Designing Web Usability: The Practice of Simplicity - Softcover

Nielsen, Jakob

Softcover

ISBN 10: 156205810X ISBN 13: 9781562058104

Publisher: New Riders, 2000

Synopsis

Designing Web Usability Deals with content and page design, designing for ease of navigation and users with disabilities. This book presents a series of principles which show: that web users want to find what they're after quickly; and, that if they don't know what they're after, they want to browse quickly and access information they come across in a logical manner. Full description

About this title

Review

Creating Web sites is easy. Creating sites that truly meet the needs and expectations of the wide range of online users is quite another story. In Designing Web Usability: The Practice of Simplicity, renowned Web usability guru Jakob Nielsen shares his insightful thoughts on the subject. Packed with annotated examples of actual Web sites, this book sets out many of the design precepts all Web developers should follow.

This guide segments discussions of Web usability into page, content, site, and intranet design. This breakdown skilfully isolates for the reader many subtly different challenges that are often mixed together in other discussions. For example, Nielsen addresses the requirements of viewing pages on varying monitor sizes separately from writing concise text for "scannability". Along the way, the author pulls no punches with his opinions, using phrases like "frames: just say no" to immediately make his feelings known. Fortunately, his advice is some of the best you'll find.

One of the unique aspects of this title is the use of actual statistics to buttress the author's opinions on various techniques and technologies. He includes survey results on sizes of screens, types of queries submitted to search portals, response times by connection type and more. This book is intended as the first of two volumes--focusing on the "what". The author promises a follow-up title that will show the "hows", and based on this installation, we can't wait. --Stephen W. Plain, amazon.com

Topics covered: Cross-platform design, response time considerations, writing for the Web, multimedia implementation, navigation strategies, search boxes, corporate intranet design, accessibility for disabled users, international considerations, and future predictions.

Review

"Robust advice on designing for maximum speed and simplicity. Well, illustrated, bracingly opinionated and riveting."www.mantex.co.uk, Sep 2001 "Anybody who has the slightest interest in web pages, site design, and information architeture should read this book. I feel quite confident that it is destined to become a classic."www.mantex.co.uk, 2000 "If you want to know about usability and the Web, this is obviously the place to come to. Very well designed, plenty of white space with numerous coloured illustrations of real Web pages. Overall, it is a pleasure to browse it."http://informationr.net, August 2001

Edition details

• Publisher: New Riders
• Publication date: 2000
• ISBN 10: 156205810X
• ISBN 13: 9781562058104
• Binding: Paperback
• Language: English
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 432