Homepage Usability: 50 Websites Deconstructed (Paperback)

~ (Author), Marie Tahir (Author)

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

While there is a plethora of books available that provide tips on Web design, most authors leave a significant gap between the theory and practice--a gap that is left up to the reader to fill. Homepage Usability: 50 Websites Deconstructed boldly steps into that gap with specific observations and suggestions backed with solid quantitative analysis. This book focuses only on home page design as the most important point of presence for any Web site.

This definitive work is coauthored by Jakob Nielsen--the accepted industry expert in Web usability--and Marie Tahir, an expert in user profiling. Their collaboration has produced a guide of such rare practical benefit that Web designers will likely wear out their first copy scouring the pages to savor every last morsel of wisdom.

The book begins with a chapter of precise guidelines that serve as a checklist of the features and functionality to include on your home page. The specifics found in categories such as "revealing content through examples" and "graphic design" will quickly hook you and whet your appetite for more. These guidelines are followed up with hard statistics and an examination of the ominous Jakob's Law: "Users spend most of their time on other sites than your site." Here you'll find some interesting statistics about how various conventions like search, privacy policies, and logos are used.

All this leads up to the showcase element of the book--a systematic deconstruction of 50 of the most popular home pages on the Web. The authors painstakingly pick apart each in an uncompromising autopsy of usability. Each site is graphically analyzed for its use of real estate and summarized with the frankness only found from true experts. Then each section of the home page is bulleted and analyzed for potential improvements.

It's a bold move to offer a critique of industry-standard Web sites such as Yahoo, CNET, and eBay, but the authors have done such a fine job that the designers of those sites will surely make reading this book a high priority. For the rest of us, this work will serve as an invaluable gospel. --Stephen W. Plain

Topics covered: Design guidelines, convention usage, screen real estate, navigation, content presentation, search facilities, links, graphics and animation, advertising, news, customization, and customer feedback.

From Library Journal

Nielsen, dogmatic don of web usability, and his strategy director Tahir believe that a company needs a well-designed homepage to succeed online. They provide 113 brief usability guidelines that lead into a chapter on homepage statistics, giving readers an idea of conventions to follow or break. The homepages of 50 major web sites, from About.com to Yahoo.com, are then pictured and critiqued in terms of those recommendations and statistics. A useful resource for both novice and professional web designers; recommended for all libraries.
Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 336 pages
• Publisher: New Riders Press (November 15, 2001)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 073571102X
• ISBN-13: 978-0735711020
• Product Dimensions: 9.9 x 9.8 x 1.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 2.6 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (73 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #189,147 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

26 of 26 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars 50 Web Site Deconstructed, May 29, 2003

By	"sherzodr" (East Lansing, MI USA) - See all my reviews

According to this book, users spend most of their time on other sites than your site... When a user visits your site, he/she will be bringing a large load of mental baggage accumulated from prior visits to thousands of other home pages. So by the time they reach your web site, users have accumulate a generic mental model of the way a homepages are supposed to work, based on their experience on these other sites.

It is a very interesting point. According to authors of the book, there are few large web sites that might count themselves among the first 10 to 20 sites visited by new users. And design of these web sites dictate the design conventions that a user will expect when he/she visits other web sites.

Example of some of these conventions mentioned in the book are:

upper-left corner is the best place for a site logo
upper-right corner are more generic locations for search widgets and "help" links
Navigation of the site is best usable either as a tab-style (such as in amazon.com) or as a column on left side of the page (such as in CNN.com)
Links should be blue-underlined, and visited links should be purple-underlined
footer navigation links should be only for "foot-note-related" content and should be limited to no more than 7 links
on and on it goes
So how do authors derive these conclusions? The process is actually very interesting. They conduct studies of top 50 chosen web sites and group their findings into conventions.

The book also "deconstructs" those 50 chosen Home Pages, and provides annotated analysis. You may find it interesting. Among those are such sites as About.com, Accenture.com, Yahoo.com, BBC Online, CNET, Disney, eBay, Microsoft, IBM and many more.

Although majority of the book is on annotating home pages, authors also give some generic tips on home page design. Some of those tips I recall are:

liquid page layout is preferred over fixed sized tables
the most optimal page width is 760 pixels (for fixed layout)
page length of the homepage should be around two full screens, but not more than four
frames suck big time
horizontal scrolling is the curse
"Guest Books" are not for pros
Do not use exclamation marks!
and on and on it goes
While reading homepage annotations, I felt very strong emphasis on the title of the homepages (the one between <title> and </title> tags). These tags are easily left un-noticed, one would think. But properly chosen titles make big difference while bookmarking your page. Try it yourself.

In other words, do not start your titles with "The" and "Welcome", because in person's favorites lists, it would be misplaced in the alphabetical order.

I strongly recommend this book to anyone venturing in Web Designs.

P.S. Although the book is on Home Page usability, the book itself doesn't seem "usable" at all. Size of the book is so clumsy that doesn't fit in a standard sized book shelf.

30 of 32 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Heuristic evaluation in a coffee-table book, February 12, 2002

By	David Walker (Melbourne, Australia) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

Web site usability has come a long way. For proof, just consider the strange case of Dr Jakob Nielsen.

Back in 1995, Dr Nielsen was a Sun Microsystem Usability software usability expert with a string of published papers and books on topics such as "heuristic evaluation". Nielsen had spent a chunk of his career analysing the benefits of quick-and-dirty usability methods such as heuristic evaluation, where a group of experts rate a system's compliance with established usability norms. But such methods remained generally underappreciated, and Dr Nielsen's books and papers were read by a relatively small group of fellow specialists. In 1995, with Web sites becoming a popular new type of "software", Dr Nielsen started publishing his thoughts at his own Web site, useit.com.

Now move forward seven years, and here is Dr Nielsen again, peering out of the front of a book through neat glasses, wearing a red tie and perfectly mismatched greenish-blue shirt, with hair just long enough to mark him as a child of the 1960s. Except now Dr Nielsen is famous and runs sell-out executive lecture sessions on Web site usability. And the book out of which he is peering is not a scholarly tome but a big, glossy, full-colour 320-page compendium of heuristic evaluations on some of the world's best-known Web sites. It's called "Homepage Usability".

Yes, it's the world's first coffee-table usability book.

And if you can get over the price, "Homepage Usability" is both a useful contribution to the discipline, and more fun than you'd think. It's a set of design rules centred around an examination of the home pages for 50 major sites, including the highly-valued (Amazon, Yahoo, eBay, Google), the worthy (PBS, Art Institute of Chicago) and the famous (CNN, Google, BBC Online).

"Homepage Usability" is particularly useful because Nielsen and collaborator Marie Tahir use these 50 sites not just as a gimmick but also to help define the "standard" treatments of elements on a Web page. They do so in the belief that rather than learning a new interface on every site, users prefer your site to work the same way as the last dozen they were on.

Others, notably Michael Bernard from the Software Usability Research Laboratory at Wichita State University, have researched the placement of basics like navigation and search. Nielsen and Tahir analyse their 50 pages statistically and confirm and extend Bernard's work. For instance, their analysis of links to privacy information suggests that people will expect to see such a link on a site's home page (43 of the 50 had it there), and that it should be labelled "Privacy Policy" (20 of the 43 did this).

On top of the 15 pages of statistical analysis, Neilsen and Tahir also offer 25 pages of heuristics - rules - on eveything from displaying logos to communicating site problems. Many of these rules will be familiar to Web design veterans and to readers of Nielsen's last book, "Designing Web Usability".

Once the rules are finished with, Nielsen and Tahir take you into the instructive and oddly entertaining 240-page dissection of those 50 sites. They seek out and pull apart every misplaced button and vague label. The label "MTV news gallery" obscures the richness of the MTV site's feature articles. Drugstore.com probably thought the term "shopping bag" appropriate, but "shopping cart" has become an accepted term. And ExxonMobil might have thought their front page oil rig photo looked arty, but "oil companies would best avoid photos that show large shadows in the water next to their rigs". Heh, heh.

The home pages themselves are displayed at full-page size. Some of the comments verge on pedantry, but there's praise too - the informative headlines on CNN, the well-described sign-in at Amazon. And the sheer weight of commentary eventually starts pushing you to think more rigorously about how users see your own pages.

Many Web designers, especially the less pragmatic and those without formal training, hate Nielsen's approach. They can see it leaching the originality out of Web design. Neilsen makes no apologies for this; he believes the content should outshine the look, and he once wrote an essay entitled "The End Of Web Design".

Commercial operators may see a different reason for suspicion. The likes of Amazon and Yahoo have been around long enough, and have experimented enough, to know exactly what produces commercial results for them. Heuristic evaluations never ask what is working in a particular case; they just apply standards. As Graham Hamer notes in his review below: if Amazon wants to label a link "Friends and Favorites", it's probably because the link is known to provoke the desired book-buyer behaviour - regardless of what Jakob Nielsen thinks. Heuristic evaluation has its limits.

Within those limits, heuristics have real power. Usability commentators like Steve Krug, author of the excellent "Don't Make Me Think", argue that the average user is a myth and all Web use is essentially idiosyncratic, so the only way to design is to test. But the truth is that almost every designer uses heuristics at some point, adopting elements because they are familiar and because there isn't the time or the budget to test. They're too useful to resist. So is this book.

121 of 146 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Take a closer look, January 8, 2002

By	F. G. Hamer "MadManxMan" (Isle of Man) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

I was impressed by the first 65 pages of 'Jakob Nielsen's 50 Web Sites'. For the first time, it seemed, someone had stopped to analyse the genetic code that made for a successful homepage.

What happened on page 66? .......... What happened was that I came to the deconstruction (criticism) of THIS site (amazon.com) and discovered that things were not as they seemed. Having purchased regularly from three of the amazon sites over the last five years, and having written over 200 reviews on this site alone, I think I know the site as well as any other customer. Thus I was surprised when I saw some of the criticisms levelled by Jakob Nielsen and Marie Tahir. I'm not saying that everything is perfect - and fair criticism is wholly constructive - however, the authors have left themselves open to the charge of superficiality.

Take as an example their criticism of the page tabs (they say that users can make use of the other navigation tools on the page). Personally, I ALWAYS use the tabs at the top of the page. It seems that Nielsen and Tahir haven't considered user preferences.

They say that 'Friends and Favorites' is a meaningless category name. Not to me, it's not. Nor to hundreds of thousands of other site users.

They say that 'Free e-cards' should be in the 'Gifts' category. WRONG - Gift Certificates are in the gift category. e-Cards are e-Cards. Gift Certificates are Gift Certificates.

They say that 'Hello' is an unnecessary level of friendliness. Is it? I LIKE being welcomed to the site (even though I know it's only an electronic gizmo). What Nielsen and Tahir failed to understand was that, after signing-in, the message says 'Hello, Graham Hamer' (or Hello, Father Christmas if that's who you are). As I say, the authors have been too superficial in drawing their conclusions.

They say that Photo albums and Photo frames is an odd and seemingly random combination of items. Eh? Doesn't the word 'photo' conjure up a link?

They say that 'Kitchen' should be grouped with 'Lawn and Patio'. Why? I don't grow flowers in my oven.

In Nielsen and Tahir's specific examples, they criticise 'A Painted House' as being a poor description of John Grisham's 'A Painted House'. ... What planet are these people from?

They criticize the fact that there is more than one place on the page to sign in. I LIKE that feature since both my wife and I have accounts with Amazon, I often find that I am 'signed in' on her account. Having a convenient location to click is a useful addition.

Nielsen and Tahir have completely misunderstood the meaning of the heading 'New Releases'. If they had bothered to click on any of the categories below, they would have understood its function. (Superficiality again.)

I could rant on and on for pages, but I think you're probably getting the gist of things. Having discovered that the authors had made such a poor job of deconstructing a site I know well, I now don't trust their judgement on the remaining 49 sites. That's a shame, because the idea behind the book is good - just poorly executed.