Customer Reviews

Web Anatomy: Interaction Design Frameworks that Work

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

 

 

This book is fantastic in the context of a couple other books in my user experience library. If you've read Kim Goodwin's Designing for the Digital Age and/or Modular Web Design by the folks at Eight Shapes this is a fantastic supplementary book. You will get a ton of value out of this book if you download the design templates at [...] and use them as a starting point for your own component library.

I would recommend this book to anyone under the User Experience canopy. This book if full of excellent tips to save you time as well as tested user centered design patterns for pain-free design decision making.

This is the best website Design Pattern book I have read so far. The book is a spare, heavily illustrated 200 pages long--not the usual bulked tome 3-4 times longer. In that space, Hoekman and Spool introduce us to Frameworks, which take advantage of Design Patterns, which will be realized with Components local to the organization and along the way they blow apart dozens of cherished misconceptions, replaced by tested, researched ideas--"this is what we've found, and this is what we actually know." They then provide some excellent Framework examples and discussion to demonstrate, including two of the messiest, most often down horribly frameworks of all: "sign up" and "search."

For the latter, the text illuminates as so far no other article or book on the subject has done, how search and browse intertwine, and without saying so explicitly, focus attention on the concept of "findability," or closer to the author's terms, "how people best find and follow a scent of information." Backing all of this up is a decade of research at UIE, so that when findings seem contrary to what one might expect, or might have heard elsewhere, they can report, "this isn't what we thought we'd find when we first did user testing...."

Some books can be read comfortably in an easy chair. Some can be read in an easy chair if you have good bookmark slips or don't mind bending pages and writing in the margins. This is one where I needed my computer nearby so that I could supplement my notes with the occasional email to staff suggesting that we rethink this or that and by the way, what did they think of making this change to that template?

Among the notes I made while reading were the addition of this book to my own course on Content Management and several class notes edits to take advantage of it.

It seems that design patterns are all the rage these days, and for good reason. Breaking larger problems into smaller ones and then applying tried and true solutions to those problems has been a mainstay of serious software development for many years. Web Anatomy brings this thinking to Interaction Design and User Experience, and wraps up a collection of design patterns and components into larger experience 'frameworks' that can be applied to a slew of different kinds of sites. I found the text to be engaging and well thought out, and appreciated that the authors' UX theories were backed by actual user testing and related research. You'll walk away from this book with a much deeper appreciation of the psychology behind common design patterns and will begin to seek to understand the user's context before your next project. It is for these reasons alone that I can emphatically recommend this book.

I have been reading Robert's books for the past few years and this latest is another great insight into the world of Interaction Design. On this particular read, Robert collaborated with one of my favorite guys, Jared Spool (if you don't know who he is, you really should know) on using interaction design frameworks.
Although, I would not consider myself a IA designer, this book illustrates great examples of successful and not so successful design strategies, pit falls within IA and much much more.
It is an interesting read and hopefully you are following them both (Hoekman and Spool) on Twitter.

In 1995, at Bell Labs, I began work with an international team of software engineers on a project just like this - frameworks and reuse. Members of our team (including myself) quickly moved on to develop complex software projects built upon these frameworks - using modular components and patterns. Nice to see Web Interaction Design is FINALLY adopting engineering frameworks - still curious why the UML methodology is not generally applied yet. As an information architect and web designer, I rely on UML methodology quite often.Building Web Applications with UML (2nd Edition)

Jared said it would help if there were more reviews from folks who hate this book. Well, that would be me.

I bought this book as soon as it came out, and I have gotten no new insights from it at all. That could be because I still haven't gotten past the cover, but I'll hold off on deciding causation until I have more data.

You see, each time I have picked this book up and perched myself in my Relax the Back zero-gravity lounge chair for some serious career development, my wife has realized that I have some time on my hands.

And then out comes the honey-do list.

That's why I hate, loathe, and despise this book.

Guys, if you want to improve your understanding of Web anatomy, beware this book!

On the other hand, gals, if you need to get your guy to finish his honey-do list... .