As far as usability books go, there are few that come more recommended than Don’t Make Me Think! Steve Krug’s expanded and revised second edition, published two years ago, is a surprisingly short introduction to usability, but that’s really the point. It defines a few key principles and lessons from which you can begin to learn about usability or refresh your knowledge of it.
Krug starts by laying out why you’d want to read Don’t Make Me Think! and what it will and won’t contain. It’s a smart introduction to a book which is not just aimed at designers, but manager and executives as well. He then proceeds to outline the book’s central principle: “Don’t make me think!” It’s a remarkably simple rule, but you’d be amazed how many websites and interfaces forget to spell out the obvious.
Don’t Make Me Think! goes on to explain how people really use the Web; not by reading everything and making logical decisions, but by scanning and muddling through. Krug focuses on a great little fact; we don’t make optimal choices; we satisfice (a neat portmanteau of satisfying and sufficing). People choose the first reasonable option, not the best one.
The book moves on to visual hierarchies, choice, writing for the Web and an extensive section on graphical cues and conventions. Krug touches on a few business issues too, including homepage design and how to safely navigate making design decisions in a team. He introduces more formal usability testing, then moves on to accessibility and a brief introduction to cascading style sheets.
What makes Don’t Make Me Think! so easy to recommend is not just the balanced choice of topics, but also Krug’s writing style. He explains issues and suggests guidelines in plain English that everyone can understand. The book is also in full colour with plenty of illustrations, so you know exactly what he’s talking about.
Looking at the cover, you’d be forgiven for thinking that it’s a one principle book that revolves around a few anecdotes and a handful of buzzwords, but it’s the complete opposite. Don’t Make Me Think! is an essential read for anyone remotely interested in the subjectand a great title to having lying around as reference. If I could only have one book on usability, this would be it.
Published in Book reviews, Usability on 9th August 2008. No comments.
Designing forms for the web is a tricky business. Left-aligned labels or right-aligned labels? What about putting them above or using none at all? Tool tips or more substantial help text? Thankfully, Yahoo design chief Luke Wroblewski is here to help.
Web Form Design: Filling in the Blanks is sadly not available in the UK, so if you really want to buy it, you’ll have to either download the digital copy or have it shipped from America (although it comes with the PDF version if you order a hard copy). I think it’s a shame because it would probably do well enough to justify its presence over here, but I guess that’s the cost of going with a smaller publisher.
Wroblewski begins by outlining the problem: “Forms suck. We should design accordingly.” He introduces the basic benefits of good form design and then moves on to cover every aspect of web form design in the clearly delineated chapters that follow.
Although there’s a lot to take in, Wroblewski writes very clearly and the full colour book is full of illustrations. Best of all, each chapter ends with a short list of best practices, so you don’t have to read through an entire section again when you use it as reference. Web Form Design also includes a number of contributions by other authors, labelled as ‘Perspectives’ in the book. These are well placed and offer additional context to the main text.
With the higher price due to shipping, my expectations were somewhat higher than usual for Web Form Design, but it’s more than justified the price I paid for it. It’s a very specialist book, but one that will probably stand the test of time better than a lot of other technical books. For anyone who designs web forms on a reasonably frequent basis, this is an essential read.
Published in Book reviews, Usability, Websites, tagged forms on 2nd August 2008. No comments.
There are plenty of books on typography, but few come as highly recommended as Thinking with Type: A Critical Guide for Designers, Writers, Editors, & Students. I have a growing interest in the subject, so I thought that that this would give me an grounding in typography and tie all of the bits of information that I’d picked up from elsewhere together.
The page you see when you first open the book is a perfect example of the clarity with which Lupton presents the subject. I simply reads, “Typography is what language looks like.” Crisp, concise and succinct.
Thinking with Type is divided into three sections: Letter, Text and Grid. The first introduces the context in which the rest of the book can be explained, looking at the history of typefaces and their evolution since the presses of the Middle Ages. It explores different letterforms and their anatomy, so you’ll never wonder what people mean by a ‘humanist sans serif’ ever again.
Continue reading →
Published in Book reviews, tagged typography on 14th June 2008. No comments.
Although CSS is not a complex language to learn, the amount of best practice advice out there is overwhelming. It seems like there are essentially two tiers of CSS knowledge; the first will give you to a reasonable understanding so you can make a basic website, while the second will help you progress to a professional level. There are plenty of books that cover the first tier, but not too many that do the second. This is where CSS Mastery: Advanced Web Standards Solutions comes in.
Andy Budd’s book is aimed primarily at those web designers and developers who already have a good understanding of (X)HTML and CSS. It starts with the basics, then quickly moves on to the advanced techniques that you bought it for. The first chapter goes over code structuring, meaningful markup and using appropriate selectors to get the job done, while the second is a recap of the box and positioning models.
CSS Mastery then covers in detail background images and image replacement, styling links, lists and navigation, forms and tables, layout, hacks and filters, and bugs. Budd then includes two walkthroughs of entire designs, the code for which can be downloaded as it can be for the rest of the book.
Technical books can be dull and suffer from a lack of clarity, but CSS Mastery is written in a style which is easy to digest and understand. Multiple alternatives are given to problems like drop shadows and rounded corners, giving you a great overview of which one is most suitable to you.
Although I consider myself to be a pretty advanced CSS user, I definitely learnt a lot from reading CSS Mastery. Sure, there are plenty of tutorials on the Web, but few are as well written and edited as this.
Links:
Book website
The book on Amazon UK
The book on Amazon USA
Published in Book reviews, Websites, tagged CSS on 7th May 2008. One comment.
Co-founder of the Web Standards Project, Jeffrey Zeldman is one of the best known Web development personalities. His landmark book Designing With Web Standards, released in 2003, was updated almost two years ago. I picked up a copy the other day after reading many recommendations, so is it still relevant five years down the line?
Designing With Web Standards, Second Edition is a much larger and more comprehensive book than I anticipated it being, serving as an introduction to a range of topics. It begins by making the case for web standards, showing what’s wrong with (then) current websites and what can be done. It examines why they’re not perfect, but why they’re also the way forward. Zeldman then goes on to explain how websites can be made to comply with web standards.
It’s a book which caters for a wide range of users, from those who have just used the likes of Microsoft Frontpage to seasoned programmers. Zeldman writes in a style that everyone from site owners who are commissioning projects to those implementing them will understand.
Designing With Web Standards‘ main flaw is that it was obviously written for a particular period in Web development and because of this, its age shows. There are plenty of references to browsers like Netscape 4, which no-one uses any more and probably didn’t when this second edition was published.
Zeldman’s book was always going to make itself obsolete if Web standards became widely accepted, and so his appeals to redesign websites are a little futile for anyone picking it up today. This irony merely demonstrates the scale of the Web Standards Project’s achievement though and reinforces its values. Although it may not be need to convince current site owners, for those who are just starting in Web design, this is a superb primer for the technologies, issues and decisions that lie ahead. It may seem a little out of date, but it provides the context in which to appreciate why we use the practices we do today.
Although I began making websites in 2000, I’ve come from using nasty table-based layouts to writing standards-compliant code without really being pushed by anyone to do so. As I’ve grown up and learnt more about programming, I’ve gone from using code generators to writing it all myself. The transition to technologies like CSS hasn’t really come from an awareness of Web standards, but a desire to make things easier for myself. So although I was oblivious to Zeldman’s campaign at the time, Designing With Web Standards is still and interesting read and one that shows just how far the Web has come in a mere five years.
Published in Book reviews, Websites, tagged Web standards on 22nd April 2008. No comments.
As books go, The art of looking sideways is a pretty big one. At 1066 pages, Alan Fletcher’s “primer in visual intelligence” is not something you can take with you to work or quickly use as a reference. It is, however, an interesting compilation of ideas which is well worth a look at.
Arranged in 72 chapters, The art of looking sideways is more a collection of anecdotes, quotations, odd facts and random material than a guide to design. There are no rules or guidelines, but instead numerous snippets of knowledge. In a way, it is about everything and nothing, a compendium of thoughts gathered through years of experience.
You can use it in a few ways. First of all, you could read it in a linear fashion, soaking up information chapter by chapter. You could also open a few pages a day at random and be inspired. Because of its massive size, you get the impression that every time you read it, you’ll find something new and that you’ll never exhaust it. Either way, you could use it for design ideas, since there is no visual consistency and every page has its own individual style.
The art of looking sideways is one of those coffee table books which might come across as overpriced and pretentious, but given a chance, it delivers on its promise to entertain and inspire.
Published in Book reviews, Design, tagged inspiration on 25th March 2008. No comments.
I have a new resolution; to buy a design book every month. Sure, there are plenty of tutorials on the Web, but I find that books give you something extra in their tactile form.
Anyway, my first purchase is Layout, the second title in Ambrose and Harris’ Basics Design series. The 175 page book uses work by major studios to illustrate the rules of layout, primarily of print design. Some of the concepts cross over to the Web, but this is essentially a book for those interested in print publishing.
Layout goes through each topic, clearly explaining principles and backing them up with well chosen examples. You don’t have to have any prior knowledge to make the most of it, just a curiosity for how to get the most out of your pages.
I’m not sure if I would buy the entire series, but as a standalone book, Layout is a fine addition to any print designer’s library. It’s clear, concise and is a great book to have at hand when designing.
Published in Book reviews, Design on 23rd March 2008. No comments.
“It’s possible for a person to have an overwhelming number of things to do and still function productively with a clear head and a positive sense of relaxed control.”
The core premise of David Allen’s book Getting Things Done is ambitious to say the least. Yet believe it or not, it is entirely possible and I’ve experienced the benefits of following a few of his basic rules since reading it for the first time. I’m normally very sceptical of any book which you might classify as ’self-help’, but Getting Things Done is actually well worth a read. I now have a system which I’ve been using for a few months, but I thought it would be worthwhile revisiting the book to see if I’d pick up any other nuggets of useful information.
As I read the first part of the book, it seemed that I had made use of most of his advice in some form or another. I use my calendar and task management programs to organise all the stuff I need to do, leaving my mind fairly clear at any one point. Here’s on excerpt that I particularly enjoyed:
…you’ll need to get in the habit of keeping nothing in your mind. And the way to do that, as we’ve seen, is not by managing time, managing information and managing priorities. After all:
- you don’t manage five minutes and end up with six;
- you don’t manage information overload - otherwise you’d walk into a library and die, or the first time you connected to the Web, or even opened a phone book, you’d bow up; and
- you don’t manage priorities - you have them.
Instead, the key to managing all of your ’stuff’ is managing your actions.
A lot of the book goes into the fine detail of implementing this sort of system, but you don’t have to read it all. In fact, the first part alone is all you really need to take in. I found that once I had the basic principles and methodology, I could work out how it fit together with my life. The most surprising thing that you don’t realise until you read the book is actually how easy all of his guidelines are to implement. You don’t need any new skills, just a logical way of using them.
I meet quite a few people who are a lot more stressed out than they need to be, mainly because they have trouble keeping track of their lives. Others have sporadically implemented systems which don’t cover all of their bases, so they end up worrying a lot anyway. If you fall into either of those categories and are curious about improving things, then I’d highly recommend picking up Getting Things Done. It might take a while to get used to, but as I’ve found over the last few months, the benefits are huge. Ever wondered how I manage do do Thunderbolt, Impact, university work and all the other stuff I commit to? Well this book is my secret.
Published in Book reviews, Productivity, tagged Getting Things Done on 25th February 2008. No comments.