, somewhere in the bowels of eBay, and probably Amazon and Google, there are eyetracking data. Those websites have a well deserved reputation for scientifically analysing their websites, and no doubt others as well. However, little if any of that research has been publicly released. Unsurprisingly, as this could be regarded as a core competence, to be closely guarded.

So in the absence of such disclosures, this book makes a good alternative. If you do want to run eyetrackers on your website, you still need to find the right hardware, and then use this on test subjects. All of which takes time and money.

A quicker way is to look at the many topics of web page layout that the authors summarise. They analysed many existing webpages, across numerous websites, using humans wearing eyetrackers. Take the recommendations and apply them to your pages. Granted, you cannot directly assess how visitors to the pages will react, but this is the cheapest and quickest way to benefit from the book.

You might think, why do I have to do any of this? Can't I just use test subjects and analyse their surfing on my website? Well one of the first things the book teaches is that that method has its limitations. The web server with its logger only tells which links a user clicks on, and which pages she goes to. For people who run websites, we've all been conditioned to think in such ways, and use such results. But those results cannot distinguish between a user spending a long time on a page because she is reading it, or because she is confused about the options that it offers.

The simplest instance of this is where a page has items that look like buttons, but are not clickable. Perhaps an item has a background colour different from the page's background, and, even worse, has a bevelled appearance, so that it looks like a button. When she tries to click on it, and cannot, it increases the frustration level and the odds that she gets confused and simply abandons the page and the site. This sounds obvious. But the authors provide real life examples of websites that make this elementary mistake.

In response, perhaps you might say that you can install software on the client machines, which your human test subjects use. This software could track the mouse movements, giving you more to analyse. Such code exists, possibly even as free open source. But this is still less [useful] than eyetracking data. After all, if your user just sits there and reads a webpage, then mouse data will be minimal.

The web is indeed held together by links. But an even more basic feature of a webpage is the textual and image content. You want the visitor to read the text and look at the images. So by carefully studying the eyetracking data in the many webpage examples, you can get vital advice about how to optimally layout your own pages.

So sorry for the previous uncomplimentary review. This was a true 5-star transaction. Excellent product and service. A different amazon.com merchant did not send another book I ordered at the same time. Sorry for the confusion.

Jakob Nielsen is renowned for his depth of knowledge when it comes to usability design. This book is an excellent review of what works, and doesn't for websites. Though many of the examples seemed more e-commerce focused, the principles are applicable to many forms of websites. If you've spent any amount of time studying various websites for usability, what works and doesn't, and helped refine best practices, then you may find this book to be somewhat "obvious" in various places.

Despite the "obvious", however, it's amazing how many times web designers still stumble on those basics. As stated in the book, certain layouts and usability features are now expected. And, if your site does not include these, then you're probably missing out on conversions.

I've read other books on usability and this book, by far, takes the cake for how comprehensive it is. It really does cover all the critical aspects of a website--especially an e-commerce website. From homepages, landing pages, product pages, and checkout.

Review: by Gregory West
prospector16@gmail.com
Member of the Computer Operators 'of Marysville & Port Huron (COMP)
[...]

Eyetracking
Web Usability

by Jakob Nielsen and Kara Pernice
Published by New Riders'[...]
(an mprint of Peachpit)
ISBN-13: 978-0321-49836-6
Pages: 437
USA: $[...]

Have you ever wondered why certain parts of a website catch your eye and you ignore or completely miss others? Whether you are designing a corporate website, simply working with a private site, or setting up a blog for the first time, this book will take you into the world of design and what works.

Authors: Neilson and Pernice take us on a detailed journey demonstrating what works and grabs your attention longer than a split second. Eyetracking technology allows you to see what people see on mainstream websites.

This book's main focus is "to study look patterns and how they relate to Web usage". It is "not a general book about Web usability", although it gives an excellent insight into why people go to certain areas on a page. Throughout the eight chapters, we learn how "Eyetracking" technology works. Also, you will find a summary covering human behavioral patterns, resulting from these extensive studies.

The second chapter is a little dry as it explains how this technology works, data collected, fake tests, study participants and cost evaluations. Other chapters get into the heart of page layout, navigation design elements and images. Chapter seven covers advertisements which is a major aspect of the Internet. Everything, from when people look at ads to the impact of ad placement, is detailed in a quite interesting fashion. Here is where you find out what works and what fails.

The authors point out the need for corporate executives to stand aside and let the professional graphic designers do their job. They show how upper-level management employees who know nothing about design and graphics can destroy the design due to ignorance of "web usability" and drive customers away. '
Not contained in the book keeping "this book at a manageable size" are two "separate reports" made available online:

Eyetracking Methodology: How to Conduct and Evaluate Usability Studies Using Eyetracking: [...] and How People Read on the Web: [...]

If you are, in any way, part of a team that works on websites, or if you have your own personal blog and want your sites to work, this book is something that you will keep going back to as a reference guide. There is an excellent Table of Contents in the front and a well laid out Glossary in the back to make sure you find exactly the topic to research and learn.