In preparing for an upcoming redesign at work (as well as Nuketown's on makeover), I've been re-reading many of my classic usability texts. This weekend focused on Jakob Nielson's Designing Web Usability, which is one of the best books focusing on what makes a site work ... and what makes it fail.
The book dissects what makes for good page and site design, including consistant primary navigation, bread crumbs, "See Also" links, and much more. Unfortunately, he doesn't delve into some subjects that i could really use, such as effective form design, the usefulness of persistant secondary navigation, and approaches to data validation.
It's a good read, but I couldn't help but wish that this 1999 edition had been updated. Six years is a long time, all the more so on the internet, where we've experienced the dot bomb and its aftermath, the explosion of broadband access, and the arrival of cool (and useful) new technologies like AJAX (which powers Google Maps. Still many of the lessons that were true in 1999 remain true now, and I still think it's worth reading. Nielson can occasionally sound like he's scribing God's word on tablets, but he backs up his proclamations with data from user testing, which makes it all tolerable.
All in all, if you're designing for the web, you need to read this book.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment