Prioritizing Web Usability: Jakob Nielsen’s early book, Designing Web Usabillity was a masterpiece — it fundamentally changed how I built Web pages. It’s the Bible of Web design, in my mind.
This is the updated version. Not a sequel or a new edition, but:
A second goal of the book is to update the early Web usability guidelines I published in the 1990s. All the guidelines found since 2000 continue to hold, but what about findings from the studies we conducted 1994 to 1999? The book compares these old studies with more recent ones and explains which of the old guidelines should still be followed.
There is drool on my chin right now. Is that wrong?
Frankly, I'm holding off on buying Nielsen books on design until useit.com doesn't make me queasy.
Yes, it's wrong. Nielsen is a luddite blow hard who makes a lot of money making Big Pronouncements that are almost devoid of meaning. Eye-tracking studies on video on the web? Does he bother comparing web eye-tracking to television eye-tracking or talk about different content types? No.
Neilsen has done some good work in the past, but any person with 6 weeks of real world video experience could tell you that 24 seconds of talking head is death. Only Neilsen can manage to stretch that out to 200 word essay length and use it to sell expensive consulting services.
Neilsen's partner, Bruce Tognazzi, is 1000 times more useful and a lot more fun to read as well. Give him a try. http://www.asktog.com/
