Customer Reviews

Designing Web Interfaces: Principles and Patterns for Rich Interactions

5 star:		(14)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(4)
2 star:		(4)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

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.

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.

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.

I've read a lot of books about designing functional user interfaces. This one is the best I've read. Even as a 12 year veteran of interaction design it had plenty for me to mine. It has up-to-the minute web 2.0 style AJAX interactions with directly actionable, pattern based examples. I bought one for everyone in the design group and made them read it!

The authors' approach to defining interactions using patterns isn't new, but the all-in-one catalog of rich interactions is. Using this book I was able to quickly review interaction options for a particular use case and pick the right pattern. After a couple of weeks I finished standardizing interactions styles for our entire site, which helped designers and developers alike. Another hit from O'Reilly Press.

If you are looking for a more philosophical definition of Interaction Design try Designing for Interaction: Creating Smart Applications and Clever Devices (VOICES)

I really enjoyed Designing Web Interfaces. If you plan on making a move from being just a visual designer to a user interface designer this is definitely a must read, more details than you imagine there could be about web interfaces!

With tons of examples and many meaty details, Designing Web Interfaces is just brain candy for designers to read. My team is working on building out a pattern library right now and this book is a great resource of best practices, decision rationales, and "gotchas" for using specific patterns. This book also builds on the O'Reilly Designing Interfaces book (Jenifer Tidwell) but the two never step on each other. Great resource and highly readable.

This book is very well crafted and compiles a very solid body of knowledge that too many UI designers simply ignore. The problem is that this book is simply outdated, as many new interface paradigms are not covered, and some of the old material feels a bit simplistic now that the body of knowledge available to UI designers has grown. If money is no issue, you should still own a copy of this book for reference, but do so with the knowledge that an update is sorely needed and that you will be partially disappointed by it.

This book is an excellent introduction into the do's and don'ts of web application interfacing. Just to set the record straight, this is NOT a book on designing general websites. In most cases, it won't help you design a simple blog or a homepage for your company. This is because the book does not proclaim to be a "Web Design Bible". I think the title is somewhat misleading as some may argue that every visual component of a website (colors, layout, headings, font, etc.) is part of the collective 'interface'. While that may be true, this book focuses on web applications. Things like online shopping carts, email clients, and other interactive components of websites are spotlighted and paid generous attention to.

Now that I got that out of the way, I would like to go on to detailing why the book is so great. The book is broken into 6 Principles:

Make It Direct
Keep it Lightweight
Stay on the Page
Provide an Invitation
Use Transitions
React Immediately

Every Principle is broken down into sub-principles, each of which lists various patterns. The patterns help you accomplish the goal of the Principle. For each pattern, plenty of examples are given that demonstrate how to and how not to use the pattern. Real world examples are spotlighted including some from sites like Yahoo, Google, Amazon, Netflix, and friends.

While reading through the book, I found several tips in each chapter that I could immediately apply to my own websites and projects. The In-Page Editing and Overlay sections were especially useful. I'm in the process of reading the last two chapters and can already see myself implementing some of the suggestions the authors are recommending.

The only complaint I have is that the Drag and Drop section was a little dry and repetitive, but, to the authors' credit, so is the nature of the subject.

I would recommend this book to anyone building or maintaining any type of web application or interactive website.

The full color screen-shots and in-depth analysis make this a fine book. The best parts are the side-bars that summarize the key takeaway points of each section. I also like the pattern-language - "overlay" - it could mean a few different things depending on who you ask, but in this context it is described as a specific concept and differentiated from "inlay" for example. I like that this book actually gets quite technical, yet does not include any real source code or steer you towards any particular technology/framework/language. We need more books like this - teach us about the "why" but leave the "how" up to us.

If you are a web designer or developer with expert coding experience, then this book can be a handy reference. This book is full of current pattern options where the authors, Bill Scott and Theresa Neil thoroughly go through each example into easy to read detail that include plenty of graphics. They go into great detail comparing which patterns work well and why other options do not.

If you are someone starting out with web design, this book can still be an asset to your library. It doesn't tell you how to code but it does give insight on how sites are built and why they are built in a certain fashion.

As a graphic designer coming from the print world and a novice to the web side of design, I picked up some good insight from this book. It helps when planning a site and discussing options when working with a programmer.