Designing the Obvious: A Common Sense Approach to Web Application Design Review

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(More customer reviews)From 9 to 5 (well, a "little" after 5 most days), I am an Application Development Manager in my company. In my years doing this, I have read a lot of books on the topic of Web and User Experience Design. So far, only a handful stand out above "Designing the Obvious" by Robert Hoekman Jr. and even some of those, he takes his hat off to (such as the case of "Don't Make Me Think", for instance).
Hoekman proposes the "unthinkable" for those entrenched into rusty web design practices, but when you step back and reconsider the experiences you've had, his framework makes perfect sense. Here are a couple of thoughts he brings to the table, to give you an idea:
-Design an application that does one thing, and does it very well. For every additional feature, there is more to learn, more to tweak and configure, more to customize, more to read about in the help document, and more that can go wrong.
-People (users) don't always make the right choices. They make comfortable choices... they make choices they know how to make. To deal with this, he supports Goal-Directed (also called Activity-Centered) Design, as opposed to Human-Centered Design.
Web Design anathema? Violation of User Interface "basics"? Maybe it sounds so at first, but if you read through his arguments, you will find them very compelling and may end up (like myself) reconsidering some of your initial assumptions.
One of the reasons why his proposal resonated so much with me is because throughout the book, Hoekman introduces concepts that are not familiar in the Web space, borrowing them from long-established best practices in manufacturing (where I worked the first four years of my professional life), such as:
-Kaizen: improving things constantly, in little tiny ways that add up to gigantic results.
-Poka-Yoke: software "devices" meant to prevent user errors from occurring.
-Pareto (80/20 rule): Good, clean Web application design means that 80 percent of an application's usefulness comes from 20 percent of its features.
For longtime professionals and newcomers into the field of User Experience Design, Hoekman's book has turned into an absolute must read.

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Designing the Obvious belongs in thetoolbox of every person charged with the design and development ofWeb-based software, from the CEO to the programming team. Designing theObvious explores the character traits of great Web applications anduses them as guiding principles of application design so the end resultof every project instills customer satisfaction and loyalty. Theseprinciples include building only whats necessary, getting users up tospeed quickly, preventing and handling errors, and designing for theactivity. Designing the Obvious does not offer aone-size-fits-all development process--in fact, it lets you usewhatever process you like. Instead, it offers practical advice abouthow to achieve the qualities of great Web-based applications andconsistently and successfully reproduce them.

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Site-Seeing: A Visual Approach to Web Usability Review

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(More customer reviews)This book lays a good foundation for web design by emphasizing planning, meeting clients' goals, and understanding the target audience. Wroblewski emphasizes usability when describing the core of the site- structure, navigation, content- and how it will affect the experience of the audience. He uses numerous examples to illustrate layout, visual heirarchy, color schemes, and how they work together (or don't!) to communicate quickly and effectively to the site visitor.
I got frustrated about the amount of fluff surrounding actual information. He makes plenty of good points and then buries them beneath a barrage of condescending, long-winded metaphors, like the way we can read a map and know that blue represents water. The analogy itself could be helpful, but three paragraphs to explain the analogy is just distracting.
I'm glad I read it... it opened my eyes to many challenges that web designers face, and inspired me to infuse life and personality into my own site. I'm also glad I highlighted the meaningful parts so I (or friends who borrow it) can skip past the fluff in the future.

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Although Web usability has received lots of hype, especially during the dot-com meltdown, the focus has been mostly on technical issues. Usability experts stress the pitfalls of frames and too many images on Web pages. They recommend editing out unnecessary words and writing in a non-linear style-all valuable advice, of course. But less frequently do they highlight the importance of the visual presentation of Web pages.The Web is a communication medium that does most of its talking visually. What you see on a Web page tells you what you might find within the site, how to get there, and why it might interest you-not to mention the instinctive emotional response that shapes your Web experience. As a result, Web usability issues are communication issues. Easy-to-use sites are those that communicate quickly and effectively.Site-Seeing takes a fresh approach to Web usability by applying visual communication principles and decision-making to Web design. Specifically, readers will learn the key concepts behind visual organization, look and feel, technical considerations, and clear planning that stem from audience awareness. Through numerous, full-color examples author Luke Wroblewski deconstructs "the good, the bad, and the ugly" of Web design.The visual presentation of a site does more than merely making it pretty. It organizes information according to function. It creates distinct and appropriate personalities. It provides emotional impact and attachment. In short, it engages the audience-and keeps them coming back.

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Effective UI: The Art of Building Great User Experience in Software Review

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(More customer reviews)This invaluable review of the Processes & Business Benefits of User Interface/User Experience Design, provides so much unique and hard won insight into the process of developing superior user interfaces, the goals of users and the business, and in quantifying the benefits of UX design that I can only award it an outstanding Five Star review. One observation, that full engagement with the true goals of users is the end purpose of UI Design, is in itself worth the cost of this excellent book. But in spite of my viewing this book as revolutionary and offering outstanding and unique insights into what User Experience is, how to achieve it and what its benefits are, I do have one major criticism of this otherwise excellent book, its narrative approach and careful explication of its arguments on what the team at "Effective UI" lead to step by step discovery of these insights; there doesn't appear to be a top-down structure allowing for easy browsing of the book; it must be studied at length. Also, an experienced student of Interaction Design and User Experience cannot easily find what the new insights of this book are at a single glance, or find its prescription for a particular step of the design process.
This is an excellent and insightful book on UI Design and User Experience based on the consulting experience of a leading firm in this industry. But the book narrating their experience must be studied, it is difficult to browse.
--Ira Laefsky
MSE, MBA IT & HCI Researcher

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People expect effortless, engaging interaction with desktop and web applications, but producing software that generates enjoyable user experiences is much harder than many companies anticipate. With Effective UI, you'll learn proven user-experience strategies that will satisfy your clients and customers, drive business value, and increase brand strength.

This book shows you how to capture the collaborative and cooperative spirit among designers, engineers, and management required for building engaging software. You'll also learn valuable methods for maintaining focus throughout the process -- whether you're a product manager who needs a clear roadmap, a developer or designer looking for guidance and advocacy, or a businessperson who wants to understand and manage user-experience software initiatives.

Learn how to build software that will:

Generate engaging and interactive experiences between consumers and businesses, or between businesspeople and their information systems
Account for how people work with, think about, and consume information
Establish a richer means of collaboration and communication
Reduce frustration by streamlining complex tasks and creating processes that are more intuitive
Distinguish products, services, and brands to create a competitive advantage
Create scalable systems that adapt to changing user needs and behaviors

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Undercover User Experience Design (Voices That Matter) Review

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(More customer reviews)In the past few years, I have read many UX books, and most of them were either extremely boring or very badly written, so I approached this one with a lot of cynicism. Luckily, it is neither boring nor badly written: it actually has a very good pace, talks about most aspects of User Experience just in the right length, and maintains a tone throughout that relaxes you and makes you feel that you're actually doing something that you enjoy.
The authors maintain the position that some UX work in design is better than none, and show ways how research, design and production can be influenced by User Experience work (performed by you, the reader) without big budgets or a sense of perfectionism.
Having worked in various companies large and small for UX teams both successfully and unsuccessfully, I found that the relaxed approach by the authors resonated with me. It's a bit like books by Steve Krug, but less descriptive in what needs to be done. "Undercover User Experience Design" rather gives you a range of possibilities to tackle problems along the way, and it's up to the user which one to pick. The book quite masterfully describes the techniques with just the right amount of detail: if you're okay with a bit of uncertainty, you can probably do the exercises straight away, but if you're a bit anxious because you've never done it before, the book gives you plenty of leads to follow up on.
I rarely recommend a book for both beginners in UX and seasoned professionals, but I felt that it spoke very well to both parties: beginners get a 5-star introduction into what can be done, a bit of how-to as well, while professionals can use it as a quick-reference guide in case they hit a snag somewhere in their projects.
Oh, and it's under 200 pages, which makes it much more likely for you to actually read ;-)

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Once you catch the user experience bug, the world changes. Doors open the wrong way, websites don't work, and companies don't seem to care. And while anyone can learn the UX remedies usability testing, personas, prototyping and so on unless your organization 'gets it', putting them into practice is trickier. Undercover User Experience is a pragmatic guide from the front lines, giving frank advice on making UX work in real companies with real problems. Readers will learn how to fit research, ideation, prototyping and testing into their daily workflow, and how to design good user experiences under the all-too-common constraints of time, budget and culture.

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A Project Guide to UX Design: For user experience designers in the field or in the making Review

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(More customer reviews)A Project Guide to UX Design is a book that defines the micro and macroscopic views of user experience design and its role in the project life cycle. Russ and Carolyn do a great job of reiterating what the core of user experience design is as well as identifying the different roles that utilize it. The book covers a lot of ground and takes a transcendental approach of showing the underlying purpose for each role in order to promote a synthetic comprehension of user experience design as opposed to shallow memorization.
The main target audience of the book are Information Architects, Interaction Designers, User Researchers, and other project stakeholders (Business Analysts, Content Strategists, Copywriters, Visual Designers, and Front-end Developers).
To make the contents more inviting, I've created an enclosing outline to provide abstract classifications for several groups of chapters. Each number represents the number of pages in each chapter:
+ Introduction
- Chapter 1: The Tao of UXD (8)
- Chapter 2: The Project Ecosystem (29)
+ Business Perspective
- Chapter 3: Proposals for Consultants and Freelancers (15)
- Chapter 4: Project Objectives and Approach (10)
- Chapter 5: Business Requirements (15)
+ Research
- Chapter 6: User Research (26)
- Chapter 7: Personas (13)
- Chapter 8: User Experience Design and SEO (17)
+ Information Architecture / Interaction Design
- Chapter 9: Transition from Defining to Designing (18)
- Chapter 10: Site Maps and Task Flows (17)
- Chapter 11: Wireframes and Annotations (17)
- Chapter 12: Prototyping (15)
- Chapter 13: Design testing with Users (25)
- Chapter 14: Transition: From Design to Development and Beyond (10)
The book also contains frequent references to books, online resources, and user experience groups and authors throughout as opposed to an Appendix or a 'For further reading' section nested in the back. This helps to drive home the thoughts as you read them, rather than 'when you are finished'.
As an aspiring user experience professional, I do believe that this book is worth owning, reading, and referencing as a compass to create effective user experience in any project setting.

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"If you are a young designer entering or contemplating entering the UX field this is a canonical book. If you are an organization that really needs to start grokking UX this book is also for you. " -- Chris Bernard, User Experience Evangelist, MicrosoftUser experience design is the discipline of creating a useful and usable Web site or application—one that's easily navigated and meets the needs of both the site owner and its users. But there's a lot more to successful UX design than knowing the latest Web technologies or design trends: It takes diplomacy, project management skills, and business savvy. That's where this book comes in. Authors Russ Unger and Carolyn Chandler show you how to integrate UX principles into your project from start to finish.• Understand the various roles in UX design, identify stakeholders, and enlist their support• Obtain consensus from your team on project objectives• Define the scope of your project and avoid mission creep• Conduct user research and document your findings• Understand and communicate user behavior with personas• Design and prototype your application or site• Make your product findable with search engine optimization• Plan for development, product rollout, and ongoing quality assurance

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Designing Web Interfaces: Principles and Patterns for Rich Interactions Review

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(More customer reviews)If you are brand spanking new to web design, and have never coded a single site, you may want to hold off on this book for a minute. I'm not saying it is not for beginners, because it is. Those new to HTML and CSS may want to get the hang of that before jumping into incorporating Ajax and JavaScript along with advanced CSS techniques.
Who is it for? I would recommend this book for art directors, project managers, web designers (all levels), interactive designers, DVD menu designers (though not directly related, you can still take away some important aspects or "patterns"), and especially those that design online training modules (we all know how dull they can be.) Like the DVD menu designers I mentioned above, I think Flash designers can benefit greatly, as well. Though the book is not directly geared toward Flash design, the patterns and "anti-patterns" talked about can easily be used when designing for a Flash experience.
The layout of the book is broken up into the 6 "principles" described in the product description of this book. The sections "Make It Direct" and "Stay on the Page" are by far the two largest sections, for they are the most important of the 6. "Keep it Lightweight" is the shortest section/principle, but by no means is rushed or glossed over. It poses some great design ideas to keep it intuitive, discoverable and keep you from designing 'mouse traps.'
In order to get the most out of this book, you would have to have designed a web site before reading this book. If you are a project manager or art director in charge of a team designing a web site (but not a web designer yourself), it would benefit you greatly to have a general understanding of web design, HTML, what Ajax is, CSS, cross-browser compatibilities, and Javascript. If you are just managing a team, you do NOT have to know how to code these languages/techniques, but in order to really benefit form this book, it would be better if you generally know what each does.
This book could also help bridge the gap for some managers by equipping them with the correct terminology of web design. Just speaking the language of user interface design can help speed up the time it takes to turn your directions into an interface that works the way you intended.
The book is detailed and to the point of the benefits of discoverability and weighing your options in the case of just how intuitive you need to make the interface. This book does not read like a my-way-or-the-highway kind of book. Scott mentions the potential pitfalls, disadvantages and possible alternate scenarios that depend on your interactive goals as set by the audience visiting your site.
A good number of the examples are from Yahoo! and Netflix sites (because Scott used to work for Yahoo! and now works for Netflix), but I never once felt like it was an advertisement for either one. He manages to spread the love around and uses examples from the Gap, iPhone, blogs, Google, Amazon, and others.
In short, the book is an easy read, something that one could go through in a long weekend. There are screenshots and visual examples on virtually every page, so in no way are we left to imagine the event happening. Multiple screenshots are taken when the event happens over the period of several steps. There is even a couple free companion web sites that will show the screenshots in a larger format than the book would allow. While reading the book, you will undoubtedly have many 'ah ha!' moments, or times when you rush to check your previously-designed web sites to see if you need to make a correction to your interface (admit it, we all do.)
I highly recommend this book for anyone that designs interfaces, even if they are for mp3 players, touch screens for electronics, or those interactive lobby displays. We all need some help in the area of user interface design.
***NOTE: there is NO code in this book. This the theory of designing user interfaces for the web, NOT the code.

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Want to learn how to create great user experiences on today's Web? In this book, UI experts Bill Scott and Theresa Neil present more than 75 design patterns for building web interfaces that provide rich interaction. Distilled from the authors' years of experience at Sabre, Yahoo!, and Netflix, these best practices are grouped into six key principles to help you take advantage of the web technologies available today. With an entire section devoted to each design principle, Designing Web Interfaces helps you:

Make It Direct-Edit content in context with design patterns for In Page Editing, Drag & Drop, and Direct Selection
Keep It Lightweight-Reduce the effort required to interact with a site by using In Context Tools to leave a "light footprint"
Stay on the Page-Keep visitors on a page with overlays, inlays, dynamic content, and in-page flow patterns
Provide an Invitation-Help visitors discover site features with invitations that cue them to the next level of interaction
Use Transitions-Learn when, why, and how to use animations, cinematic effects, and other transitions
React Immediately-Provide a rich experience by using lively responses such as Live Search, Live Suggest, Live Previews, and more

Designing Web Interfaces illustrates many patterns with examples from working websites. If you need to build or renovate a website to be truly interactive, this book gives you the principles for success.

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Designing Web Navigation: Optimizing the User Experience Review

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(More customer reviews)§
The title of this book does tend to focus things, doesn't it? A book totally dedicated to working out navigation challenges in Web products means that it is destined to be a one-stop keeper on your shelf. If you work in any capacity on Web front-ends, navigation is often the issue of issues, the source of stimulating and heated team discussions. This book won't end those discussions but the information in it will certainly add calm perspective to them.
_Designing Web Navigation_ seems to have it all in one place, including practice discussion at the end of each chapter and further reading recommendations. The amount of information is impressive. There is not a page without a visual aid of some sort. I certainly like having lots of screenshots of real sites with the commentary of the author.
I also like the practical knowledge of the author which informs his writing -- he emphasizes the variability of the rules in the complex contexts we Web workers tend to work in. Note, for instance, how differently he approaches Amazon's tabbed navigation from how usability guru Jakob Nielsen writes of them. Nielsen never passes up an opportunity to exclaim what is wrong wrong wrong about Amazon's tabs. Kalbach, instead, explains the motivation behind each passing stage in the evolution of those same tabs, giving the dynamic context. This rings true for those of us with daily working knowledge in constructing user interfaces.
I was a bit disappointed that the book did not have more on the specific problems of designing Web *applications* instead of conventional Web sites. However, the book is written is such a way that this is not a problem. The advice and arguments on p.236 "Don't start by designing the navigation on the home page" encapsulates quite well something I have learned working on agile development teams over the years.
I had a few problems with the readability of this book. Page numbers look like squished gnats and all paragraph sub-headings were a pretty but painful light blue. The extremely large line-height weakened the separation of paragraphs.
As I mentioned, this book is chock full of the right material that belongs on your shelf for when you need it...and you will.
§

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Thoroughly rewritten for today's web environment, this bestselling book offers a fresh look at a fundamental topic of web site development: navigation design. Amid all the changes to the Web in the past decade, and all the hype about Web 2.0 and various "rich" interactive technologies, the basic problems of creating a good web navigation system remain. Designing Web Navigation demonstrates that good navigation is not about technology-it's about the ways people find information, and how you guide them. Ideal for beginning to intermediate web designers, managers, other non-designers, and web development pros looking for another perspective, Designing Web Navigation offers basic design principles, development techniques and practical advice, with real-world examples and essential concepts seamlessly folded in. How does your web site serve your business objectives? How does it meet a user's needs? You'll learn that navigation design touches most other aspects of web site development. This book:

Provides the foundations of web navigation and offers a framework for navigation design
Paints a broad picture of web navigation and basic human information behavior
Demonstrates how navigation reflects brand and affects site credibility
Helps you understand the problem you're trying to solve before you set out to design
Thoroughly reviews the mechanisms and different types of navigation
Explores "information scent" and "information shape"
Explains "persuasive" architecture and other design concepts
Covers special contexts, such as navigation design for web applications
Includes an entire chapter on tagging
While Designing Web Navigation focuses on creating navigation systems for large, information-rich sites serving a business purpose, the principles and techniques in the book also apply to small sites. Well researched and cited, this book serves as an excellent reference on the topic, as well as a superb teaching guide. Each chapter ends with suggested reading and a set of questions that offer exercises for experiencing the concepts in action.

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Web Application Design Patterns (Interactive Technologies) Review

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(More customer reviews)User experience experts, information architects, and the like will want
to have a copy of "Web Application Design Patterns" as an important
addition to their knowledge base. Web developers and companies feeling
they can "handle it themselves in-house" will find this book an
absolutely critical must-have. It is obvious that years of experience
and research have gone into the production of this valuable reference.
Written at a college / professional level, Vora's style remains,
however, as user-friendly as his design solutions. Presented in a
straightforward PROBLEM --> SOLUTION --> WHY --> HOW format, this 429
page volume skips the editorializing and pontificating; instead, it provides
concrete examples and explanations of underlying concepts. This
book is a veritable encyclopedia of solutions to today's software
interface design issues.
Colorful screen shots grace almost every page, helping the reader
quickly understand problems and resolutions with real-world examples.
Along with the expected discussions of everyday mechanisms such as
forms, user authentication, and navigation schemes, "Web Application
Design Patterns" forges on with detailed examinations of rapidly
evolving areas such as Rich Internet Applications (RIA), social
networking sites and more.

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Ever notice that-in spite of their pervasiveness-designing web applications is still challenging? While their benefits motivate their creation, there are no well-established guidelines for design. This often results in inconsistent behaviors and appearances, even among web applications created by the same company. Design patterns for web applications, similar in concept to those for web sites and software design, offer an effective solution. In Web Application Design Patterns, Pawan Vora documents design patterns for web applications by not only identifying design solutions for user interaction problems, but also by examining the rationale for their effectiveness, and by presenting how they should be applied.. Design interfaces faster, with a better rationale for the solutions you choose.. Learn from over more than 100 patterns, with extensive annotation on use and extension.. Take a short-cut into understanding the industry with more than 500 full-color screenshots and a web site for help, discussion, and a collection of additional patterns.

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iPad in the Enterprise: Developing and Deploying Business Applications Review

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(More customer reviews)Given the inroads that the iPad is making in the Enterprise, the book is very timely and the content serves as a good commentary on many aspects related to the adoption of the iPad for Enterprise use.
-The book is organized into five parts: Strategy, Architecture, Design, Development and Deployment. This organization works very well to cover the content of this book.
-iPad in the Enterprise is written with a broad set of enterprise readers in mind - IT and non IT executives, architects as well as developers. Different parts are focused on different types of readers and as such each part is fully contained and can be read on its own.
-The enterprise focus is maintained well throughout the book, except for a couple of areas where the treatment of the content does not quite do justice to the enterprise focus.
I provide a detailed book review here on my blog on PROPELICS


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Discover how to plan, design, develop, and deploy iPad apps for the enterpriseHaving taken the enterprise by storm, iPads are now in the handsof workers in virtually every level of companies in almost every industry, andusers are beginning to demand line-of-business applications to help them bemore productive and efficient from wherever they are. From businessintelligence and executive dashboards to customer relationship management andorder capture solutions, the iPad has incredible potential to leverage existinginvestments in information systems and enterprise applications. Even manypaper-driven processes today, from sales presentations to survey data capture,can be dramatically enhanced through the introduction of the iPad.This book is a guide for how business and IT must collaborate todevelop a mobile strategy to properly take advantage of this transformativetechnology. Readers will also learn about the high-level software architecturaloptions, the importance of design and user experience, application developmenttools and techniques, and best practices for deploying and managing iPads inthe enterprise.iPad in the Enterprise gets you started immediately planning, designing, developing, deploying, and managing iPad apps specifically for the enterprise.

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