Customer Reviews

Web Application Design Patterns (Interactive Technologies)

5 star:		(4)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

This book is well organized. It contains useful information from a user advocate and graphic artist perspective (much of it is just common sense). It is not at all what I expected. I am disappointed; I was misled by the title.

As an application developer - when I think of design patterns, I think of relationships and interactions between classes and objects in the code (i.e. Factory Pattern, Decorator Pattern, Observer Pattern, etc). The 'Security' and 'User Authentication' topics in this book are all about how it looks on the page. This book is about UI design. The title does not fit with the content - in my opinion.

If a web application were a car - this book would be all about paint jobs. There is nothing 'under the hood'. It has nice pictures but has little to offer in terms of content for a serious application developer.

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.

From the Yahoo Home page (www.yahoo.com) I can see the weather for my area and the five day forecast, I can check email, send messages to friends, check the stock market, shop, and a whole lot more. Google maps allow me to search addresses and display maps that I can "zoom in" on to view details. It's all possible because of web applications. I have noticed, however, that some web applications are better designed than others. If Web 2.0 has any importance to you, you will appreciate the need for guidelines to create a satisfying user experience. Unfortunately, there are no guidelines to design web applications--until now.

Web Application Design Patterns by Pawan Vora provides practical user interface design guidance for developing web applications by offering a "working" starting point that designers can adapt and refine to develop creative solutions. He condenses best practice methods, along with research and solid experience to create a useful reference about designing web applications.

Web Application Design Patterns covers design patterns as they are used in forms, user authentication, main page, navigation, searching and filtering, and lists. The rest of the book covers Rich Internet Applications, social applications, internationalization, accessibility, visual design, and how to create pattern libraries with just the right amount of detail and examples.

Each of the one hundred and twenty-two design patterns covered in this book are presented by name, the design problem(s) the pattern solves, the solution to the problem, the rationale for the design solution's effectiveness, a list of best practices describing the application of the solution and possible variations, and related design patterns.

Unlike most books of this genre, he does not cover the history of the Internet and Web 2.0 as so many authors do. Instead, he describes the benefits and challenges of web applications, which prepared me to understand the rest of the book.

I am impressed that Pawan Vora addressed the importance of including Help at all levels of interaction, internalization, and accessibility in sufficient detail, yet leaves me the opportunity to research them in greater detail. As a member of a society of technical communicators, I know that my colleagues will appreciate that somebody recognizes what they have been advocating for years.

I am not disappointed that he does not compare and contrast the tools to create web applications. To do so would ignite a debate of why one tool is better than another, and there are just too many tools on the market.

Not finding a chapter dedicated to usability, I assumed that he did not consider usability important. Then I took a harder look and what I found was even better -- he explains characteristics that contribute to "good" design.

The book is rich with examples of web applications. Not only does he show examples of web applications of popular companies (i.e. Dell, Linkedin, Expedia, Adobe, and Netflix), he also shows web applications from lesser known companies (i.e. Kayak, Wufoo, and Basecamp) -- how he found them is a mystery to me.

I was privileged to serve as a technical reviewer of this book. When reviewing the first iteration of the manuscript, I brought it to work to show developers who were working on the user interface of forms and user authentication--they liked what they read and made the modifications as suggested. I even learned how to customize my favorite web applications.

Web Application Design Patterns is a must read if you want to understand how web applications work and why they work the way they do.

Vora has done an awesome job in detailing the whats, whys, and hows of developing software products. The discipline that patterns create in development and the power for creating outstanding user experiences makes this book an invaluable resource. Vora shows how, by imbuing good user interface design principles into application design patterns, can reduce time to delivery and returns investment in a short period of time.

The examples are tremendous and allow for easy abstraction to common problems. I highly recommend this book.

This book is a good deeper level non-nonsense middle level generalized guidelines (patterns)
I am not a graphic designer but a backend developer.

I found it
--Easy Reading, simple and core concrete guidelines of UI web application design
--Well illustrated without clutter
--Nice guidelines/patterns that can be applied "universally" during web application UI design
--Its value is in universal practical guidelines that can be applied with rationale explained


Worth it and wonderful book and i just loved it.

This book will be useful for internet applications such as online retail store but not very useful for intranet applications.
Most of the information is pretty common sense.

Overall, this book is a tremendous resource for those who design for a living or find themselves responsible for a product or service and would like to understand how good design patterns used by others can make their product and service better. I found it useful as a refresher resource to catch up on elements of design that have evolved over the years to solve questions that have plagued the field. It also sparked genuine design ideas for me to generalize to questions I am charged with solving through good design. In short, it is an excellent reference that is both intellectually engaging and visually appealing. I recommend for anyone who is in our field.

Gavin Lew
Managing Director
User Centric, Inc.
[...]

As a software entrepreneur in India since 1993, my perspective of this book and its applicability for the Indian software industry at large. As a country with a billion people which is going electronic in almost every touch-point possible from banking, to utility payment, to tax payment, to filing tax returns, to buying books, to e-governance and more: our software developers equipped with good engineering degrees are producing applications for these C2B areas with little or no understanding of usability or UI Design. This coupled with the fact that these same software engineers produce and maintain software for almost half the developed western world, the need for a pragmatic book on UI Design which can act as a self help manual for our bright software engineers has been felt by many of us.

Design Patterns as an approach to writing good software code is now pervasive across the Indian IT Industry and well understood and made popular by Eric & Elisabeth Freeman and Kathy Sierra & Bert Bates through their book Head First Design Patterns. This "Pragmatic Metaphor" of Design Patterns for building good software has revolutionized the way our Indian Engineers build good Software. Unlike the earlier books on User Interface Design which have had the traditional "User Manual" approach to UI Design where one was expected to read the book from the first page to the last before either becoming a guru on UI Design or dying of boredom, Pawan Vora's Web Application Design Pattern's "Cook-Book" approach to identifying and using the right UI Design Pattern for the UI Design Problem at hand is very useful for our software engineers who are already familiar with the Design Patterns approach to software development.

The team at Elsevier / Morgan Kaufmann Publishers should seriously consider releasing an Indian Edition of the book which can be adopted and used by our vast army of software engineers. For the larger good of our Indian software industry and the quality of the software we produce, I would be happy to evangelize this book as a must-refer for every software engineer in India. My best wishes to Mr. Vora and Elsevier for their efforts in producing a pragmatic and useful book in an area of good and bad UI Design that touches (& sometimes frustrates) our lives, everyday.

Swapnesh Patel
CEO & Co-founder - Omniscient Software Pvt. Ltd.
[...]

Recently, Harold came out with a useful book Refactoring HTML: Improving the Design of Existing Web Applications (Addison-Wesley Signature Series). Its discussion was confined to the writing of HTML webpages. Vora's book can be considered an extension. It does not go into the level of detail about HTML specifics that Harold has, but it broadens the scope, by defining many patterns of web application design.

This is not primarily a coding text. So largely, it avoids delving into whether you might use ASP or JSP [or something else] to define those pages. Instead it gives overall good policies or characteristics that your website's pages should have, leaving the implementation details to other texts.

Each pattern, and there are many patterns, is described in this way - By defining the topics "problem", "solution", "why" and "how". Typically, a pattern is buttressed with at least one screen capture of an actual website that uses the pattern. Readers will recognise many prominent websites, including Yahoo, Google, Flickr and Netflix. But also relatively minor ones like Wine, Zoho and Mint. That is one of the book's attractions. None of these are made up examples, which should help keep the reader's attention.

One chapter is on searching. Here, be aware that the discussion is about how to present search results. A UI issue. It does not go into the actual complexity of finding results for a query and then sorting those according to some relevance criteria.

Unfortunately, there is one discordant feature of the book. Notice the names given above, that Vora uses for the topics of a pattern. He has paid careful attention and chosen good terminology that is succinct and self explanatory. Alas, this is mucked up by a cumbersome and unnecessary repetition of a few phrases, like "allow users to" or "allow them to". Literally every second or third page often has one or more instances of the above. They should be replaced with "let users" or "let them". Shorter and more active. Lets the reader focus more easily on the underlying messages. Just like the way that each pattern has the topics "why" and "how".

This is also worsened by the text using the above long phrases as titles, like on pp. 188-9, "ALLOW USERS TO SORT DATA COLUMNS" and "ALLOW USERS TO FILTER LARGE LISTS". It's not just on these pages; it's easy to find other instances. Titles should be as short as possible, as in "why" and "how". The author understands this, yet he keeps contradicting himself. I suspect that at some level, he automatically uses the longer passive phrase, without questioning it.

Attention has also not been paid to minimising other types of titles. On p. 227 there is "OFFER USERS ALTERNATIVE TEXT INPUT OPTIONS". Better is "GIVE USERS OTHER TEXT INPUT OPTIONS". Or on p. 247, replace "INFORM USERS OF THE SELECTED VALUE(S)" by "TELL USERS THE SELECTED VALUE(S)". When you write a title, not only are you allowed to be concise, you should be.

Ditto for figure captions. Figure 9.7 says "Flickr allows users to add tags to photos they upload". Just say "Flickr lets users add tags to photos they upload". As above, it's not just this figure. There are many others with the same problem.

In case you're wondering why I'm harping on this. The book is about design patterns. The terminology of a "pattern" is about 15-20 years old, and is borrowed from architecture. But when applied to a website user interface, you can think of a pattern as a generalisation of a [good] writing style. For decades, there have been books on the latter. The book looks at the ease of use of a website's pages. Step back and look in a metalevel sense at the book itself. Apply the book's motivation to itself and judge it by this.