Homepage Usability

Danny Yee writes: "Last year I reviewed Jakob Nielsen's Designing Web Usability . Read on for my review of his latest book, Homepage Usability." This might make you want to go and revise your own home page. Homepage Usability author Jakob Nielsen, Marie Tahir pages 315 publisher New Riders rating 9 reviewer Danny Yee ISBN 0-7357-1102-X summary high-profile homepages deconstructed in colorful detail.

You might want to read Homepage Usability just for the entertainment of watching web usability guru Jakob Nielsen deconstruct the homepages of fifty major sites. Or you could read it for some invaluable advice on web design -- I learned a lot from it, as I think even seasoned web designers will.

Homepage Usability begins with 113 tips on homepage design, some of them obvious and some not so obvious, and most of them applicable more broadly than homepages. Here are two of the shorter ones:

Use graphics to show real content, not just to decorate your homepage. For example, use photos of identifiable people who have a connection to the content as opposed to models or generic stock photos. People are naturally drawn to photos, so gratuitous graphics can distract users from critical content.

Don't use clever phrases and marketing lingo that make people work too hard to figure out what you're saying. For example, the "Dream, Plan, & Go" category on Travelcity might sound catchy to a marketing person, but it's not as straightforward as "Vacation Planning." Every time you make users ponder the meaning behind vague and cutesy phrases, your risk alienating or losing them altogether. Users quickly lose patience when they must click on a link just to figure out what it means. That isn't to say that homepage text should be bland, but it must be informative and should be unambiguous.

Nielsen and Tahir then look at some statistics on the fifty sites considered. These statistics are used to make recommendations, following Jakob's Law of the Internet User Experience, that "most users spend more of their time on other sites." Here's a sample:

Link Formatting

Next to the use of colored text, the underline is the second-most important cue to users that text is clickable, and 80% of the homepages underlined the links. We continue to recommend that links be underlined, except possibly in navigation bars that use a design that makes it more than commonly obvious where users can click.

Of the homepages in our sample, 60% used the traditional standard for link colors: blue. This is a fairly small majority, but still large enough that we continue to recommend blue as the color for unvisited links. If links are blue, users know what to do. End of story.

All this packs a remarkable amount of useful information into the first 50 pages, but the vast bulk of Homepage Usability, some 250 pages more, consists of analyses of the fifty chosen homepages. These follow a standard format. A full-page screen-shot faces a brief commentary, discussion of the page TITLE and tagline (if any), and a pictorial (overlay plus pie chart) breakdown of screen "real estate" into operating system and browser controls, welcome and site identity, navigation, content of interest, advertising and sponsorship, self promotion, and unused/filler. Then follow either two or four pages with detailed commentary: the screen-shots are repeated on the left-hand pages with elements numbered, and the right-hand pages have comments on them. Many of these are trivial and site-specific

"This Go button's color isn't noticeable enough - there should be much more contrast with the background color."

some of them amusingly so

"In general, oil companies would best avoid photos that show large dark shadows in the water next to their rigs."

Others are more general

"Don't have a special Shop link when there is a product section. The natural thing for users is to find the product first and then decide to buy it."

The sites covered are mostly those of corporates or media organisations - Ebay, ExxonMobil, ESPN, IBM, Victoria's Secret, and CNNfn, to name a few -- but some government departments are included and there's a good sprinkling of English-language sites outside the United States, such as those of the BBC and Australian supermarket chain Coles. The vast bulk of the analysis is, however, just as relevant for other kinds of organisations -- certainly for the university at which I work and the charity for which I do volunteer work, but also for my personal sites.

Finally, a comment on the physical book. A large square volume, 25cm a side, with colour everywhere, Homepage Usability is really nicely laid out. I'm not generally a fan of books with a lot of graphics and screen-shots, but here they are used to good effect, demonstrating how some things can still be done much more effectively in print than online.

You can order this book from Fatbrain. Check out Danny's other Internet and publishing reviews. Want to see your review in this space? Check out our book review guidelines first :)

Comments

though the suggestions might be usefull...

[night_flyer]

most of the time people who determine what is and what is not good for web design dont have a clue, or are obsessed with old standards and old browsers. (ie you shouldnt use frames)

I will say the suggestions mentioned here however are not bad.

Re:though the suggestions might be usefull...

[ChaosDiscordSimple]

most of the time people who determine what is and what is not good for web design dont have a clue, or are obsessed with old standards and old browsers. (ie you shouldnt use frames)

I don't think you've been paying attention . Frames have terrible usability. The article may be 5 years old, but most of the problems remain. This has nothing to do with old standards or old browsers, but fundamental problems with be behavior of frames. Bookmarks to framed pages don't work as users expect. Links from search engines into frames sites don't work as expected. Framed sites don't print as expected. Entering an URL from an email or newspaper article to a site using frames doesn't work as expected. When browsing web pages over limited browsers link handheld computers or cell phones, frames make the experience extremely painful.

That said, frames have their uses. Even Jakob admits as much. But too many people aren't considering the potential problems before using them.

This book really is good

[Anonymous Coward]

Especially the sections regarding Americans with Disabilities act compliance... Something lacking in most current websites.

Re:Take Jakob with a grain of salt

[mcelrath]

Jakob seems to be stuck on information delivery in its distilled form, which simply isn't paying the bills for many sites out there.

And just what do you think the web is? Some kind of place where people pay good money to see your blinking flashy popup crap? No. People use the web to find information. Anything else is secondary. If people can easily find what they want, they will buy it, and that's where the money comes from. They won't buy it because your ad blinks more than the next guy's.

I'm sorry non-information-delivery doesn't pay bills for you, but really, good riddance.

Kudos to Jakob for emphasizing function over form. The web is a functional medium. Now if you're running an on-line art-gallery...that's a different story.

--Bob

well, two things...

[jpellino]

1. this is a $45 book ,and amazon has 21 souls looking to unload theirs at $15... sounds like a one time read at best.

2. make it an ebook - what is it with all these people - negroponte leading the charge - extolling electronic/cyber/wired life and grinding trees to pass out their gospels? dymitri or no dymitri, people pay for ebooks.

Re:And what ...

[SomeOtherGuy]

Actually -- I may not be Jacob...But it is easy to see (for me) that MOST ads (banners popup, etc) do nothing but rape the look and feel of a site. From a look and feel perspective -- there is a nothing like seeing a well designed site littered with flashing ads....All that work in color coordination goes down the drain....

** Note: text based hyperlink ads are AOK with me...and should be the choice for all sites that want to have a tasteful way to try to lead me to a site that I never intended on visiting in the first place...

I Love Usability!

[epepke]

I've always been a fan of usability. I kept a copy of Psychology of Everyday Things on my bedside table. However, I've noticed some unpleasant patterns over the past couple of decades:

• The Macintosh was way more usable than DOS. People got DOS and called the Macintosh a toy. The Macintosh is still at least marginally more usable than Windows. People get Windows. Apple is on the ropes instead of dead because of design decisions a few years back that had everything to do with flash and style and nothing to do with usability.
• The Amiga, especially with Video Toaster, was a fantastically usable machine. You can't get one any more.
• The Palm is wonderfully usable, focused and appropriately designed. CE devices are clunkier but kewler. Palm is on the ropes.
• Three years ago, someone tried to sell a VCR recording device with a clock dial. Nobody bought it, including Alan Cooper, who at the same time wrote a book griping about how he couldn't buy one.
• If you have a telephone at work, you know that just about every button works in a different, idiosyncratic way. Somebody bought that phone and didn't buy a phone with a better design.
• Go look at the new washers and driers, the expensive ones that people buy as status symbols. Show me one that is as easy to use as the old ones with dials that you turn and pull.
• Count the number of doors that need to have a user manual on them, even if it just says "Pull." Watch how many people struggle for a couple of seconds or even run into them because the design is not obvious. Somebody bought those doors and didn't buy others.
• Submit two software designs. One has a whole bunch of buttons, easily translatable into bullet charts. The other has a unifying concept that makes the complexity unneccessary. See which one impresses the purchaser more.

Alas, all the evidence is that, even if usability is on the list of criteria for purchasing (which it seldom is at all), it is way low on the list. It may even be a de facto negative.

Vincent Flanders asserts that web pages are different: that if people don't like it, they're gone. Well, maybe, but is there any evidence that usable commercial web pages sell better than less usable ones? Has anyone done a study? I thought the value of usability in commercial products was self-evident, too, until the evidence built up that I was flat-out wrong.

Re:I Love Usability!

[dublin]

Count the number of doors that need to have a user manual on them, even if it just says "Pull." Watch how many people struggle for a couple of seconds or even run into them because the design is not obvious. Somebody bought those doors and didn't buy others.

This is one of my pet peeves. Almost 100% of the time, push/pull confusion is caused because the door violates the unwritten rule of door and handle design that we've all incorporated subconsciously based on our experiences with doors: Doors with horizontal handles should be pushed, while doors with vertical handles should be pulled.

Chances are, next time you're fooled by a door, it will be violating this simple rule that you may not have even been consious of. It's unconscionable for those conscious of design to be unconscious of it, though... ;-)

Re:typical jakob

[defaulthtm]

Usability experts and designers like Donald Norman, Alan Cooper, and Bruce Tognazzini seem to me to be a lot more realistic in their mixing of user goals and business goals.

Two of the three guys you mentioned are partners with Nielsen. Go to Nielsen Norman Group to see more. They seem to believe that their ideas are compatible.

K.

Bobby and W3C standards

[Compact Dick]

...when I create web pages ... I try to make them Bobby compliant. Is this just as good ?

Not necessarily. Both services have different objectives.

Bobby [http://www.cast.org/bobby/] is a web-based tool that analyzes web pages for their accessibility to people with disabilities. From their test homepage [http://bobby.cast.org/], a Bobby-approved website must:

* provide text equivalents for all non-text elements (i.e., images, animations, audio, video)
* provide summaries of graphs and charts
* ensure that all information conveyed with color is also available without color
* clearly identify changes in the natural language of a document's text and any text equivalents (e.g., captions) of non-text content
* organize content logically and clearly
* provide alternative content for features (e.g., applets or plug-ins) that may not be supported

The W3C validator [http://validator.w3.org/], on the other hand, ensures your webpages are syntactically correct and conform to their prescribed standards, such as XHTML 1.0 Strict. It does not place so much emphasis on accessibility, though it isn't ignored.

I would advise you to develop your webpages with the disadvantaged in mind. Make the web a better place for them and they will be grateful.

Cheers
CD