The book is a quick read and I took many notes, but the important thing that I gleaned from this book was how to make my site informational, easy to navigate through and what works and does not work as far as design and color are concerned. As a cruiser myself, I know what bores me, irritates me, frustrates ma and what appeals to me when I am on a mission to find information and when I want to find it fast. The information contained in this little was quite valuable in that regard.
This is NOT a book about design and the use of color, etc., but instead a book about making a site usable to the ?cruiser? and then giving you, the reader, the information on how to attract users to your site, so that they won?t get irritated or frustrated. Admit it, we all have been to those sites!!
I think one might be surprised when reading this book, that color, tons of pictures and graphics are not key elements in an informational website, and our preconceived notions will quickly be laid to rest!
Very good book for a ?newbie? starting out on the road to web-design as well as seasoned designers.
Jared Spool and the UIE team discovered many new things in the studies this book is about. Up to the point of publication, web usability and general usability were closely equated, and not just the test methodology. But Spool's studies find unpredictable users surprising our preconceptions at every turn.
Some may say that the book contains too many questions, but when Spool admits "we don't really know what makes a site usable" he is reflecting the number of surprises his studies unearthed.
As for the causes of those surprises... the studies were performed as 'comparison tests' between sites that fulfilled wholly different purposes.... between (for example) Disney and Edmunds (car facts)... it may be invalid to compare usability between sites even if they are in the same domain, however, let alone when they are so diverse. For it may be a usability test can only identify weaknesses, not strengths. Perhaps that's why Spool says we don't know how to design for usability.
One possible weakness of the tests was that they were designed as 'scavenger hunts.' This is still very common, however, and only by studying the results of this book is one led to suspect that this approach generates an overly-directed browsing behaviour, and thereore measures only a subset of real web visitors utilising only a subset of possible tasks, which are not a proxy for general usability.
If you only read three books on web usability, this should be one of them.... Essential.
Web Site Usability: A Designer's Guide is a report that every person involved in Web design, commerce, or online marketing will want to have. This book is, undoubtedly, the most comprehensive data demonstrating how Web sites actually work when users need specific answers. Researched and compiled by User Interface Engineering, the results are written in an easy to understand style, illustrating the need to make Web sites useful, not complicated.* Based on an extensive study of actual users -- not theory, not graphic design principles, and not new tricks to make a "cool" Web sites* Demonstrates how people actually navigate and extract information on Web sites* Offers guidance for evaluating and improving the usability of Web sites