greenpoint design

Book Review: Designing Web Usability

February 4, 2003 on 6:34 am | In Books | Add a Comment

Designing Web Usability: The Practice of Simplicity, by Jakob Nielsen. Read February 2003.

The guru of User Interface lays down the law. Should have read this when it was published in 2000. Here’s the synopsis:

• Separate design from content; separate presentation from meaning - use semantic coding, e.g.,
• Use style sheets with relative sizes and positions
• Design for speed. Maximum of one-second response time; over a 56K modem that’s about 34KB per page.
• Use descriptive link titles
• Use visited link color to show which pages have been viewed.
• Version 4x browsers were introduced in 1996. By standard rates of adoption, most users should have V5 or 6 browsers by now. Design for V4 or above.
• Use thumbnails and brief descriptions for video served from the web
• The homepage must explain WHAT THE SITE IS AND WHAT IT DOES. It must have simple navigation to main content areas, a summary of primary content, and a search feature.
• “Content is king.”
• “Design Darwinism” dictates that in the melee of web experimentation, bad design will die off for lack of users.
• Dense sites can be made navigable by: aggregation, summarization, filtering, truncation, and example-based representation.
• Read the search logs from your site along with the user traffic analyses. Frequently searched-for items are a key indicator of demand.
• Add common misspellings of keywords to meta tags to pull errant searches
• Intranets MUST have: a personnel directory with pics, projects, employee background, contact info and location; site directory with a hierarchical organization of info; a full-text search function; current company news, memos etc.
• Test early; test often. Get representative users and have them perform typical tasks on the site.
• Great websites are HOMERUNs: High in quality content; Often updated; Minimum time to load; Easy to use; Relevant to user’s purpose; Unique to the medium; Net-centric

Neilsen on modern tools: “… this is the first time humanity has lost mastery of its tools. … We have lost 2000 years of progress in rationalist thinking and reverted to superstitious and animist behavior (where these new tools are concerned).”