Rating: 
Summary: Invaluable book!
Review: For Web developers and consultants, this book is excellent for fine tuning the most important page on your site... your home page. The first section of the book is a list of 133 guidelines. Each and every one of these guidelines are extrememly useful. However, I wouldn't treat them as the gospel that Nielsen regards them. The second section is a collection of 50 (well designed) famous home pages. Nielsen picks them apart and applies the 133 guidelines to them. (He will also point out where the home pages do well.) This book works well to examine your existing site, as well as, seeds for new ideas. It also helps when talking with non-design types to have examples of ideas and principles.
Rating: 
Summary: Heuristic evaluation in a coffee-table book
Review: Web site usability has come a long way. For proof, just consider the strange case of Dr Jakob Nielsen. Back in 1995, Dr Nielsen was a Sun Microsystem Usability software usability expert with a string of published papers and books on topics such as "heuristic evaluation". Nielsen had spent a chunk of his career analysing the benefits of quick-and-dirty usability methods such as heuristic evaluation, where a group of experts rate a system's compliance with established usability norms. But such methods remained generally underappreciated, and Dr Nielsen's books and papers were read by a relatively small group of fellow specialists. In 1995, with Web sites becoming a popular new type of "software", Dr Nielsen started publishing his thoughts at his own Web site, useit.com. Now move forward seven years, and here is Dr Nielsen again, peering out of the front of a book through neat glasses, wearing a red tie and perfectly mismatched greenish-blue shirt, with hair just long enough to mark him as a child of the 1960s. Except now Dr Nielsen is famous and runs sell-out executive lecture sessions on Web site usability. And the book out of which he is peering is not a scholarly tome but a big, glossy, full-colour 320-page compendium of heuristic evaluations on some of the world's best-known Web sites. It's called "Homepage Usability". Yes, it's the world's first coffee-table usability book. And if you can get over the price, "Homepage Usability" is both a useful contribution to the discipline, and more fun than you'd think. It's a set of design rules centred around an examination of the home pages for 50 major sites, including the highly-valued (Amazon, Yahoo, eBay, Google), the worthy (PBS, Art Institute of Chicago) and the famous (CNN, Google, BBC Online). "Homepage Usability" is particularly useful because Nielsen and collaborator Marie Tahir use these 50 sites not just as a gimmick but also to help define the "standard" treatments of elements on a Web page. They do so in the belief that rather than learning a new interface on every site, users prefer your site to work the same way as the last dozen they were on. Others, notably Michael Bernard from the Software Usability Research Laboratory at Wichita State University, have researched the placement of basics like navigation and search. Nielsen and Tahir analyse their 50 pages statistically and confirm and extend Bernard's work. For instance, their analysis of links to privacy information suggests that people will expect to see such a link on a site's home page (43 of the 50 had it there), and that it should be labelled "Privacy Policy" (20 of the 43 did this). On top of the 15 pages of statistical analysis, Neilsen and Tahir also offer 25 pages of heuristics - rules - on eveything from displaying logos to communicating site problems. Many of these rules will be familiar to Web design veterans and to readers of Nielsen's last book, "Designing Web Usability". Once the rules are finished with, Nielsen and Tahir take you into the instructive and oddly entertaining 240-page dissection of those 50 sites. They seek out and pull apart every misplaced button and vague label. The label "MTV news gallery" obscures the richness of the MTV site's feature articles. Drugstore.com probably thought the term "shopping bag" appropriate, but "shopping cart" has become an accepted term. And ExxonMobil might have thought their front page oil rig photo looked arty, but "oil companies would best avoid photos that show large shadows in the water next to their rigs". Heh, heh. The home pages themselves are displayed at full-page size. Some of the comments verge on pedantry, but there's praise too - the informative headlines on CNN, the well-described sign-in at Amazon. And the sheer weight of commentary eventually starts pushing you to think more rigorously about how users see your own pages. Many Web designers, especially the less pragmatic and those without formal training, hate Nielsen's approach. They can see it leaching the originality out of Web design. Neilsen makes no apologies for this; he believes the content should outshine the look, and he once wrote an essay entitled "The End Of Web Design". Commercial operators may see a different reason for suspicion. The likes of Amazon and Yahoo have been around long enough, and have experimented enough, to know exactly what produces commercial results for them. Heuristic evaluations never ask what is working in a particular case; they just apply standards. As Graham Hamer notes in his review below: if Amazon wants to label a link "Friends and Favorites", it's probably because the link is known to provoke the desired book-buyer behaviour - regardless of what Jakob Nielsen thinks. Heuristic evaluation has its limits. Within those limits, heuristics have real power. Usability commentators like Steve Krug, author of the excellent "Don't Make Me Think", argue that the average user is a myth and all Web use is essentially idiosyncratic, so the only way to design is to test. But the truth is that almost every designer uses heuristics at some point, adopting elements because they are familiar and because there isn't the time or the budget to test. They're too useful to resist. So is this book.
Rating: 
Summary: Take a closer look before buying
Review: At first glance, this book seemed like just what I needed. It was deeply disappointing to find that much of the commentary was very arbitrary- superficial and simply opinion without any solid basis. The cases were quite repetitive. It was not nearly as helpful as many free sources of information that are available. This episode reminds me of some of my experiences in building large-scale Web sites and the problems introduced by involving so-called experts.
Rating:
Summary: Fundamental
Review: Great!
A must-read for everyone who is working seriously on a big site.
Better to read this before start designing pages with any WYSIWYG editor. The book has a gorgeous package, if it had less pages and examples it would be useful too.
Rating:
Summary: Simply Amazing
Review: In my research of writing my You Are Here Internet Guides, I have personally visited and toured well over 15,000 Web sites and I must say I find this book very impressive. A flawless job of deconstructing these 50 sites makes you want to look more introspectively at what visually stimulates viewers. It explains in detail what insightfully makes Web design sufficient and efficient for the viewer. The commentary is very easily spoken and will make you think twice about some characteristics of Web design. Things you may have normally taken for granted in Web design are pointed out. For instance, intricacies such as arrows pointing at words and how to keep it simple with text links make the user well informed. Or how some redundancies keep the user from reading more, and in turn decrease the impact of the intended marketing message shows that somes sites may be susceptible to overusability. The book takes the word "clutter" and defines it, and explains ways around it. The simplicity concept is explored deeply, explaining a site can be easy to use without sacrificing good content. I like how each site deconstructed has a pie chart that tells you can quickly and easily look at and see what the homepage allocates space for. Much thought put into critiquing the sites. I found the homepage design statistics in the beginning to be quite useful and accurate. Overall, the book is a masterpiece. There is a chock full of thought into each homepage.
Rating:
Summary: Very useful, but maybe too long.
Review: This is an excellent book giving guidelines for communicating the purpose of websites, communicating information about the company whose site it is, revealing content through examples, archives, accessing past content, links, navigation, search, tools, task shortcuts, graphics, animation, graphic design, UI widgets, title tags, URLs, news, press releases, popup windows, intermediate pages, advertising, welcomes, technical problems and much more. The first 52 pages are worth their weight in gold to any web professional. The rest of the book is taken up with indepth analyses of specific web pages, and this I found rather boring & much less useful, though I can see that for people who need real-life examples reiterated it can be a good thing. But overall pretty recommended.
Rating: 
Summary: Take a closer look
Review: I was impressed by the first 65 pages of 'Jakob Nielsen's 50 Web Sites'. For the first time, it seemed, someone had stopped to analyse the genetic code that made for a successful homepage. What happened on page 66? .......... What happened was that I came to the deconstruction (criticism) of THIS site (amazon.com) and discovered that things were not as they seemed. Having purchased regularly from three of the amazon sites over the last five years, and having written over 200 reviews on this site alone, I think I know the site as well as any other customer. Thus I was surprised when I saw some of the criticisms levelled by Jakob Nielsen and Marie Tahir. I'm not saying that everything is perfect - and fair criticism is wholly constructive - however, the authors have left themselves open to the charge of superficiality. Take as an example their criticism of the page tabs (they say that users can make use of the other navigation tools on the page). Personally, I ALWAYS use the tabs at the top of the page. It seems that Nielsen and Tahir haven't considered user preferences. They say that 'Friends and Favorites' is a meaningless category name. Not to me, it's not. Nor to hundreds of thousands of other site users. They say that 'Free e-cards' should be in the 'Gifts' category. WRONG - Gift Certificates are in the gift category. e-Cards are e-Cards. Gift Certificates are Gift Certificates. They say that 'Hello' is an unnecessary level of friendliness. Is it? I LIKE being welcomed to the site (even though I know it's only an electronic gizmo). What Nielsen and Tahir failed to understand was that, after signing-in, the message says 'Hello, Graham Hamer' (or Hello, Father Christmas if that's who you are). As I say, the authors have been too superficial in drawing their conclusions. They say that Photo albums and Photo frames is an odd and seemingly random combination of items. Eh? Doesn't the word 'photo' conjure up a link? They say that 'Kitchen' should be grouped with 'Lawn and Patio'. Why? I don't grow flowers in my oven. In Nielsen and Tahir's specific examples, they criticise 'A Painted House' as being a poor description of John Grisham's 'A Painted House'. ... What planet are these people from? They criticize the fact that there is more than one place on the page to sign in. I LIKE that feature since both my wife and I have accounts with Amazon, I often find that I am 'signed in' on her account. Having a convenient location to click is a useful addition. Nielsen and Tahir have completely misunderstood the meaning of the heading 'New Releases'. If they had bothered to click on any of the categories below, they would have understood its function. (Superficiality again.) I could rant on and on for pages, but I think you're probably getting the gist of things. Having discovered that the authors had made such a poor job of deconstructing a site I know well, I now don't trust their judgement on the remaining 49 sites. That's a shame, because the idea behind the book is good - just poorly executed.
Rating:
Summary: Statistics, Recommendations, Analysis. Pretty good value.
Review: This book is a no nonsense guide on making the homepage more useable for the customer. It starts out by giving you 113 guidelines on how to improve your homepage. Then it disects the major critera with statistics. The second half of the book concentrates on 50 popular corporate homepages, and evaluates all the good and bad relating to usability. Positives: This book informative and the authors present the information well. The pages are big, and the screen shots are colourful and easy to read. Negatives: This book only covers corporate sites based on HTML pages. It doesn't mention Flash or Flash design. I wish the book could have gone deeper in some parts of their analysis of the chosen websites. It starts with the assumption everyone has built a website before. I think the best part of this book was that I got what I expected. The book taught me ways to improve homepages in regards to useability. Too many books promise too much and you feel it was a waste of money after reading it. This book has value and is a good reference . It won't just sit on the shelf.
Rating:
Summary: Time to learn about book readability, Jakob...
Review: I have just browsed the book, and got tired after five minutes. Page after page is filled with details about the 50 web designs, but when not prioritized, it's quite hard to follow. I really learned a lot from "Designing web usability" because it gave me a theoretical base on how to think about usability design, but this is just like a very long check list. I belive the book is quite useful if you have the time and energy to browse it, but it could have been made more easy to read. Like when pointing out design mistakes (50 websites x 25 mistakes = 1250), why not give some kind of priority? For example green-yellow-red or 1-5? I will probably read all of it, but not today..
Rating:
Summary: Great Book for Profesional and Novice Designers
Review: This book is about how most websites "should" be designed. It's not about adding Flash, large illustrations and animations that only make your visitors leave. As a professional website designer, I knew most of the mistakes that others made listed in this book. However, I still found a couple tips that were very helpful. For the novice designer, ALL the tips in the book will be helpful. Don't sell your book after you're done reading it! The real strength of this book is to use it for inspiration when you're designing a website. Just flipping through the pages you can see pictures of some of the best websites on the internet. Before I start new website project, I'll look through the pages just to get the creative juices flowing. The tips in the book are just icing on the cake.
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