My review concerns the 2002 2nd edition. There is a much more recent 3rd edition (which is also much more expensive). I believe there is great value in either. And I would heartily recommend this book.
The author is a consultant making his living evaluating others' web sites. He approaches evaluation from the standpoint of the user seeking to fulfill user needs. The quintessential marketing approach.
The book steps us thru the mindset needed to focus, foremost, on the user's experience and the user's goals in accessing a web site. The title of the book refers understanding users' well enough so that a web site is written to be essentially self-evident -- thus avoiding forcing to THINK about what the web site wants or expects. What is expected is just...obvious.
He steps thru many of the means that web sites use to provide such an experience, focusing heavily on effective site design & navigation. He also strongly recommend reducing verbiage by 75% as a rule.
All in all, I found his focus on the user & his attention to a site's navigational structure to be very useful. Thru his experience, he is able to provide both positive & negative examples of these and other points thruout the book.
This is one author that I sense I trust his judgment and enjoy his writing style. As one measure of that, I've already purchased a few of the books he highly recommended in his "Recommended Reading" section. Those, too, appear to be excellent books written from the same place with the user in the center.
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