Fat Agnus

For a couple of years I worked for a software company that sold e-commerce solutions, so many of the things that are presented in this book by Jakob Nielsen is something that I learned through that job. Despite many of the things that I learned, I discovered that there were new things to learn about creating e-commerce solutions. So if you have been designing solutions like this, then you probably are better of buying another book, because the price is a little bit too high and it wont outweigh the few new things you might learn.

Some of the areas covered in this book are:

• Selling strategies
• Category pages
• Product Pages
• Search
• Checkout / Registration
• International users

If you have read “Don’t Make Me Think” by Steve Krug and thought to yourself that the book needed to go into more details about different functionalities, then you will really like this book. Just like some of the other books by Jakob Nielsen (Designing Web Usability and Homepage Usability: 50 Websites Deconstructed), you will see that he really digs into the websites that he analysis, therefore he can give you an good understanding of how users think and acts.

Jakob Nielsen gives a great example of this with a pie chart which shows that 27% have trouble finding the product(s) they want (which probably doesn’t surprise many), but 22% are unable or unwilling to complete and order when it comes to the Checkout/Registration process, which is the second largest issue.

Even though this book was published in 2001, many of the things he presents are still useable today, so if you are new to e-commerce then I would strongly recommend this book to you, if not, then you could probably find the missing parts online.

More about the book