Designing Web usability

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Have you read Jakob Nielson's work? - http://www.useit.com/ Designing Web Usability would be a good start - http://www.useit.com/jakob/webusability/ And Homepage Usability is good for screenshots with examples - http://www.useit.com/homepageusability/ I would take what he says with a pinch of salt at times, as he can be very metric based. Sometimes it helps when to know to bend the rules. I remember for years he was very strict about hyperlink colours insisting that they should always be blue for unvisited and purple for visited.

In Nielsen's "Designing Web Usability" I remember him frowning on the use of "here" and "click here" as links. Since around 2000, when I first read the book, I heeded his advice. For more information: click here To sign up, go here were cardinal no-nos, if I remember correctly. But it looks like everybody else uses this technique, and the average web surfer is more likely to click give the redundant area to click on. Maybe people are just more comfortable with "click here" when the links lead to an undefined word, like Twitter. Would it be true to say that most people on the web don't know what Twitter is? Do most of Curtis's visitors know what it is? If most of his visitors don't know, are they clicking on "here" because it's a more comfortable link given Twitter is undefined? While each of his test cases vary in wording, the first 3 are…

I have always liked his stuff, and I read and liked Designing Web Usability, but the enterprise-ish pricing on the real meat of his research annoys me immensely. E.g. "Usability of Intranet Portals A Report from the Trenches: Experiences From Real-Life Portal Projects 3rd Edition 343 pages PDF format $348 for a single report, $698 for the report and a site license to make copies within your organization and place on your intranet. (No shipping/handling fees will be added: it's a download.)" The parenthetical statement is hilarious. Site Licenses for books are hilarious.