Weekend reading (web usability).

Weekend reading (web usability).

Last weekend I read through Steve Krug’s Don’t Make Me Think and Nielsen & Tahir’s Homepage Usability: 50 Websites Deconstructed. And now for your pleasure, mini reviews!

Don’t Make Me Think: Steve Krug does a bang-up job of covering a lot of ground in a clear and concise way. It’s 4 years old, which dates some of the examples he uses but all the principles he teaches are still very relevant. The user testing section alone is worth the price of the book twice over. Anyone with any kind of stake in any web project should read this book. I’m going to read it again this weekend.

Homepage Usability on the other hand, is not quite as useful. Which is not to say I didn’t learn anything from it. I did. There is a lot of good information in the book. It’s just not very usable. Externally, the book is large, square and floppy. It’s very difficult to read without sitting at a table. Internally they fall victim to their chosen format. Most of the book is devoted to deconstructing the homepages of 50 websites. They display screen shots and spend a few pages evaluating all the usability issues with the site. They have great things to say. But because every single site is it’s own section they have to cover every single issue for every site. It very quickly devolves into tedious redundancy. They try to counteract this by adding a review section at the front that goes through their findings statistically. But I even had a hard time with that section knowing that everytime they said “2% of site’s reviewed” they were only talking about one site. Read it if you have a vested interested in usability issues. If not, read Don’t Make Me Think.

Next on the list:

• 37Signals’ Defensive Design for the Web: How to improve error messages, help, forms, and other crisis points.
• Joe Clark’s Building Accessible Website.
• Alan Cooper’s The Inmates Are Running the Asylum: Why High Tech Products Drive Us Crazy and How To Restore The Sanity.
• And pretty much anything by Donald A. Norman.

It’s completely off topic, but this is a much better idea than setting up a lemonade stand.

Xian 11:54 AM, 04.09.04 - p-link