Appendix B: Recommended Books

The following are recommended web design books by web design guru Dr. Jakob Nielsen. You can view this information at www.useit.com/books.

Web Design Books

Information Architecture for the World Wide Web (2nd Edition)
by Louis Rosenfeld and Peter Morville

The authors’ emphasis is on the structure of the site and how to facilitate users’ access to the information they need the most. Even though these are crucial issues in web usability, they are often overlooked in the quest for cool pages (that download slowly and are impossible to navigate). I liked the manuscript enough to write the foreword to both the first edition and the second edition.

Web Bloopers: 60 Common Web Design Mistakes and How to Avoid Them
by Jeff Johnson

As the title says, 60 of the most basic guidelines for web design. But the book is really much more than that because each guideline is discussed at length with many screenshots and examples. Also, the author is well-grounded in the basic principles of human-computer interaction, having many years experience in interaction design, so he explains why the mistakes are bad with reference to the underlying big picture. Truly an excellent book, and pretty easy to read because it’s structured according to the bloopers and the entertaining examples.

Adobe Master Class: Web Site Redesigns
by Darcy Dinucci

Based on the title, I almost discarded this book without reading it, despite having received a free review copy. After all, even though Photoshop is good software, it’s not exactly what’s important about web design, so why would one ever want to read a book from Adobe? A year later, I picked the book out of whatever pile it had gotten lost in and was happily surprised: It’s not about Adobe software at all, but a series of case studies of real websites and what worked and didn’t work in various versions of their designs. You have to translate these specific lessons into general guidelines yourself, but there are a lot of gems in the case studies. In particular, is it nice to see how iterative design was applied to gradually make the sites better, despite problems in their early releases.

Collaborative Web Development: Strategies and Best Practices for Web Teams
by Jessica R. Burdman

Why do most web projects fail? The most common problem is probably misguided goals (i.e., making a cool site rather than one that’s good for customers). But the second most common problem is doubtlessly project management. You could even argue that pushing back on damaging goals should be the first duty of the project manager. Anyway, this is the book on how to run a web project, what the different team members should do, and how to put together a good process. Oh yes, lack of process is another common reason for disaster.

E-Commerce User Experience
by Jakob Nielsen, Rolf Molich, Carolyn Snyder, and Susan Farrell

207 guidelines for how to design e-commerce sites to make them more usable. All guidelines are based on findings from detailed usability studies of 20 e-commerce sites with users in the United States and Europe.