Customer Reviews
Very usable - By: Balai Zsolt, 19 May 2002 
I've read about 10 books & tutorials about site design. This was the best of them in terms of usability.
Jakob's Law has an unbelievable importance: "users spend most of their time on other sites than your site.".
There is a separate section for statistics what contains the range & the average of properties like:
-Page width
-Logo location
-Width of search box
...
I felt at last somebody tells what to do if I want to create a site what is simple to use.
Another book to check out is: Don't make me think!
A good starting point, should go further - By: Tom du Pré, 11 Apr 2002 
Jakob is reallly trying to hurry the web forwards into useful maturity, & who can blame him. Many designers who come from a purely artistic background will hate Jakob & this book, because they will think it amputates their creativity. They would be right, & Jakob would make no excuses for that. One of the reasons why the web is such a nasty place to be most of the time, is that different sites do the same things in different ways. In this book, Jakob & Marie attempt to identify the common components that most websites share, (such as company logo, navigation area, news area, about us link, search function, legal wording etc) & recommend a consistent way of displaying these common components. These recommendations are based not on what they think you should do, but based on what most other websites are doing already. If 84% of sites have their company logo in the top left hand corner, that is a pretty good indication that a similar percentage of users will expect to find the company logo to appear in the top left hand corner, which is a pretty good indication that it's a good idea to put your company logo in the top left hand corner.
It's a handy book. Yes it's quite repetitive, but in way that illustrates the point's he's making about standardisation. Jakob should go further. The Victorians started standardisation, & created standard time & weights & measures. Jakob should use his position to push web standardisation. He should examine sites deeper that the homepage. He should provide examples of information architectures that although will need to be adjusted from site to site, follow a similar structure that users will recognise & be able to navigate intuitively.
When users go to a site, they go there to achieve something. A significant proportion of the time taken to achieve their goal will be taken up by learning how to use the site. If sites are more standardised, the learning curve will be flatter, & the user will achieve his goal more effectively, more efficiently, & more satisfactorily. This book starts to set out those standards, & should be read by people designing sites.
Good - but repetitive - By: Bobby Elliott, 07 Feb 2002 
I like Nielsen. He talks common sense. His first book on Web design ('Web Usability') should be the bible of Web designers - but as as this new book shows, the same old mistakes are made time & again. The first 50 pages are great but then he analyses actual Web sites for the rest of the book - & this would be OK if they were different. But they're alll pretty much the same so you don't learn much after the first few reviews. Sloppy research. But I still recommend the book. Give it to your IT guys.
Very good, but possibly too long. - By: , 25 Jan 2002 This is an excellent book giving guidelines for communicating the purpose of websites, communicating information about the company whose site it is, revealing content through examples, archives, accessing past content, links, navigation, search, tools, task shortcuts, graphics, animation, graphic design, UI widgets, title tags, URLs, news, press releases, popup windows, intermediate pages, advertising, welcomes, technical problems & much more. The first 52 pages are worth their weight in gold to any web professional.
The rest of the book is taken up with indepth analyses of specific web pages, & this I found rather boring & much less useful, though I can see that for people who need real-life examples reiterated it can be a good thing.
But overalll pretty recommended.
Useful but there are better ways to spend the money - By: Chris Rust, 13 Jan 2002 
Jakob Nielson has set out his stalll to be the voice of science & reason in web design and, in the past, I have found a lot of his advice helpful. However this book strays into dangerous territory because he exposes his detailed thinking & there are enough cases where his prescription misses the point about the message & audience for a particular website to convice me this emperor is only half-clad.
The approach to the book is very much a box ticking exercise, you can't help feeling that this is a cheap way to fill a few hundred pages & get another title out.
Nielson & Tahir analyse a lot of (relatively similar) websites & reading soon becomes a grind, each page I turned I hoped I would learn or see something new but after a while I realised I was on a bus tour of the ordinary & I was unlikely to find any significant insights.
