Customer Reviews

Defensive Design for the Web: How to improve error messages, help, forms, and other crisis points

5 star:		(19)
4 star:		(8)
3 star:		(4)
2 star:		(4)
1 star:		(5)

 

 

While reading this book many experienced web designers will dismiss it as a collection of obvious techniques. Don't be fooled by that perception. I gave this book to my team with a mandate that it serve as a framework for usability for all corporate intranet projects. I was immediately deluged with protests from a few team members claiming "we already do this".

Skeptical, I sat with those who made the claims, and we compared our techniques against those this excellent book proposes using live web pages on our intranet. Surprise. We did not measure up, and were certainly not "already doing this".

Phase two, I had one member of my team reengineer one of the smaller internal web sites on our intranet using the techniques given in this book. Business users gave the results high marks, and my team began accepting the book as the official usability guide.

Result: this book has made a measurable difference in the quality of internal web sites we are designing and deploying for various lines of business within our corporation. It is now embraced by my team, and is used as a standard of good practice in web usability. The advice provided in the book has also resulted in less support calls to our team, freeing them to work on design and deployment instead of answering end user questions.

Moral: do not let the surface simplicity of this book fool you. While its contents and advice may seem obvious, chances are that your team is not following those obvious design rules.

This book is one of the best books on web site design I've read - and I've read quite a few. New and experienced web masters will find a plethora of tips and techniques covering every facet from how to display error messages that are both meaningful and don't get lost on the page, to ensuring that search engines on your site actually return relevant information to search queries.

The topics covered are covered intelligently and in detail, and address the most common weaknesses found on too many web sites. Moreover, every topic is reinforced with examples from actual and well-known web sites. Specific areas of web site design include:
- Show the Problem (crafting visible and informative error messages)
- Language Matters (excellent tips on writing content that is descriptive, short and gets attention)
- Bulletproof Forms (take the confusion out of filling in forms and validate data)
- Missing in Action (go beyond 404 messages, and how to enhance the visitor experience even if they are using older browsers or are missing needed plug-ins)
- Lend a Helping Hand (creating help that is ... well, helpful)
- Get Out of the Way (how to find and eliminate stuff that slows down page loading, detracts from the main content, or alienate visitors)
- Search and Rescue (tips for making your site search engine give visitors relevant information instead of dumping everything under the sun in response to a query)
- Out of Stocks and Unavailable Items (best practices in stock management if you are selling items on the site)
- Contingency Design (a strategy for continuous improvement)

What I most like about this book is the fact that it isn't based on some rigid design philosophy, but instead, is a compendium of design issues commonly found on major sites - and how to make sure your site doesn't have them. Most of the items covered are the very ones that are likely to irritate you when you encounter them on someone else's site. The elegant solutions given in this book can serve as a checklist of what to consider when you're designing or improving your own site. If I had to recommend only one book on site design to new web masters this would be it.

I have read a few books on this topic and found this book to be good for those that are begining to do professional development and it also serves as a good review for those that have been developing for a while.

The book is simple in its layout and each section is easy to read by itself or you could read it from cover to cover if you wanted to. I found myself skipping around some and just skimming some areas of the book.

Its not a must have, but it is a good to have.

I have just finished reading Defensive Design for the Web, written by the fine folks at 37signals. The book is divided into 10 chapters, the first 9 broken down into 40 "guidelines". The guidelines cover all areas of defensive design, or "contingency design", as mentioned throughout the book. These guidelines are used to drive home the overall purpose of the chapter.

The writers keep the technical talk to a minimum, and really focus on what contingency design is, how it helps users, and how it is implemented in various sites around the web, if it is implemented at all. It also gives pointers on how to avoid these pitfalls in your own development. Also, it gives alternative examples to prove a point, relating it to something physical rather than electronic.

One example is comparing the annoying flash ads that appear on top of sites, disabling the functionality of certain elements, to trying to leave a travel agent office, and instead, the agent has blocked the door and keeps handing you brochures.

The sites chosen by the author as examples are very popular sites that a majority of readers have at least heard of if not visited. They range in variance from search engines, to e-commerce sites, to general sites with little application implementation. Many sites are mentioned in multiple chapters, sometimes having great contingency design for what the chapter is about, sometimes not. It is interesting to see that some sites succeed in certain areas while at the same time failing in others.

The "Head to Head" features are also great. This takes to sites that would be seen as competitors (Barnes and Noble vs. Amazon, K-mart vs. Wal-Mart, Foot Locker vs. Finish Line, etc.) and shows how they each handle the same contingency design element in different ways.

After reviewing the areas of contingency design, there is a "Contingency Design Test" that you can use not only to test your site yourself, but also give to others to test your site. The test gives certain tasks and uses a point system to score how well a site did with certain guidelines.

The book closes with a chapter on developing a plan for testing, correcting, and implementing contingency design in your site. It gives examples of ways to catalog various design guidelines such as using a knowledgebase for staff members to reference when a problem occurs, testing a site thoroughly at all points of development, and other techniques.

Anyone involved in building or managing websites with any degree of web application integration would do well to read this book. Many items seem like common sense, but you would be surprised at how easy it is to overlook them in the development process. In the end, your users will thank you for it.

As the makers of the highly-regarded Basecamp, Backpack and Ta-da List, the crew at 37Signals certainly have the credibility to write a book on web usability design. While you won't find any earth-shattering new concepts here, you'll get a lot of common-sense guidelines that a surprising number of sites don't follow.

It's too bad that this book (on design, of all things) had to be presented in such a cheap-looking book. The heavy black sections of the chapter headings are washed out, and the text inside the graphics (e.g., dialog boxes, pull-down menus) is hard to read. The book text itself is easy enough to read. In all, the whole thing was obviously produced on a printer that uses some sort of toner (and not enough of it!), rather than good old traditional offset printing.

In all, the book is still worth reading, and I'd still recommend it. It's just a little disappointing that one of my favorite reasons for buying dead-tree versions of books--the look and feel of the book itself--is a little lacking with this one.

This book contains 40 guidelines on designing websites to cope - and recover - from failure.

Each guideline is presented with real life examples of best and worst case behaviour for dealing with a particular situation.

Obviously these are general guidelines, and they apply to many sites, however there are always exceptions to the case, and the guidelines should be taken as these - rather than rules.

The real life examples clearly show what is currently happening in the online world, but I feel that some of the guidelines could have better been communicated as a chapter rather than choosing from specific real life examples - perhaps there are good guidelines that don't have a real life example to show. This format does mean that nothing that isn't already out there is described.

I was surprised that Site Maps were not covered, and I would have liked some more generic guidance on language and communicating to customers rather than the real life examples, which don't always provide enough range to best see the right solution for your particular problem.

The quality of the paper and printing is not the best, but for the low price this can be expected.

Overall this is a book that I would prefer to borrow from the library that own. A good book to read once, but I don't think that I'll be using it as a frequent reference.

I've made this book compulsory reading for everyone involved in web or internal system projects. It does not answer the questions or give a perfect example for every situation that comes along, but it does get you thinking about what would the appropriate message be for my situation based on some solid principles.

I agree with some of the reviewers that it is very basic - but most people don't get the basics right! It's entertaining and enlightening and will quickly get you on the right path to providing a better user experience.

No introduction necessary for 37S, I am a near-cultic reader of the "Design Not Found" (DNF) endeavour and of the "Signal vs. Noise" (SvN) blog. But upon reading the flyer for this book I wondered if I'd find something in it that's not already on these two sites. Unfortunately, the answer is somewhat mixed.

PEOPLE WHO MAY FIND THIS BOOK USEFUL:

(1) Those who don't have the time or the energy to voraciously follow the posts on SvN or the additions to DNF.
(2) Site Managers who need a guideline or checklist of things they would do well to cover off.
(3) Project Managers making a case for that common-sense stuff that's usually skirted amidst all those Yesterday deadlines.
(4) Cultic fans of 37 Signals
(5) Those who like Interstate typography :)
(6) Those who don't really care for actual implementation, but are looking simply for some cursory ideas and examples. For instance, in giving examples of good 404 pages (aren't we kinda late to the party if we need a book such as this to get educated on the MOST fundamental element of a website?) we are never really told how these pages can be implemented. We instead get 7 pages of what the authors believe are good case studies. Fair enough.

PEOPLE WHO MAY BE DISAPPOINTED:

(1) Web Developers in the know. I mean, do I really need a half page discourse on the scourge of the RESET button (which no one uses) or a whole page on why I should disable the SUBMIT button once it has been pressed by a user, etc etc?
(2) Those who believe that nearly twenty dollars could get you a whole array of other cool things.

SUMMARY:

It's an extended and neatly bound version of DNF with a New Riders stamp, and only you're the judge of what that could mean to you. Great stuff, very well presented in the customary 37S elegant minimalistic design, but it would be difficult to make a case for why this is a must-own item for webbies in-the-know.

I have really enjoyed reading DNF and other 37signals related material. I like their philosophy about web design etc... However, from what I understand these are simply their informed yet casual observations on how to improve design. The findings are not backed up by usability testing or any other studies. So while what they say may be thought provoking it is by no means right.

Take for example DNF's suggestion to separate out a long text box for entering your credit card into 4 separate boxes. I've tried this and it doesn't help reduce entry error. Top internet retailers that do extensive research and testing, such as this site and land's end, also keep with a single box. Why? I'm not sure but here are a few ideas: Credit card #s aren't all 16 digits long. Maybe tabbing from box to box is confusing and a pain to do if you are looking down at your card and realize that you have tried to enter 16 digits in the first box. The point is though that real answers to questions aren't found by casual observation and inference.

So I say interesting but over hyped. I'm disappointed that Zeldman so blithely endorsed it.

I've read the other reviews on this site and the negative ones seem to think the stuff in this book is rehashed or just common knowledge. I guess they didn't need this book. However, there are quite a lot of sites out there with horrible interfaces that could be made better if only they WOULD read "Defensive Design for the Web." So obviously there are those out there who CAN benefit from it.

This is not strictly a book for web designers. It is a great one for business owners and those who actually pay the bills for web design. It helps explain why something is bad if they have a paricular pet peeve about doing something you think is plain bad design.

Being a web developer, I can't say everything in it was something I didn't know. Some of it's just plain common sense. What I really liked was that it's short, to the point, and has an abundance of examples of both how to do something and how NOT to do it. If you want to create a better user experience, get this book.