Usability reading

Three books arrived on my desk this morning.  All on the area of web usability and information architecture.

After flicking through them all, I dived straight into Steve Krug’s new second edition of “Don’t Make Me Think”. I found myself nodding and smiling at the common sense advice.  This book is concisely written with often humerous illustration of the key points. Chapters such as “How we really use the web (Scanning, satisficing, and muddling through)” and “The first step in recovery is admitting that the Home page is beyond your control” get straight to the heart of usability and navigation.  Make it easy and make it clear. There is a very useful section of web navigation conventions including use of taglines, tabs, breadcrumbs and the placement on the page of these elements. The illustrations of users “thinking” and “not thinking” really give food for thought as to the “Reservoir of Goodwill”. This shows users attitudes as they travel through the site and what will increase and decrease their good will.

I scanned a chapter of the second book, “Prioritizing Web Usability” by Jakob Nielsen and Hora Loranger. Initial impressions are that there are a LOT of statistics and it seems a little repetitive.

According to the data gathered by the authors, users spend an average of 1 minute and 49 seconds visiting a site with the visit to the final site used to complete a task lasted an average of 3 minutes and 49 seconds. And a site only has a 12 percent chance of being revisited, once lost those visitors are gone for good.

Both authors clearly agree that the key to a successful website is to provide users with the information they need, and FAST.

I’m also looking forward to reading Peter Morville’s book “Ambient Findability” examining how people find their way through an age of information overload, filtering and making sense of information as they go. This one looks a little more theoretical than the other two and I’ll need to find a quiet corner to do it justice.