Customer Rating:  
Summary: Just look at his website first - the proof is in the pudding
Comment: Jakob Neielsen has his own website at http://www.useit.com/. If you even think about buying this book and consider yourself a web designer, take a look at his site first. Frankly speaking, it stinks! He even breaks some of his own rules about text clutter and long scrolling pages. Perhaps you like his site. If so, then maybe this book is for you. Maybe I can get a PhD in web usability, proclaim myself a guru, and sell books. I'll get companies to pay me 175k to give them verbal feedback on their site based on some simple principles that should be summed up in one article - Creating text based websites for morons. By the way, in the same vein of the Dummies books, Jakob assumes that people are idiots. Buy his book and prove him right (the press sure has). Maybe you can buy the book for half price - mine's for sale. Heil Jakob, der fuhrer of usability!
Customer Rating:
Summary: Excellent resource
Comment: This book is a great resource for web developers. The suggestions Neilsen makes are backed by usability studies that make sense. While some guidelines may seem limiting, the facts upon which they are based are clear and well-founded. When the author writes that usability research shows web pages with 40K have a 25-30% bailout rate on a standard modem line, we are free to disregard this and make bloated, sluggish pages anyway. But what Neilsen's book makes clear is the effect that this has on the average user. At no point did I get the impression that Neilsen had anything but respect and concern for the users. He is their advocate. The virulent reactions some people seem to exhibit in reaction to this book amaze me. As a software engineer, I can say this book has been an extremely valuable reference. As a web user, I can also say that I wish more web developers would read this book and put these guidelines into practice.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Useful day to day. Period.
Comment: I've had this book for about a year, but have held back from reviewing it until I could see it in action in our work place. (In all honesty, I could have posted these same opinions six months ago; it was effective that long ago, but reviewing this was not one of my top priorities.) In my work place (a large large corporation whose website has scads of pages), this book has been a major resource for colleagues trying to support the user experience. Nielsen makes his points clearly and supports them with germane examples. His tone is sober and persuasive, and while he often gives direction in absolute terms (allowing little room for judgment), he never sounds like Chicken Little. This increases his arguments' credibility, which is of course important if you need to cite an outside source. The day to day usefulness? Well, where I work this book has buttressed discussions around page download times, organization, page real estate, intranets... I don't know of any other web book which could have filled this role. Granted, other books carry similar messages, but their authors are not quoted daily, and they are less likely to be recognized by those you work with. The fact that there is a mouse pad (intended as a joke) that asks you to ask yourself "What Would Jakob Do?" is a testament to the persuasiveness of his arguments. They are persuasive for a reason. BUY THIS BOOK.
Customer Rating:
Summary: It should be about facts not ego
Comment: From the beginning this book seems to be about Jakob standing on high, sharing his unquestioned wisdom with the simple folk. Perhaps if he backed up his pronouncements with more facts, idependent research (not just quoting himself, his firm or his past affliations with Sun) he might sound like more than hot air.In the end, I measure any non-fiction book by how many practical insights, tips or concepts I take away. I finished this book without having learned anything more than if I had sat in a bar listening to a couple of web designers bitching about how stupid most people are. It comes down to look at my site. I got it right because I am smarter than you. Save the money. Go buy a couple of developers a beer.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Overall, a good book to read. But not a bible to follow.
Comment: Jakob is a controversial figure on web design community, and will keep being that way for quite some time. It's not hard to figure that out for someone who put his name right on the cover of the book like what it is with this book.But yet, many of the comments that I read in the book are very helpful. A lot of them are common sense, but for some reasons, they haven't been common on the web page design. The way I see it is, as long as it helps users retrieve information that they want from a web site, it is a valid guideline. And one common misunderstanding about Jakob Nielson is that he thinks users are idots. But I don't think that's what he said. What he said is, users are not patient. And that I can totally relate to. I mean, hell, I am not patient when I browse the web. As to the rest of the comment that he made, I don't agree with him, especially his comment on the efforts that has been made to the web environment to make it a multimedia. It is not a waste, Jakob! If it were, all of us would still be using DOS, not WINDOWS, today. One last thing to complain about the book, the diagram and figures are terribly integrated, if at all, with the main text. I kept being forced to jump back and forth between the text and the figures and found myself confused many many times. Talking about usability and readability, hummm...... Jakob? Anyone?
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