Customer Rating:  
Summary: An excellent starting point for students of info design
Comment: On pages 13 and 14, Jakob writes: "You are probably going to have to buy two books...this book will tell you *what* to do with your site and an implementation book to tell you *how* to put that design on the Net."I wholeheartedly agree with Jakob's statement here. This book should be read required reading for anyone who saw a "kewl" webpage with lots of "neat" navigation elements and wants to try their hand at website design. There are simply too many badly designed, useless sites out there. We don't need to add any more to the pile. This book's focus seemed to be toward the news publishing industry and producers of "static" pages in general. The only thing I wish this book covered more was how to design complex web _applications_ (non-static pages) for improved usability. I've been watching Jakob's columns since 1997 and I have seen many of his predictions about the Web and usability come true. I highly recommend this book to site designers and CEOs alike. Users of their websites will be the ones to benefit.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Simplicity or design fascism?
Comment: It was with great trepidation that I bought this book, but did so because of the hype surrounding it. I am sure I am not alone. This book in common with so many others makes the fundamental mistake of ignoring the fact that the internet is a new medium with new aesthetic imperatives as well as new technological criteria. This is a handsome book, well published albeit with more than its fair share of typos. The usage of English by the author is appalling, but nowhere near as bad as the content matter.As someone professionally involved in the design, mark-up and content resourcing of web sites, this book offered nothing. To start a tome purporting to offer advice about developing sites, it seems disengenous to offer advice on cellphone and PDA technology straight off the bat, as these technologies have not yet been developed. The author appears obsessed with 'telling' rather than advising how best to offer up a well designed site. This imperical stance is let down wholesale by bad examples of the advice offered and instead of accepting the fact that the web will shortly become one of the biggest branding exercises in the history of business, the author seems content to give further advice on arcane and automatically out of date statistics on page loading, screen real estate and design criteria. Nowhere, but nowhere is branding or aesthetics mentioned. The big mistake - 'content as design' is automatically assumed in this book. This is a rehash of the 'Web sites that suck' mentality, that achieves nothing and gives the term 'American Design' a reputation it does not deserve.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Excellent, if brief.
Comment: The concepts in this book are desperately needed on the vast majority of websites. However, as another reviewer has stated, there is nothing new in this book if you've read Jakob's online column at useit.com. In fact, the book often contains word-for-word extracts from Jakob's web column and reads more like a web site than like a book. It is also deceptively brief, as it contains many screen shots to illustrate the points in the text. While some of the examples are very effective, I would have preferred a more in-depth examination of the principles and fewer illustrations.Nevertheless, the book is worth buying just to have it available as a print reference. If all web designers took Jakob's advice to heart, the web would be a much friendlier place.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Practical Tips From A Master of Usability Engineering
Comment: This beautifully produced volume by a leading expert in usability engineering might well be called a handbook because of its throughness. It is packed with principles of usability applied to web design.Use it to move the code-mad developer to consider design issues or to bring a wildly creative sort back to reality. The only problem is that I hesitate to pass the book to the staff developer who needs it for fear that I won't get it back.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Shockingly good...
Comment: After 5 years of creating educational and commercial web sites, I thought I'd made all the mistakes, and finally figured out what I was doing...thought I had some insight. Well, Nielson's book floored me. Absolutely brilliant. Suggestions backed by theory and data. If every developer read this, the web would be a better place...but then I'd end up with less work, so ignore my words. Don't buy this book. Keep making unusable sites...for my sake. For my children's sake. We thank you.
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