useit.com Homepage Usability Book Study guide

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Study Guide for the Book
Homepage Usability: 50 Websites Deconstructed

The page numbers in the following refer to the English edition of the book. If you have a translated edition, the guidelines and statistics recommendations may be located on different pages.

Exercise 1. Evaluate a redesigned homepage

> Picture of new BBC homepage and instructions
> Solution to Exercise 1 (please do not peek - don't follow this link until after you have scored the new BBC page)

Even though the BBC changed their design, the original homepage analysis in the book is still of interest. Many of the other websites represented in the book are probably going to take advantage of getting free consulting and will probably revise their homepages as well. That is OK, because the goal of the homepage analyses was not to provide recommendations to 50 design teams. When we write design recommendations, we do so in a different style. The goal of the book is to learn about homepage design by taking a detailed look at a set of case studies. So it's just an additional benefit when readers get the opportunity to compare the before and after versions of the pages, and thus see which of the usability problems have been fixed.

Exercise 2. Use guidelines to evaluate other homepages

1. Choose a homepage (other than your own) to use for this exercise. You might want to try evaluating a competitor's homepage, a site with similar business goals, or a homepage from a popular website that interests you.
2. Take a screenshot of the homepage, to ensure that you evaluate the same design for all of the guidelines. Capturing the page is necessary, because many sites update their content frequently.
3. Evaluate whether or not the homepage follows the homepage guidelines (pages 10 to 35 in the English edition). For each guideline, give the site one point if it follows the guideline, or half a point if it only partially follows the guideline.
4. Add up all of the points.
5. Divide the total points by 113 (the total number of guidelines). This will give you the percentage of the guidelines that the homepage follows.

• Although you should use your screenshot of the homepage for the exercise, you'll probably need to have the live site available, in order to check some links or functionality.
• Limit your scoring to the homepage, even if you need to go to other pages in the design in order to evaluate it. For example, a site might have a section with information about the company, but not have any link to it on the homepage, and so shouldn't get any points for that guideline.
• It may be that some of the guidelines don't apply to the homepage you are evaluating. For example, the guidelines for presenting stock quotes would not apply to a page without stock quotes (for example, a homepage for a government agency). If you are certain that a certain guideline doesn't apply, then you should not add a score for that guideline. In such cases, you would use a smaller number than 113 as the divisor in step 5: you would divide by the number of guidelines scored, not counting those that do not apply.
• Reading groups can do this exercise in a variety of ways. Groups can evaluate the sites together, but we recommend that each member do the exercise independently, and then get together to compare and discuss the scores and rationale as a group activity.

Exercise 3. Evaluate your own homepage's guidelines compliance

Exercise 4. Evaluate how close you are to the "recommended homepage design"

1. For each recommendation in the table that your site follows, give yourself points equal to the number of stars in the "Strength of Recommendation" column. For example, if you have your logo in the upper left corner, you get three points.
2. Add up all of the points.
3. Divide the total points by 85 (highest possible score). This will give you an estimate of how close your homepage is to the ideal design, in terms of what percentage of the recommendations you follow.