Designing Web Interfaces [ペーパーバック]

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.

This book absorbed me for the last weekend, and I have to say, it is the best book in the field of HCI I have come across since reading Tidwell's Designing Interfaces: Patterns for Effective Interaction Design. Of course, I like everything that happens to quote Cooper's About Face 3: The Essentials of Interaction Design and Raskin's The Humane Interface: New Directions for Designing Interactive Systems (ACM Press) - but this one gave me lots of new, practical ideas for the web, and a consistent terminology I can use to think and talk about Rich Internet Applications.

Nicely organized and layouted, well-written, and, in my opinion, thought-through easy-to-grasp structure. I was studying many patterns in the Yahoo! pattern library online and I am glad that Bill Scott finally published a book with the same clarity and logic that I came to like online.

Will become a standard in the company I work for and I am sure our clients will already start to "fear" discussions around the six principles when arguing with our consultants for what should be done and how :-)

Great book.

Scott is a/the genius behind Netflix and Yahoo!'s interfaces, so I got this book to figure out how to make my web interface programming work more professional.

However, much of what I've read here goes against the spirit of the design I was taught to do in grad school. For example, Netflix/Yahoo! make complex designs that are highly functional for expert users, and at-least reasonably usable for intermediate users. These designs feature transitions which use fades, transparent controls which only become visible when a user hovers, and dueling interfaces which allow power-users to move at a different speed than weaker users, etc.

By comparison, my grad program emphasizes designing for readability, learnability and with a singular notion of organizational principles structuring content in such a way that it is accessible to humans, search engines, and user agents (speech synthesis for visually impaired users). In Designing Web Interfaces, this perspective is consistently swept aside in the quest to build "rich interactions" at the expense of these peripheral users.

The result for me of this encounter with "Designing Web Interfaces" has been a renewed appreciation of how hard it is to make interface design choices. So often design is a question of framing, which establishes who the audience is, what the goals are, and what standards to use for a product.

I think at best, this book offers insight into future trends of professional design -- what Scott calls "rich interactions". However, I have a feeling that I'll always be more on the novice/disabled/user-agent user's side, leaning towards standard-based and user-centered designs, no matter what these captains of industry are cooking up.