Rating: 
Summary: Poor science yields incorrect (or unproven) conclusions.
Review: There are a few good things in this report, but many more bad and misleading ones. It is not a very good "Designer's Guide."The main problem is that they haven't done any comparative studies. They can't say that whitespace isn't important or that graphics don't matter, without doing some controlled studies. They should have created the same sites with and without graphics and compared them. (This would include making sure that some of the alternatives really depended on graphics. That might be clothes shopping or map reading.) It's hard to believe that hundreds of years of graphic design suddenly goes down the toilet just because we have a new medium. You also can't say anything about graphics or graphic design when you don't have the terms straight (p82: The Edmunds site is not "design-free". Everything has a design, even if it's limited. It is "graphics-free", however. There is a BIG difference.) There are some important observations, like the idea that users skim rather than read on the Web. Unfortunately, the rest represents poor science and will lead people down the wrong path.
Rating: 
Summary: Primary reference for web usability
Review: There are several primary sources to study Web usability. Jared Spool of User Interface Engineering is one of them. Among technical communicators, "Web Site Usability : A Designer's Guide" is mentioned often in the same sentence with Jakob Neilsen and his work. From the standpoint of communicating information, everything Jared and his team has put together has been validated over and over in my experience designing sites with very technical content. Spool (et al) takes into account all the idiosyncrasies human beings bring to their Web searches, whether for information or entertainment, and makes consistently valuable comments about users and how they behave when using the Web. This book is a jumping-off point for Web developers and not intended to be a sole reference. However, Spool remains one of the most important people in Web usability and development today.
Rating:
Summary: MAGNIFICENT BOOK!!!
Review: This book is a definite MUST HAVE for any website designer, newbie to web design and anyone and everyone who has an online business. Simple, easy to understand visuals compliment the text, which is written in a very simplistic manner. This book is wonderful - magnificent - excellent, and will help you greatly understand the elements of successful web design. I've used it to consistently update my own website, at:
http://www.aei.dli.com
If you don't have this book, you're missing out on your single-most-important investment in your professional life!
Rating:
Summary: Poorly researched, poorly presented, and 3 years late.
Review: This book is a very poor attempt to provide advice on designing web sites. Right up front you should note that although this book has a publication date of 1999, the research was done in 1996. In Internet time that is a lifetime ago. A typical user in 1999-2000 is much more experienced using the internet than a user from 1996. None of the web sites that they used for their study look anything like what they did at the time of the study. In fact, they failed to get pictures of one of the web sites (from the 1996 Olympics) which was no longer available when they got around to writing this book. In most cases, the problems that were found at web sites were corrected long before the results of this research were produced which shows that this book may have been needed in 1996 but is useless today. No information is given to us about the people who participated in the study. Were they novice users or well experienced in using the internet? We will never know. That information, however, can be critical when trying to design a web site. The study also examined one small part of usability of a web site. How easy was it for the participants in the study to find a particular piece of information at a particular web site? But is that really the only reason that we visit a web site? Is that the only aspect of usability? And does any of this mean anything when we don't know who the participants were? In short, this book might have been somewhat useful had it been published in 1996 but it is useless and a complete waste of money in 1999.
Rating: 
Summary: Lots of questions, few answers
Review: This book is useful if:
1. You are involved in designing a site that is solely information-oriented.
2. You want a counter-point to Jakob Nielsen, who really has some helpful information.
3. You have a boss who doesn't know anything about the web and you want back-up documentation for your decisions.
Otherwise, this book has the following weaknesses:
1. Too many questions are asked with the answer being "we do not know why" and too many sentences beginning: "we believe, but do not know"
2. The goal was too specific: how well do users find information. This leaves out any websites designed for casual use, 'browsing', or entertainment.
3. The authors keep comparing apples to oranges. They do not usually take into account that some sites might have done better due to the type of content rather than the architecture or design.
4. There is no credence given to learned behavior (which, admittedly, Nielsen also gives short shrift).
5. It's just a TAD obvious. For example, "The better users could predict where a link would lead, the more successful they were in finding information." Well, uh, duh.
6. I don't agree with the model of testing. Users were given 4 questions they were to answer on each of 10 existing sites. Hypotheses were created from the results. However, none of the sites were amended to specifically address these hypotheses (unless, through some coincidence, the sites were updated during the process, and even then there was little before/after comparison).
7. The authors keep stressing throughout the entire book that web site usability differs from software usability. However, not once did they step back and think "maybe web site usability TESTING differs from software usability testing." While Jared Spool is a great speaker (having seen him in person, I was very impressed with his humor and intelligence), this book leaves a lot to be desired.
Rating:
Summary: Poorly Written
Review: This book, while occasionally presenting useful information, was on the whole written very poorly. Many statements like "We do not know what this means," littered the book with useless, inconclusive babble. The studies were purely linear in nature and provided no valid conclusions or insights into usability. It was almost as if the researchers were afraid to admit to drawing any conclusions from their findings. They also neglected to actually capture the content they were researching, the 1996 Olympic site for example, and could therefore not present pictures of the site when it went offline. Their painful admission of this fact only strengthened their lack of credibility. Read it if you'd like a good laugh.
Rating:
Summary: Wondefully Imaginative!
Review: This is a great book to read before bed, to your children or just to yourself. In enables fond dreams of websites, dancing on the bandwidth, and partying on the Fidelity site. Love comes into my head when I'm reading chapter 4's section on the catalog reseach. It is a brilliant sonnet of today's not so modern world. It tells wonders of how we can improve upon ourselves and form better sites. A must for all Shakespeare lovers,it is written in non-iambic pentameter, yet still retains a homey quality. In my opinion, a must read, but if you don't like it, it's about the right size for a trivet. Happy reading!!
Rating:
Summary: Massive overgeneralization based on limited observations
Review: When Jared Spool's Web Site Usability: A Designer's Guide was published, I was so interested that I packed it as carry-on reading for my vacation. I had found very few published accounts of empirical studies of web usability issues, and was anxious to compare notes with a fellow professional's web research methods and findings. The book is a quick read, so by the time the plane landed, I was thoroughly disappointed. Mr. Spool sets high expectations in the early pages with these three humble claims: that his book presents "groundbreaking research on web site usability;" that this research "provides actual data - not opinions - about what makes web sites usable;" and that his results are "really cool scientific findings." But the book fails on all three counts. Because the authors neglect to describe their research methods up front, the first errors the reader will notice are problems of logic, definition of terms, and overgeneralizations based on limited observations. The first chapter presents a set of "major implications," each of which is meant to debunk some common-sense idea of web design; for example, Implication 1 is "Graphic Design Neither Helps Nor Hurts." However, the reader who tries to follow the logic behind the titillating assertions will find it mortally flawed. In this example, a little digging reveals a misunderstanding of the meaning of graphic design, which the authors interpret as the quantity of picture elements in a given web page or site. This misinterpretation leads them to conclude that if a site with few pictures (described as a "nearly 'design-free zone'") fares better with subjects than do other sites with many pictures, it is because graphic design is unimportant. Some of the conclusions are directly contradicted by reported results. The authors conclude, for example, that "The more white-space there was on a site, the less successful users were at finding information." Yet Edmund's, which uses white space very effectively for visually separating the various informational categories, was ranked best for ease of finding information. The research methodology is mentioned only very briefly, toward the end of the book. Even then, the little information offered is enough to raise serious questions about what is not revealed. Here is a sampling of the facts I could glean: The researchers did not consider the sites' intended audiences when selecting subjects to evaluate them. The sites examined were aimed at vastly differing audiences ranging from kids (Disney) to durable-goods comparison shoppers (Edmund's) to small business owners (Inc.). Yet a single group of subjects was chosen to represent all the sites' users in the testing. Test tasks did not necessarily resemble likely end-user tasks, and the purposes of the sites were disregarded. Obviously, the effectiveness of a site should be evaluated in the context of the reasons for the site's existence. One site may be designed to facilitate the users' speedy navigation to information the user is seeking out, while another may intentionally divert users to certain pages to attempt to sell impulse items. It is not meaningful to compare these two types of sites on the same criteria. The test data are a sloppy combination of between- and within-subject ratings. The authors explain that "...each [subject] tested as many web sites as possible in [the three-hour time allotment] (no [subject] tested all the sites)." The ratings tables do not include the number of observations used to calculate each "average" rating score. No variables were held constant across sites. Therefore, the reasons asserted for any differences between sites' ratings are strictly conjecture on the part of the researchers. Even more distressing than methodology described are the questions left unanswered. These include some as basic as: How many subjects participated in the testing? What incentives were used to motivate the subjects' participation? What were the demographics of the subjects? The most valuable piece of information in this book is the one uncharacteristically candid remark tucked away in the Foreword: "...no one should accept our reasoning without question." Subtract the two final words of this statement, and you will have a pithy summary of my review.
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