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Style This Book: An Alternate Layout for Nielsen’s Designing Web
Usability
by Chris deMaagd
In the preface of Jakob Nielsen’s Designing Web Usability (New Riders, 2000), the author states in a sidebar entitled “Book Layout” that he “can’t take credit for the page design in this book” (Nielsen, p. 5). He shouldn’t. Nielsen’s writing style is clear and without fault, and the book has all the information beginners need to understand the fundamentals of website design; however, Nielsen’s presentation of that information is a mixed bag of clarity and inconsistency. This paper will illustrate examples of both; and credit and blame can both be attributed to Nielsen’s application of website design principles to the printed text. First, let’s start with an example of good design: the redundant Table of Contents (“TOC”). Rather than presenting it just once at the beginning of the book, Nielsen gives it to readers several times, thus providing readers with several entrances of varying breadth according to their location in the book: first, through the “Contents at a Glance” (Nielsen., p. iii), with just the names and page numbers of each chapter; then the full TOC (Nielsen, pp. iv-ix); and, finally, a table of chapter contents (“chapter TOC”) at the beginning of each chapter. It’s very helpful to have an overview of each chapter right at the beginning of that chapter. When looking for a passage within the chapter that they’re reading, readers are given the option of turning back to the beginning of the chapter to find that passage (sort of — more on that later), and are thus spared the hassle of going back to the beginning of the book, leafing through the preface and introduction and TOC, and scanning the entire TOC just to find that page number. (I don’t know if there are any studies backing this up; however, any writer of collegiate term papers can cite ample anecdotal evidence of working under a deadline and losing valuable time, frantically poring over texts trying to find what they need.) In this way, DWU functions as a useful reference text, one which allows readers to spend more time reading and less time rooting through it. In placing TOCs throughout DWU, Nielsen successfully upholds the website design principle of good navigation, and makes his book better in the process. As he says in his section on “Site Structure:”
If the structure is a mess, then no navigation design can rescue it. Poor information
architecture will always lead to poor usability.
By increasing his book’s usability with the well-placed TOCs, Nielsen makes the average textbook seem clunky in comparison — and his book, therefore, more desirable. However, there are differences between the TOC at the beginning of DWU and the chapter TOCs. In the second, comprehensive TOC (Nielsen, pp. iv-ix), readers are shown the following layout for the book’s chapters (utilizing the example of Chapter 3, “Content Design”):
This differs slightly from the chapter TOC for Chapter 3: 100 Writing for the Web
The main discrepancies between the two tables are the use of italics and page numbers, both of which appear in the TOC at the beginning of the book but not the chapter TOCs. There’s no immediately apparent reason why these two features have not been applied to the chapter TOCs. Their omission is an inconsistency that detracts from the overall usability of the text: when searching for a section or sub-section of the chapter, readers would surely be helped by seeing the visual markers that were a part of the TOC at the beginning of the book. Furthermore, when reading the chapter TOC, readers are lead to believe that the nine different titles represent sub-sections of the section “Writing for the Web.” In actuality, however, some do and some don’t. The first two sub-sections, “The Value of an Editor” and “Keep Your Texts Short,” are sidebars (albeit at the bottom, rather than actually at the side, of the page) to the main body of the text. For readers of material on the Web, this kind of information presentation might not imply anything out of the ordinary; perhaps in that context, the only difference between the information inside and outside of a sidebar is the sidebar itself. However, readers of print periodicals, such as general interest magazines like Time and Newsweek, have grown accustomed to the sidebar as a means of conveying information that is related to the main article but that would not, in its absence, preclude the reader’s understanding of that article. (Examples of this would be all the little graphics of plane crashes, chemical processes, stock indices and maps of warring countries that you’ve ever seen in a print periodical.) According to this convention, presenting information anywhere other than in the body of the text literally “marginalizes” that information. It becomes merely supplemental, not truly integral to the article being read. Nielsen would have done better to organize DWU in a purely linear manner. The present organization of the different sub-sections in the section chosen as an example seems haphazard. An examination of these sub-sections should reveal a linear progression in which to organize them. For example, one progression of the sub-sections might have them flowing from the beginning of the writing process to its conclusion. Thus, a re-organized chapter TOC might look as follows: ___ Writing for the Web
(Of course, by re-organizing the flow of sub-sections like this, and having presumably done so throughout the book, I can’t say with any certainty on which page each section would fall; in reflecting this uncertainty within the given example, I have left a blank space [“___”] where page numbers should be.) This re-organization makes more sense: instead of the sub-sections and sidebars on “Writing for the Web” being scattered pell mell throughout that section, they are now laid out according to a logical sequence of the events that constitute the creation of Web content. In order to maintain a more linear text, and to convey to the reader the idea that none of the information is incidental, this re-organization (of the book and, by extension, its TOCs) should be taken a step further: the use of sidebars should be eliminated, and their content incorporated into the main body of the text. This change would eliminate the need for italics to differentiate between sidebar and sub-section, which would further change the chapter TOC so that it would look like this: ___ Writing for the Web
Furthermore, with the possible exception of prohibitive
printing costs, there’s really no reason not to continue the practice of
noting the page placement of each section and sub-section. As this TOC is currently configured, there’s no room for the page
numbers at the end of each sub-section; however, if Nielsen worked with two
columns instead of three, it would all fit. Thus, the organization of the entire chapter TOC might look like this:
If Nielsen’s text were thus altered, it would then be a better marriage of the simplicity and navigability of a website with what readers have already come to expect from a textbook. In sum, in order for the text to make readers feel like they’re reading a work of intellectual rigor, Nielsen needs to package the work more like a traditional textbook. By making the chapter TOCs complete, and integrating the sidebar information into the main body of the text, Nielsen would make the book feel more like the books readers have already come to know and trust. By gaining readers’s trust, DWU will “feel” to readers more like the authority on website design that it purports to be.
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