Recommended Reading

• Spool, Jared M.; Scanlon, Tara; Schroeder, Will; Snyder, Carolyn; and DeAngelo, Terri. Web Site Usability: A Designer's Guide. San Francisco, CA: Morgan Kaufmann Publishers, Inc., 1999.

While I think learning from the Web is a good idea, you might want to make sure that you are learning the right things. In this book, Jared Spool and his associates describe performing extensive usability testing on nine different Web sites and asking users to perform four tasks at each site (although each user didn't test every site). The results contradict some widely held beliefs about Web site usability. For example, this group found that there needs to be a link between content and navigation and that shell pages that are independent of the site's contents are ineffective. The user needs a clear indication of what he is going to get before clicking a hyperlink. It also found that graphics are a neutral factor in the user's ability to perform tasks (except that users find animations to be annoying) and that users are often basically clueless about the overall structure of a site. Also, interestingly, it found that certain users don't use the Back button at all and always try to get where they want to go by going forward or returning to the home page. Finally, Web pages with little white space seem to do well. This book will help you learn from the Web because it provides research data rather than opinions and assumptions.