Customer Reviews

Modular Web Design: Creating Reusable Components for User Experience Design and Documentation

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

 

 

There are some good ideas included in the book, but it is far too lengthy. Any professional should find most of the notions common sense, and of little use.

I may have gotten something out of it if it were half the length, much more focused, and a little more detailed. Throw in some case studies of actual cause-effect examples, and it would have grabbed my attention.

Expect a very detailed and systematical book about how to think modular when designing for the web and how to create component-based designs, deliverables (wireframes, layouts, specs). The book is packed with practical tips on how to achieve modularity in common design tools (InDesign, Fireworks, Visio, etc.).

What I liked about the book:
- It's down to earth, very well structured.
- The fundamental approach is very inspiring: how to cut a design into pieces, document the pieces, search for reusable elements and define those as components.
- Examples and figures are abundant and illustrate the points very well.

What you should be aware of:
- If you're mainly working for on small to mid-sized projects or you're not really decided to go and start creating and sharing component libraries, the detailed process in the 2nd part of the book may be really overkill for you.

Ever wondered if you are creating wireframes, comps, technical requirements, etc. as quickly as you could?
Looking for some tips that will take your design deliverables to the next level?
Have customers ever looked at your deliverables and said, "Huh? Where are you referring?"

Then Modular Web Design is worth buying and reading.

I confess that I can be a bit lazy. I'm also extremely swamped. I want to make engaging, easily understood deliverables as quickly as possible and this book has helped me review my current body of work and enhance it. It's given me some new ways to think about how I create great deliverables and leverage existing work.

Nathan Curtis has written a very useful book. My manager recommended this book to me as I am new to UX, and it's been a great read. (It can't hurt that there are legos on the front of the book, either.)

The book has very helpful visuals and goes into depth. If you were ever creating or maintaining a library, this would be an awesome bible and I am sure it would ensure that you didn't miss a step. On the other hand, this is useful for many other situations. For example, our website is going through a massive redesign, and I have found it incredibly useful for doing content inventories of the old site and for thinking of both the old and new sites in terms of modules.

The book is very detailed, which makes it long, especially for people who are not creating libraries. However, it's still a great read and should be read by designers, developers, and anyone else involved with website components.

The value-add to using modular design could have been summed up in a blog post (or perhaps a white paper) rather than in this repetitive and rudimentary 300+ page ramble. The chapter on module re-use reads like an Adobe Customer Success Story. The chapters on tools and organization don't even mention working with CMS or UML, though the section on naming conventions is on target. Much of the book is overly focused on introductory-level IA documentation and wireframe styles and the discussions on managing the overlap between design patterns, creative design, IA, and code snippets don't successfully solve anything.

User experience design teams often suffer from a broad approach to documenting a design solution for different projects. MODULAR WEB DESIGN: CREATING REUSABLE COMPONENTS FOR USER EXPERIENCE DESIGN AND DOCUMENTATION discusses components and how to use them based on an established design system, defining their role and discussing how to apply them to practices. Any library catering to neo-professional web designers will find this a key to understanding user interface components.