Spotlight customer reviews:
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Customer Rating:  
Summary: Nielson disappoints again
Comment: Admittedly, I've been biased against Nielson's works since the publication of `Designing Web Usability' in 1999; finding his tendency to oversimplify and `deconstruct' rather ineffectual. And as usual, `Homepage Usability' disappoints as an overly sensational and inaccurate evaluation of homepage usability. There are good parts, in particular, the statistics you may want to reference for your own usability initiatives. But the `50 webpages deconstructed' portion is not much more than Nielson spewing hot air. If you learn (or are entertained) best through critique by an impossible standard and ideal, by all means, this book is for you. If you are looking for a USABLE and real life guide to homepage design, look elsewhere.
Customer Rating:
Summary: detailed critiques of major websites
Comment: This book excels in giving detailed critiques of the home pages of 50 prominent websites. These include Microsoft, Barnes and Noble, Amazon, General Electric and Boeing. The websites span the gamut from appealing to a mass audience, like Amazon and MTV, to more specialised corporate sites like GE.
The authors offer incisive comments. All the more valuable for not being always complimentary. They show how even a large company can have flaws in its home page. Take GE for example. Its page has a "Buy Online" section. But it is mostly misleading. The links in that section point to such items as aircraft, which you cannot buy online.
The websites were captured several years ago. So it's quite possible that if you go to their current addresses, the pages are different. Yet the analysis in the book is still instructive. It should also be noted that the unusual shape of the book might be misleading. From the outside, it looks like a coffeetable type book. Full of glossy images. It does indeed have the latter. But these are high resolution screen captures that enhance the visual nature of the pages and their analyses.
If you are designing your own website, try going first through this book, for inspiration.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Excellent guidelines, but deja vu for the rest of the book
Comment: This is Jakob Nielsen's more pragmatic follow-up book to 'Designing Web Usability'. The book is divided into two parts. In the first half, Nielsen presents 113 guidelines for designing home pages derived from research conducted by the Nielsen/Norman Group. The second half (and bulk of the book) consists of the practical application of these guidelines in the analysis of 50 website homepages. The 113 guidelines are excellent, summarizing a great deal of HCI research and will be beneficial to anyone designing websites. The second half starts off strong with insightful narratives as Nielsen deconstructs each homepage, clearly illustrating the guidelines. However, after reading about ten or so of the critiques, they become quite monotonous, as each homepage clearly makes the same mistakes as the prior one. If you can manage to get through the deja vu, then the 113 guidelines will surely be imprinted in your brain and on your work.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Save your money
Comment: I saw Jakob once at a usability conference and all I can say is "What a friggin' ego." The whole beginning of his presenation was a series of slides showing what magazines he's been featured in. It totally eroded any semblance of scholarship I may have once thought he posessed.
And if you don't think ego is involved, check out his rates on the neilson/norman consulting site.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Nice book but have usability problems
Comment: It's worth the first 53 pages. I don't think anybody cares about if a specific site do or doesn't do something rigth unless it is in a specific example. I found three usability problems in the book itself.
First, the printed format is odd and hard to handle.
Second, when he make the breakdown of the hompage sould have some kind of rating for each point, like Good, Bad or Regular. In this case if your are looking to see what is good or bad in a homepage you don't have to read all of them.
Third, the appendix. Completely useless. It doesn't give you a hint of the meaning in the real state breakdown. If you want to see the logo of one of the company in the book just go to the review of that company or go to their hompage. The search features doesn't say anything about it, it is a collection of different search boxes. The other collection in the appendix are not worthy comment them out.
If you want to take read the book, I recommend going to a public library or to a boookstore and red it there, not worth spend your money, save it for a bouquet to your spouse (or boy/girl-friend).
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