Eyetracking Web Usability
Eyetracking Web Usability is based on one of the largest studies of eyetracking usability in existence. Best-selling author Jakob Nielsen and coauthor Kara Pernice used rigorous usability methodology and eyetracking technology to analyze 1.5 million instances where users look at Web sites to understand how the human eyes interact with design. Their findings will help designers, software developers, writers, editors, product managers, and advertisers understand what people see or don’t see, when they look, and why.
With their comprehensive three-year study, the authors confirmed many known Web design conventions and the book provides additional insights on those standards. They also discovered important new user behaviors that are revealed here for the first time. Using compelling eye gaze plots and heat maps, Nielsen and Pernice guide the reader through hundreds of examples of eye movements, demonstrating why some designs work and others don’t. They also provide valuable advice for page layout, navigation menus, site elements, image selection, and advertising. This book is essential reading for anyone who is serious about doing business on the Web.
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A Very Academic Book – Not for Beginners,
As one of the other reviewers said, there’s not a lot here that will break new ground and most of the points made are things that experienced UI designers already understand. Two exceptions for me were the findings about the attractiveness of text as a design feature and the exact degree that banner blindness can affect a user’s experience.
Although a lot of the findings in this book will be more profound for those with less experience, it doesn’t mean that this book is ideal for beginners. Quite the contrary, I think the people who can make the most use of this book are people who already understand just about every UI guideline in this book. I say this because this is a book that’s all about data and evidence of things a lot of us already know, but can’t convince others of. It’s a book that might help you persuade someone who’s insistent that things need to be done a certain way that perhaps a different approach would be better.
This book really covers a niche topic and will probably bore anyone who doesn’t have a high level of academic curiosity to tears. For rookies looking for design tips, there are far more concise and easier to understand volumes of work. In many ways this is a very long research journal article produced in the form of a book. The tomes of data and explanations overwhelm the scattered number of important design points in the book. If you just want to skim the big take away lessons from this book, you can do it in one sitting. Just look at the pictures and read the captions. If you need more background info, then read a few pages around the illustrations for more info.
My one critique of the book and one that might knock half a star off my rating if Amazon did half stars was that the book was difficult to follow in some stretches. The way they wrote the narratives about their subjects’ behaviors and motiviations were often hard to understand and in many cases, it may have been better to simply use more bullet points and illustrations instead of full text narratives of how the subjects were navigating. They often mention their subjects by first name and it gets hard to keep them apart in your memory.
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Overly Verbose, Under-Delivers, Too Much Space on Irrelevant Topics,
Although many of the web usability observations presented in the book will be helpful to web and ecommerce designers, the authors really could have said much, much more using far less space. Follow Steve Krug’s style: be concise! The book under delivers in the sense that much has been left out which was researched but was not adequately covered in the book, such as usability issues as they pertain to ecommerce sites. Many, many pages were spent going into minute detail on how a particular user utilized a given web site rather than summarizing and following with concise conclusions, making the book onerous to get through. Irrelevant topics were also covered, such as web users’ attention paid to dog’s crotches (I kid you not, this is an actual topic, covered in depth), making it difficult to take the book seriously and compromising the authors’ credibility.
In addition, the writing style was a bit immature. The impression I received from their writing was that of a group of undergrads who were given money and let loose in Manhattan and required to produce a paper to account for their efforts.
I had really looked forward to this book, and unfortunately it fell far short of my expectations. Although, there is a lot of good usability information in the book, I would not recommend the book on that basis, because the information must be ferreted out from all the excess prose.
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Comprehensive, interesting, & engaging,
This is a great book! Kara Pernice and Jakob Nielsen did a fine job of making this potentially very dry topic interesting, accessible, easy to absorb, and funny. I found the heat map pictures most helpful in illustrating key themes. The authors go into great detail on how to interpret eye tracking results to optimize electronic displays and user interfaces. I especially appreciated the practicality of this book – they describe not only what eye tracking is, but how to apply it to your work.
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