Customer Rating: 
Summary: Finally a Reference to Point to!
Comment: Every member of your web design team should be required to read this. It is the best, simplest, and most concise reference I have ever read on web design. I've been doing this since 1994 (I spent two years reviewing websites for an online library. I have seen more bad design than anyone ever should - and have seen very little improvement since then.)Marketing folk, grumpy programmers/developers, and upper management who think that the web is their very own toy should read this and start to understand that the web is meant for the user, NOT THE DESIGNER! I don't agree with everything - but no two people ever do. By far, this is the best book to use as a web style manual / usability manual I have seen. All opinions are my own and reflect on none of my colleagues.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Recommended reading for aspiring & practicing web masters.
Comment: Designing Web Usability introduces the World Wide Web through the eyes of the average user. Users experience the usability of a site before they have committed to using it and before they have spent any money on potential purchases. The Web is the ultimate environment for empowerment. He or she who clicks the mouse decides everything. In this landmark design reference, the world's acknowledged authority on Web usability, Jakob Nielsen, shares with you the full weight of his wisdom and experience. From content and page design to designing for ease of navigation and users with disabilities, Jakob Nielsen delivers complete direction on how to connect with any Web user, in any situation.
Customer Rating: 
Summary: Designing Web Usability
Comment: Found more "usability" in first chapter than I expected. Very pleased with the book. Excellent illustrations. Surprised to see the author talking about "right-now" technologies. Nothing out of date that I see so far. Discovered several "how-do-they-do-that" revelations that are worth much more than the book price. Covered over half of the book before I put it down after opening the box it arrived in. Wow.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Jakob is dead on, but this should be common sense
Comment: As a directory editor I review lots of web sites. The info, ideas, and critiques in this book would be very helpful to most designers/information architects/web site owners. People are looking for specific, information, quickly, on the web. Visitors should always know where they are in a site, should be able to quickly download information with a 28.8 connection, and be able to get from any page in a site to any other page in 3 clicks. There is a lot of good info in this book. If you've got a site with all the latest technologies that contains a lot of hype and self promotion, and was built to please the top brass in your organiztion get this book read it and use it. If you've got a site designed have as well as Amazon, skip it you've got the gist of this book.
Customer Rating:
Summary: A good buy for most people, from a Usability Engineer
Comment: One of the best things about this book is that Nielson actually bases his dictums on usability testing. There is NO substitute for user testing when designing, and his data alone makes the information in this book vastly more useful than 95% of the other web design books on the market.One of the big problems is that sometimes he makes rather crusty assertions without actually testing them. For example, he continuously says to minimize scrolling. But as is evident on his own website, this often happens by letting text stream to the full width of the browser window. Unfortunately, this creates vastly more serious usability problems than narrowing the text column and letting users scroll more. it's easiest for the eye to read text if the angle between the end of one line and the start of the next line is about 13 degrees, which translates into about a 500-pixel wide column of text. Overall, though, his insistence that designers design for the user, rather than the technology or the Vice President, is crucial. The book is worth a read if you've never read his stuff before. If you're already a heavy user tester, buy one of his more technical books on usability engineering, such as *Usability Inspection Methods*.
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