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Ellen Isaacs | |
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Designing Web Usability provides a lot of sound, specific advice about designing web sites, much of which can be applied immediately. Nielsen starts by making the points that the nature of the web puts the user in control because they can always go elsewhere, and that web sites enable users to experience products before buying, which also gives them more power. (I had to smile, though, when he told people who try to use tricks to force users to stay on their sites to "Get over it" because users will go where ever they want. Knowing many product manager who think this way, I doubt his admonishment will do it, sadly.) From there he goes on to dispense a large amont of specific do's and don'ts, often citing web usage statistics and data from usability studies, and illustrating many of his points with high-resolution, color screen shots of real web sites, which are generally quite effective in grounding his points. The book is well organized, divided into three major chunks about Page Design, Content Design, and Site Design, followed by some more specialized topics. Although he has chapters on Accessibility and International users, I appreciate that he integrates his advice about these topics where ever they apply, reinforcing the idea that designers need to keep these issues in mind all the time. The text is very readable, and flows like a long conversation (or lecture) rather than a textbook, which makes it enjoyable to read. (The down-side of this is that it's not that easy to use the book as a reference, since it's difficult to go back and find the place where he made a specific point. He uses sidebars to pull out important points, which is nice, but I don't think they are any easier to locate later on.) Although I thought the Page Design and Content Design chapters were well done, my one big disappointment with the book was the Site Design chapter. A great many sites are really applications rather than a locus of information, and yet Nielsen says almost nothing about interaction design -- how to design the flow of the site so that users can move through it easily to get their task done. To give a very simple example, many websites provide one or more fields for entering text with a button to enter the data. Some such sites don't enable the user to type the Enter key to trigger the button, forcing them to switch to the mouse to click the button. This is a simple but common error in interaction design. A more complex example: when a user adds something to a shopping cart, there are a number of ways to let them know it was added. Do you go to the shopping cart page to show them it was added, a la Amazon? This provides clear feeback but it might break the user's flow in looking for more items. Do you follow PCConnection.com's example by having a small view of the Shopping Cart on the left side of every page, incrementing the number of items each time the user puts something in their cart? This approach keeps the user's context for further shopping and gives a full-time view of the cart, but users may not notice the feedback when they add an item. Or do you go with Netflix's approach of popping up a separate window informing the user that the movie was added to their list. In this case, users can't miss the feedback and they can keep looking for movies, but the popup is disruptive and ignores the fact that the next likely step is to adjust that movie's priority in the list, which requires going to the list anyway. What works best when? These are just two of the many interaction design issues most designers face, and yet Nielsen says little about them. Instead, he talks mainly about pages as they relate to other pages, e.g. where on a page to put links to other pages, how to indicate where you are, how to "design" a URL. These are certainly legitimate issues that he covers well, but there was a lot missing. There were times when Nielsen's tone gets a little arrogant, but overall, I was pleased that he was fairly constrained, and tried to point out good things on pages he otherwise criticized. It would help if he avoided words like "useless" or "disastrous," and I think he too often states advice as black-and-white rules, although he does sometimes provide guidelines on when to break a rule. (I did notice that when discussing sites he worked on, he was more willing to allow exceptions. For example, when discussing Sun's complex home page -- he worked at Sun -- he says, "I would recommend use of this elaborate set of navigation mechanisms only for very large sites with highly heterogenous content." I suspect if another company had such a navigation mechanism, he wouldn't find that page to be a justifiable exception.) Nielsen is pretty far on the function end of the function-vs-form spectrum, too far in my opinion. In some case, I accept his argument, e.g. using relative rather than absolute font sizes, so people can control the sizes of their fonts through the browser. But in other cases I think there's more room for visual style without sacrificing functionality. For example, even though black on white may provide the best contrast for reading text, I think there's a fair amount of play in choosing colors that are readable, which gives more room for using color to indicate structure and to chunk information. As many people point out, his website is pretty unappealing looking, and I think he could improve the look while still communicating structure just as well. He's also very conservative in recommending staying 2 years behind the curve in adopting new browsers or browser features, arguing that you give up 10% of your user base if you don't. His point is well taken, but I think it would be easier to take if he didn't treat it as an absolute (only excepting sites whose point is to showcase skill with new technology). I'd prefer if he pointed out the price you pay for using newer technology, and let people decide if they can justify that cost for their site. Finally, Nielsen's last chapter on Future Predictions seemed out of place and silly. After giving boat-loads of practical advice on things like naming links and where to put a logo, he suddenly launches into a series Utopian predictions, many of which have been predicted for years and never seem to unfold. My particular favorite is the idea that major population centers will fade away as people disperse to the mountains and the plains because everyone will be able to work from wherever they wish. I suppose things like chat and video conferencing and inventions to come will suddenly start to fulfill humans' need for face-to-face social interaction in a way that hasn't happened yet (and didn't when the phone was invented either). I'm sure Nielsen had fun writing the chapter, but I didn't find it particularly valuable or enlightening. Despite those specific criticisms, I think the book is an impressive compendium of very concrete, specific, usable advice. If everyone followed his advice, most web sites would be the better for it.
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