Usability
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Usability |
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Introduction Finding other books |
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Titles: |
Introduction |
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Web Site Usability: A Designer's Guide
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Background
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This book is a report, a snapshot of the research into web site usability that Jared
Spool and his team at User Interface Engineering are continuously doing. Their approach is refreshing, non-academic, and always comes
up with practical results. Results that often fly in the face of what you've always believed about usability; as they put it:
'You may be surprised at some of our findings. We certainly were!'
A must read for every web designer. Your sites will be better, and your users will thank you for it.
Get it!
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Homepage Usability: 50 Websites Deconstructed
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Background |
Fans of Nielsen's Alertbox column about web usability will snap up this book (just off the presses).
Far from a rehash of his columns, this book is the tale of a field trip along the home pages of 50 major sites, together with researcher
Marie Tahir. In a chapter for each, the site's home page is held up against the authors' 113 guidelines for ensuring homepage usability.
Apart from these guidelines, you'll also find 40 design recommendations to make your home page more usable. While I don't agree with every
single guideline, there's a lot to learn here, and tons of good, solid, common-sense advice. One shocking conclusion from the Statistics
section:
ALT text
Among those homepages that included graphics ALT texts would have been beneficial for visually impaired users, only 42% included ALT texts. Including ALT text for images is the oldest and easiest of the guidelines for making websites accessible to users with disabilities, so it's a disgrace that the majority of homepages don't provide them.
A disgrace indeed. There is a reason why the alt attribute is actually required for an image!
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Web Navigation: Designing the User Experience
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Background |
This book seems to sit on the fence between being a design book and a usability book; but really it
is about how to design a usable site with an emphasis on navigation. If the visitors can't navigate your site, you've lost them. The book
starts out with goals and processes for developing workable navigation schemes, treating qualities of successful navigation, designing for
users, architecture, interface and interaction design and more. The second half consists of navigation design by purpose, such as shopping
sites, identity sites or information sites. With lots of schematics and screenshots to help you learn by example. The sniffing dog on
my cover is really appropriate: it fits in beautifully with Jared Spool's idea of "scent": that quality of
links that tells you whether they are likely to lead to what you're looking for. (O'Reilly's website shows a completely different cover,
though. I hope that's an older, not a newer version.)
Lois Wakeman
commented:
Covers the same sort of ground as [Information Architecture
for the World Wide Web], but very much focused on what the user needs.
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Don't Make Me Think!: A Common Sense Approach to Web Usability
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Background |
Common sense is right - you already knew all of this, right? But then why isn't everyone
(including me) doing it? Sometimes common sense needs to be pounded home to make sense - like Krug's third law of usability:
'Get rid of half the words on each page, then get rid of half of what's left.'
The French writer Antoine de Saint-Exupéry (not commenting on websites, they didn't exist yet) put it another way:
Perfection is reached, not when there is no longer anything to add, but when there is no longer anything to take away.
I should do that - except in these book reviews, of course. But usually it's just plain easier (for you and me) to write more words;
it's only harder for your visitors. There really is a lot of common sense in this attractive book, it's not only full of commented screen
shots in full color, but it's well-organized and written with a gentle sense of humor that makes it easy to absorb it all. Once you've done
that, you'll realize you did not actually know all of it before...
Get it!
Finding other books |
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You can use these search forms to search Amazon.com's or Amazon.co.uk's catalog for books, software, and more. And
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