useit.com

This might be a bit cheeky, to evaluate the site of the world-respected Jakob Nielsen, but I thought it might be a good idea to see just how good his site is, compared to Krug’s rules. (I was going to bring the book with me today, but decided not to, so I’m mostly working from memory).

When you first approach the site, it feels a bit bland – but with a site of this nature, where the important part of it is the information it contains, blandness is very soon forgotten.

Within seconds of first approaching the site it’s obvious that the homepage is split into two diffrent sections – ‘Perminant Content’ on the left with a dirty yellow background, and ‘News’, on the right, with a light blue background. This very quickly allows for a distinction between the two seperate areas of the site, and allows for an easy decision as to where you should look, depending on what want.

As you look further down the page, within the permanent content section, it’s separated by carefully worded headings, each highlighting what content can be found within it. This is not as good as it could be, however, as many of the links listed within the sections lead to different sites, without any notification that the links would do so.

A glance to the top-right hand corner of the site reveals a search box. This is easily identiable because of two reasons – firstly, because it is in the top-right hand corner, a web convention that has existed for a while now – and secondly, because it clearly uses the word “Search”, leaving no cause for confusion.

Finally (as we’re running out of time), if you navitate to a page deeper within the site, such as this one, a breadcrumb at the top of the page clearly indicates that you’re looking at a page about the Macintosh, and the fact it’s been around for 25 years now (happy birthday), which is contained within the Alertbox section of the site.

So that’s a few good things, but I have some gripes about the site too – such as the fact there is no global navigation, meaning if you’re on one page, and want to find another, you’re forced to return to the homepage. It’s also quite hard to find archived content – content which is no doubt not archived, like this – but so far as I can see, the only way it’s accessable is via the search box – which isn’t very good for people that don’t know what they want – until they see it.

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