Web Usability: The Practice of Simplicity - Jakob Nielsen
Every self respecting web designer should have read this, not necessarily agree with all the things he says in it, but you have to be aware that to many this book is THE web Bible.
Read any article about Jakob Nielsen, and there have been quite a few and the term web guru is bound to pop up somewhere. "The Guru of Web Page Usability" (New York Times) and ?Usability guru?(The guardian). This title is really deserved in this case because he has made a lot of people think about their approach. He holds 62 United States patents, mainly on ways of making the Internet easier to use.
His approach is a different one, looking at a web site from the users point of view, not the designers. Thinking about what users need and how they get it. His own web site (www.useit.com) has almost no graphics because he considers ?Download times rule the Web, and since most users have access speeds on the order of 28.8 kbps, Web pages can be no more than 3 KB if they are to download in one second which is the required response time for hypertext navigation.?(www.useit.com)
The interface to the information in the book , not surprisingly is laid out very well with an extra content of each chapter page to inform you of what is covered., but the boxes which I suppose are the equivalent of the pop-up window can be very distracting.
1. Introduction- Why Web Usability?
2. Page Design.
3. Content Design.
4. Site Design.
5. Intranet Design.
6. Accessibility for Users with Disabilities.
7. International Use- Serving A Global Audience.
8. Future Predictions- The Only Web Constant Is Change.
9. Conclusion- Simplicity in Web Design.
Recommended Readings.
The content design section I found the most useful,and covered things such as writing for the web, printing from the web, one of my bug bears about poorly designed pages
The biggest problem I have with this reductionist approach is the it results in books behind glass. Which is ok for informational sites but if this approach is adopted to far will leave use with a much duller medium.
The web as a medium as very new and is struggling to find its own language and grammar and is borrowing from other media. Just as early films were theatrical plays performed in front of a static camera and it took 40 years for someone to think of following the action with the camera.
The interfaces between information and a user are in their infancy and potential for the web and how we use it has not yet been realised.
This is still the best book yet on interface, usability and navigation issues specific to the Web.
And I consider this to be the rule book of web design, and if you are going to break the rules you need to understand them and why you are breaking them
Reproduced with the permission of Dooyoo UK Ltd