Customer Rating:  
Summary: Unfortunate waste of paper
Comment: Nielson has once again demonstrated his ignorance when it comes to defining people on the web and what they like. According to Nielson, the average user is uneducated and needs to have their hand held every step of the way. I have more faith in the average user and I believe they are capable of waiting and understanding the intricate works of both text and image. I have to ask Nielson, should every piece of advertising exist in just black and white, Helvetica type leaving nothing to the imagination? Where is the fun in that? I feel bad for the aspiring web designer who is mislead by the information in this book and learns nothing. This book will not help you to build a better website.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Time to drive a stake through the heart of Nielsenism
Comment: Jakob Nielsen's bizarre insistence on treating the Web as if the years 1996 through 2000 had never happened is the sort of lapse in his otherwise-cogent thinking that will doom him to irrelevance. He makes points that need to be made, but I worry about any sentence of the form, "*All* Web sites *must*..."There's no way anyone can finish that sentence and have it ring true to me, since the Web is such a hugely multifaceted environment. It's not - and never has been, at least not since Mosaic 1.0 - a purely informational medium. Neither is it a purely commercial environment. It contains both these elements, along with a strong leaving of emotion and an increasing ability to display aesthetic sophistication. With these thoughts in mind, it's purely irresponsible to *demand* that Web sites be designed solely according to the Taylorist precepts of Nielsen's so-called "practice of simplicity." Simplicity is a wonderful thing - even an underrated thing - but there are topics on the Web, as in life, that require complexity, even idiosyncrasy. The implied insult in "Designing Web Uability" is that users are dimwitted drones who can't be expected to deal with idiosyncrasy. And while the review-of-a-review below may seem snarky, the guy's got a point. I don't want to sound elitist, but simplicity in practice demands subtlety - mastery of the sort that generally eludes "Dummies." This book will *not* make you a Web design professional, and if the below example is any proof, it cannot even teach you the basics of aesthetic balance. Nielsen himself admits as much. Usability is a good thing. It is not a religion. Nielsen loses sight of this, which makes him dangerous; half-competent project managers who take up his cause without ever having designed a Web site themselves are more dangerous still. I think it's time for the anti-Nielsen: a loud, proud statement that design is OK, that users are clever, that Flash can be useful, and that emotion is at least equal to commerce and utility in the life of the Web.
Customer Rating:
Summary: For the Simple-Minded Web Designer
Comment: While this book has a few good points, the majority of it reverts the reader back to the Web design days of 1995. Technology and bandwidth have increased the Web's capabilities, and there are many, easily-navigable Web sites that employ very little from Nielsen's thesis.He seems to be a small-minded man with an affinity for himself, especially considering the "I Love Me" page on his site. Someone so close to the engineering aspect of Web technology does not need to be given that much credit for design.
Customer Rating:
Summary: sign of the times
Comment: The justifiably vast popularity of Nielsen's book is a sign of the times. The Web is about 10 years old. In the early days it required an unusually talented software engineer to build a working dynamic Web service. Now the knowledge of how to build database-backed Web sites is fairly well distributed. You can adopt the Microsoft religion. You can adopt the Oracle religion. You can adopt the open source religion. Whatever you choose your users will probably get back a page full of HTML (or WML if they are on a WAP phone).If the software engineering aspects of Web service design have gotten easier, what about usability? It has gotten much harder. Mark Hurst of Creative Good has a nice graph showing how in 1993 and 1994 the average Web site was very simple to use and the average user was a hardcore Unix weenie working in a university research lab. Whereas in 2000 the average Web site has almost the complexity of a desktop app and the average user is new to computers. Hurst calls this the "user experience gap". The questions that Nielsen raises are the important ones, by and large. Does he have all of the answers packed into 419 pages? No. The field is too broad for any one person or any one book to be comprehensive. But this book is another important contribution by a guy who has been taking these issues seriously for more than a decade.
Customer Rating:
Summary: You think it's all common sense, huh?
Comment: Sure, designing web sites is not simple. You know you shouldn't use marquees or pink text against a light green background. You know those things and a few others and you think you don't need a book to tell you how to create a website when all you need is common sense. Wrong! I didn't think there were techniques to this art, but there are. Nielsen doesn't give you these basics mentioned above - not at all. He gives you theories and amazing full colour examples which perfectly exemplify every point he so correctly makes. I bought this book thinking that it would tell me things I've already learned in all these 4 years of webdesigning, but instead I found myslef not able to put it down! I've learned a lot from it and you will too, no matter how experienced a designer you may be.
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