What are web shoppers looking for, what are their habits, why do they click? This book has the answers. Highly recommended.

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Product Description

207 design guidelines to improve the usability (and thus the conversion rate) for e-commerce sites. Richly illustrated with 221 color screenshots of designs that worked particularly well or that caused problems for shoppers.

All the design guidelines are based on findings from detailed usability studies of twenty e-commerce sites with real users in the United States and Europe, showing what they did as they shopped on real e-commerce sites.

Covers the following topics:

• Category pages (including homepages)
• Product pages, product descriptions, product photos
• Shopping carts, checkout, and registration
• Search
• Selling strategies, cross-sales, recommendations
• Trust and credibility
• International users
• Test methodology used in this research; how to run your own usability studies

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Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #668704 in Books
• Published on: 2001-07-01
• Binding: Hardcover
• 389 pages

About the Author
Jakob Nielsen, Ph.D. is principal of Nielsen Norman Group. He is the founder of the discount usability engineering movement, which emphasizes fast and efficient methods for improving the quality of user interfaces.

Nielsen, noted as "the world's leading expert on Web usability" by U.S. News and World Report; and "the next best thing to a true time machine" by USA Today, is the author of the best-selling book "Designing Web Usability: The Practice of Simplicity," which has sold more than a quarter of a million copies in 22 languages. His other books include "Usability Engineering," "Usability Inspection Methods," "Multimedia and Hypertext: The Internet and Beyond," "International User Interfaces," "Homepage Usability: 50 Websites Deconstructed," "Prioritizing Web Usability," and "Eyetracking Web Usability."

Nielsen s Alertbox column on Web usability has been published on the Internet since 1995 at www.useit.com and currently has about 200,000 readers.

From 1994 to 1998, Nielsen was a Sun Microsystems Distinguished Engineer. His previous affiliations include Bell Communications Research, the Technical University of Denmark, and the IBM User Interface Institute.

Dr. Nielsen holds 79 United States patents, mainly on ways of making the Internet easier to use.

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Customer Reviews

Superb insight for a serious professional
If you are serious about learning what makes eCommerce sites work for the users you are looking at the right book. While there are many other good books on the subject, this is has to be the 400-lb gorilla! Here's why:
- every guideline and recommendation is supported with examples of real user behavior. In fact, it is this insight into what users do that makes it especially valuable for anyone trying to justify investing in usability.
- the chapters on selling strategies and trust show how online store design impacts the site's overall success with its customers;
- the chapters on category pages, search, product pages, and checkout & registration show in detail how design decisions on those particular parts of a typical eCommerce site can help or hurt their effectiveness in guiding the customer to the product and through the checkout;
- the methodology chapter will be extremely useful for anyone who wants to conduct their own usability tests. It not only documents how the tests were conducted, but also gives tons of valuable tips on task creation, test facilitation, etc. Also included are various pre- and post-test questionnaires, a consent form, and the list of all the tasks.

This book (or report, if you will) spends most of its time on my night table and is the inspiration behind my own UI design book, free at paulgokin dotcom. If you own/design B-to-C eCommerce web sites, get this report. It will pay for itself many times over in increased conversion rate on your site (provided, of course, that you implement the guidelines it contains).

Very insightful
I work in eCommerce for a leading online retailer (Australia) and I thought I knew pretty much all I could. This book showed me the intricacies of user behaviour and web usablitily and offered several great tips to tweak and improve my website. However, I would say the remaining 80% of the book covered areas I was already familiar with, so those in the industry - do a bit more research online before you invest in this expensive book.

For those new to eCommerce usability, I highly recommend this book. Very valuable to know the fundamentals and rules of user behaviour, so in future we can all be navigating easy-to-use and feature rich eCommerce sites.

Steve Krug's 'Don't Make Me Think' is also a great book (and a definite read for anyone interested in eCommerce), but this book takes a more professional approach - Krug's is mostly about 'concept' whereas Neilsen's is more about 'action'.

One last thing - don't be dissuaded that this book was written in 2001 - that's young in the Internet world. It would have been good, though, to maybe see a new edition of this book with more recent/updated eCommerce sites.

Based on Research - Not Opinion
I've been an e-commerce professional since the mid-nineties, and I echo what Thomas said in his review. I only THOUGHT I knew what was needed to achieve excellence in e-commerce.

This book is work the price because you're not getting mere opinion, vision and cleverness. You're getting the results from a big pile of research -- expensive research you would probably never fund on your own.

Hard numbers support every bit of advice that this book offers. It takes someone like Jakob Nielsen to back up their suggestions with that level of substance.