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Overview of Homepage Usability by Jakob Nielsen
 
Homepage Usability is really two books:
In the first 53 pages, Nielsen talks about the purpose of a homepage, and discusses the 113 guidelines that he uses when evaluating a homepage. He has keen insights into communicating your site's purpose, information about your company, the site's content, links, navigation, search-engine, shortcuts, graphics and design, user interface, window titles, URLs, news and press releases, popup windows and splash screens, and tools for gathering customer data and fostering community. The information is easy to understand, and easy to put into practice.
In the final 250+ pages, Nielsen deconstructs 50 websites from companies with high name recognition. In agonizing detail, he inspects every inch of the homepage, and offers suggestions and criticism. He breaks every homepage screen into its component parts: operating system and browser control (roughly 19 percent of the real estate, using Internet Explorer), welcome and site identity, navigation, content of interest, advertising and sponsorship, self-promotion, filler, and unused portions of the homepage. The percentages allocated to the various categories vary from site to site, by huge amounts. It's fascinating to see the different approaches that major companies use on their homepages.
Software developers can benefit from Jakob Nielsen's Homepage Usability
Most of the material used in this book was developed by watching real users access real websites. So, when Nielsen recommends that you include a search box on your web site, that you place it in the upper-right corner of your homepage, and you label the button "Search" (rather than "Go" or "Find"), it's not his personal tastes that you're reading about - it's actual field experience with real users.
As a result, the book's recommendations carry much more weight than the typical marketing book's suggestions that are based on hypothetical theories or personal taste.
Nielsen's selection of websites is not ideal for the typical independent software developer. The companies and institutions tend to be huge, and as a result, their concerns are different than the problems that software developers wrestle with every day. For example, programmers rarely have to include stock quotes, news for stockholders, investor relations press releases, links to multi-national legal pages, or other issues that Fortune-100 companies address.
On the other hand, it's fun and easy to browse through the 50 websites, looking for ideas that can be adapted for our own homepages. And for every idea that we can find, Nielsen includes detailed comments, criticisms, and suggestions.
Should software authors read Homepage Usability?
It's an expensive book, and worth every penny. If you only read the first 53 pages, the book will pay for itself many times over.
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