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Homepage Usability: 50 Websites Deconstructed Jakob Nielsen and Marie Tahir. 2001. Indianapolis, IN: New Riders Publishing. [ISBN 0-7357-1102-X. 322 pages, including index. $39.99 USD (soft-cover).]
Somewhere around the dawn of my writing career, I read Strunk and White's The elements of style, a simple, tightly written book of 100 or so pages. I studied its few guidelines, saluted my English major's diploma, and was ready to write.
Now come the World Wide Web and usability maven Jakob Nielsen. Nielsen, with his useit.com Web site, 10 books, and 8 years of Alertbox columns, may have written more about Web site usability than anyone. His is a prodigious oeuvre, although a far cry from the simple stuff of Strunk and White. Here's my question: How much must a reader read or a student study before grasping what makes a Web site usable?
Apparently, quite a bit. In Homepage usability: 50 Websites deconstructed, his latest opus, Nielsen (this time in company with coauthor Maria Tahir) selects and dissects the home pages of 50 Web sites. It's like a seminar where a Web page is shown on a screen and people discuss the pluses and minuses of every detail.
Before the seminar, the authors provide some notable preambles. Their preface includes a section on "The role of the homepage" that could help your team agree on what a home page is and what it should accomplish and avoid. Thoughtful content developers, as they build their sites, no doubt will return to the 113 homepage guidelines (more about them in a moment). Finally, because site development teams often want to know how their site measures up to others, there is a section of "homepage design statistics." Statistics are a Nielsen forte, and the data here is not going to disappoint statistics-oriented readers.
The 113 homepage...