By: Erik Vlietinck
Wed, December 06, 2006 - 1:45:00
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Jakob Nielsen and Hoa Loranger wrote their follow-up to Nielsen’s best seller “Designing Web Usability” published in 2000. The new book is still aimed at e-commerce sites, but is useful to bloggers and content providers as well.

One big difference in the new book is that Nielsen actually pays some attention to Search Engine Optimization. Not surprisingly, usability and SEO go hand-in-hand according to the authors.

While the largest part of this new book reads like a blog by itself, the authors have done their homework and have added some extra juice. For example, they show you how to measure a ROI of good design. They show you how to measure ROI and explain why good design from their point of view gets such high ROI figures.

The book furthermore revisits most sites of the 2000 edition and discusses the progress being made and the (new) mistakes that pop up on these sites.

Most of the book is still about rather obvious and sometimes disputable views. Such as the view that people don’t scroll beyond one third of a screen full. Many webmasters of content-rich web sites will argue with Nielsen on that point.

Still, for many company employed webmasters, this book will reveal what is acceptable and what is not.