Artigo Especial #2: Homepage Usability

INTERVIEW Jakob Nielsen and Marie Tahir on Homepage Usability

We interview the authors of the upcoming book "Homepage Usability 50 Websites Deconstructed." Reviewed last time, the book offers 113 homepage usability guidelines and 40 design recommendations to make your home page more usable. The authors then mercilessly critique 50 prominent Web sites using their own recommendations. 

>WEBREF Why did you do the book?

>JAKOB NIELSEN Homepages are the most valuable real estate in the world. Millions of dollars are funneled through a space that's not even a square foot in size. The homepage is also your company's face to the world. Potential customers look at your company's online presence before doing any business with you. 
Complexity or confusion make people go away. Of course, all other aspects of bad Web design should be fixed as well, but if the homepage doesn't communicate what users can do and why they should care about the website, you might as well not have a website at all. That's why homepage usability is so important and that's why we wrote a book specifically about this one topic.
We followed our own principles when naming the book. Most people should be able to figure out what a book called "Homepage Usability" is about. Two words, and you know the topic.

>MARIE TAHIR The purpose of the book is really to help design teams help themselves. The whole philosophy of our company is built on this, because we believe that design and usability efforts are most successful when they come from within the company. Many of our training services focus on coaching teams to do the work themselves, rather than making them dependent on us for extended periods of time.

>WR How did you choose the 50 Web sites to review?

>JN They were on various "top 10" lists, such as most visited sites in the U.S., most visited sites in the U.K., biggest e-commerce sales, Fortune 100. We also picked a few prominent sites from Asia and Australia as well as some small-business sites and government sites. The general idea was to get a spread of different types of sites, but mainly to pick good ones so that we did not have to waste the commentary on obvious stupidity.

>WR Have you noticed an increase or decrease in the Web's usability since 1993?

>JN Increase in absolute terms, but decrease in relative terms. By this I mean that sites follow many more of the usability guidelines now than they used to do. For example, splash pages are almost unheard of today. Search engines are also better. They are not nearly as good as they should be, but still the average site has a better search engine today than in 1993. Thus, in absolute terms, usability has improved. If the same user were to try to attempt the same task on a site today vs. that same site in 1993, the task would be better supported and earlier to perform today. 
In relative terms, usability has declined. We are not talking about the same users, the same tasks, and the same sites today. 
Some of us have used the Web since 1993 (I personally started using the Web in 1991), but the vast majority of users are much less computer-savvy today than they were in the early days. The tasks are much more complex today than they used to be, and we obviously have many more sites. The increase in usability has not been big enough to compensate for the broadening masses of users and the increasing complexity of the tasks.

>WR How were the 113-homepage usability guidelines arrived at?

>JN We analyzed the design mistakes on the 50 homepages and also drew upon our experience from other usability projects over the years. Mainly, if something was an issue sufficiently often, we made it into a guideline.

>WR I hear that you have a list of 200+ usability guidelines for Web sites, and that you'll reveal it this month. Do you plan to make it available online?

>JN This is actually different. I have a list of 207 guidelines for e-commerce sites. So this is for a more specific type of website where we can provide more specific guidelines than we can when the problem is broadly defined as "Web design" in general. 
These guidelines have been collected into a rather fat report that was just published and is available from our website now http//www.nngroup.com/reports/ecommerce 

>WR ON MENUS In your book you mention some "rather tricky dropdown menus" and seem to discourage them. How do you feel about dropdown HTML and cascading DHTML menus in general? How prevalent are dropdown menus on the Web? How should they be designed properly?

>MT Many designers use dropdown and cascading menus, because it's a tough challenge to reveal enough content to users, make categories understandable and differentiable, all without putting too much information on the page. By using dropdown menus, designers think they can keep the page simple, while still providing information on the homepage. A couple of major usability problems often plague dropdown and cascading menus.
First, many menus give no visual affordance that they have information lurking beneath, so people often don't know that they are there. In fact, many users are startled when they hover over an area of the screen and a new element pops up unexpectedly. 
Users only discover the menus if they felt sufficiently convinced that the menu choice was correct enough to go to it. This negates any "benefit" from putting the submenu items on the homepage, because it means that the hierarchy of the site is only revealed to those who already have a pretty good understanding of it.
Another problem is that users can only see one dropdown menu at a time, so if the user isn't clear about the difference between main navigation items, he or she must access each one individually, remember what was on each one of them, and try to determine which main item to choose. That's a lot of work.
Another problem is that the menus often use tiny fonts and place the items very close together. This means the user must have precise mousing skills in order to select the right item. In many of our studies, we've seen users select incorrect menu items from dropdowns.
If you're going to use dropdown or cascading menus, then, they need to have some sort of visual cue that they have a dropdown. Also, avoid small fonts and allow adequate space between menu items. 
Often you can avoid the dropdown dilemma by not trying to make your homepage a completely democratic representation of all of your content. It's much better to give top billing to the highest priority items and feature some of the content in those categories directly on the homepage and provide simple links to other categories rather than to try to cram equal depth on all features on the homepage.

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