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32 of 32 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
1998 book anticipates 21st century themes, September 27, 2000
This review is from: Web Navigation: Designing the User Experience (Paperback)
Jennifer Fleming has created a lively and wide-ranging discussion of Web design practices for the turn of the century. This 250-page volume accepts the Web for what it is - a task-based mass medium reaching for its audience through the often clouded glass of the computer-based browser screen. Rather than fuss over the Web's elusive true form (publishing medium? hyper-animated poster? PC software platform? supermarket?), Fleming simply accepts the obvious: there are all sorts of sites out there. For Fleming, tellingly, the design challenge lies not with deciding the right sort of site, and certainly not with the look of your navigation buttons. Instead, the challenge lies with adapting sites to the increasingly well-documented struggles of their audience. Fleming's book starts with Web users, ends with Web users, and stays with them all the way through. Jakob Nielsen, of course, has been gathering devotees to his cause of Web usability for several years. But Nielsen, rational as he always is, speaks from outside the designers' circle. Fleming, a practicing design consultant, takes the Nielsen ideas (and others) and turns them into a full-fledged design process, a toolbox for building sites. Among the best of Fleming's tools is the "user profile", the half-imaginary story about a specific user arriving at a site with particular needs, desires and concerns. You can see this slice of the book excerpted at Web Review. The technique lets you think creatively about all the different frustrations of different user groups - problems with graphics, problems with information design, problems with underlying business processes. Then there's Fleming's succinct yet detailed description of Digital Knowledge Assets' "ethnographic" methods - such as asking users for stories of satisfying Web experiences, and even giving them disposable cameras to photograph what happens to them as they work. To her user profiling, ethnographics and the like, Fleming adds a rich mix of more traditional Web project techniques - scenario planning, brainstorming, conventional usability testing and the like, all well-described. And over the top she sprinkles wisdom from scores of sources - from vintage design sources such as Edward Tufte through so-cool designers like Clement Mok and Erik Spiekermann to obscure sources such as a 1996 volume arguing that people expect computer-based media to behave "politely". Parts of Web Navigation are respectful journalism, as Fleming effectively picks the brains of the Web business's best. These luminaries' views broaden her book handily into a catalogue of current Web best practice.
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70 of 77 people found the following review helpful:
2.0 out of 5 stars
Not up to O'Reilly's usual standards of excellence., December 9, 1998
This review is from: Web Navigation: Designing the User Experience (Paperback)
Fleming's technique involves a lot of interviews and case studies, which results in an overview of design issues that's a mile wide and an inch deep; some folks might need that and might indeed benefit from that. I expect more from O'Reilly. Typically, O'Reilly books are much meatier than this, and certainly as a practical matter the level of technical detail presented here is quite low. If you're a novice to site design, this book might help you quite a bit; likewise, if you're a nontechnical manager with one or more web developers on your staff, it might also be worth your time. If you've kept up with the various web sites and print magazines which discuss aspects of the "user experience," your time and money can best be spent elsewhere. O'Reilly has enjoyed a reputation for technical excellence that in my opinion no other technical publisher can come close to. If they put out many more books like this, though, I don't expect that to hold. Buy O'Reilly's excellent "Information Architecture" instead of this volume, read the design tutorials over at HotWIRED's "Webmonkey" and visit Jakob Neilsen's site, and save your shekels for something you can use.
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19 of 19 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Excellent overview on the current state of web design, July 8, 2000
This review is from: Web Navigation: Designing the User Experience (Paperback)
This book covers a wide array of issues related to the creation of navigation schemes for web sites. Fleming discusses current strategies in site architecture, interaction design and site development (just to name a few). In addition, Fleming describes why these strategies work, how to implement them, and presents fascinating insights from the web's leading design experts (Clement Mok, Jakob Nielsen, Nathan Shedroff, etc.). One of the most all-encompassing books I've ever read on the subject, this book gives an excellent overview of what's involved in web navigation design. It contains many truths about the problems facing web navigation and offers clear-cut approaches in a very practical manner. The book's high-level approach is ideal for anyone interested in just an overview of web design, but it also offers an impressive list of references to further the research endeavors of readers with a more vested interest in the subject. Some of the examples and case studies will become a bit dated; however, there will always be a tremendous amount of value in this book due to the timelessness of the concepts presented in it.
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