Book Review: Prioritizing Web Usability

Prioritizing Web Usability is the solemn title of web usability guru Jakob Nielsen’s latest book, which he wrote with Hoa Loranger. It is a useful book, but its style is as po-faced as the title.

The fundamental idea is to highlight and prioritise the most important elements so that a website can achieve its objectives. Since Nielsen’s earlier book, Designing Web Usability, the internet world has changed. Users have become more familiar with it and the technology in use has improved. So his new book also acts as an update to his earlier guidelines.

An early admonishment to website designers is: “If people can’t or won’t use a feature, it might as well not exist.” Like many of the exhortations in the book, this is a common-sense observation, but how many of us think that way? The book is more than mere exhortations though, and provides plenty of practical guidance.

However, the chapter on revisiting early web usability findings struck me as a poor example of book usability. A skull and crossbones symbol is used to show how some usability factors have dropped down the scale of importance since the earlier guidelines. This seems like a great wheeze, but it doesn’t actually work. You’d expect the sequence to run from most skulls to least. Or even least to most. The first section covered all the three-skull items, but in each of the remaining three sections, the skulls were sequenced randomly.

The other thing that grated in this chapter was that the last section was devoted to problems that have diminished because designers avoid them. But this book is for designers, so aren’t the problems as important as ever?

If you’re in a tearing hurry, start at chapter 4, “Prioritizing Your Usability Problems”. The “scale of misery” and “why users fail” will give you plenty of food for thought. The subsequent chapters cover the important issues, such as search, navigation, typography, writing and design in some detail.

This book is a good replacement for its predecessor and, for Nielsen fans, an essential update.

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