Customer Reviews

Web Navigation: Designing the User Experience

5 star:		(6)
4 star:		(7)
3 star:		(5)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

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.

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.

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.

When I first heard (six months ago) that someone was writing an entire book about web site navigation, I have to admit I was pretty jazzed. After all, web navigation is something I spend several hours a day thinking about, and there's almost nothing useful written about it. (I make my living reviewing web site designs to make sure that human beings stand a chance of being able to use them. It's a great job.) I figured this had to be just the book I was looking for: endless discussions of whether sites should be wide or deep, how many items you can fit on a navigation bar without scaring users off, whether JavaScript rollovers help or hurt, and so on. Lots of diagrams and flow charts.

So I have to admit that I was more than a little bummed when it finally arrived: it just wasn't the book I was hoping for. (In the interest of full disclosure, while I was waiting I sought Jennifer out to consult on a particularly thorny project of mine. She was very helpful.) But the good news is it only took a few minutes to get over my disappointment. As soon as I started reading, I realized that what she's written is actually a much more interesting book than the one I had in mind, and one that's valuable to a lot more people. Even though the title is "Web Navigation," the subtitle ("Designing the User Experience") is what it's really about. It explains (and shows by example) how to grapple with a much more important issue than what your navigation looks like--namely: figuring out your users' goals-what they hope to accomplish at your site-and then designing an experience that meets those goals. (Hint: navigation's just a part of it.) And since it's broken down into chapters for different types of sites (like entertainment, shopping, community, and so on), you don't even have to read the whole thing--although you'll probably want to. Buy this book and Information Architecture for the World Wide Web and spend a long weekend reading both of them. You'll know what you need to know.

Contrary to some of the reviews posted here, I found the advice in this book very worthwhile. The first half makes a promising venture into the uncharted territory of navigation design for the Web, and is particularly good where the process of Web development is concerned. In many ways, I felt that chapter to be even better than David Seigal's superb book on the subject.

The second half is, as far as I am concerned, padding to make this book look bigger than it is. The analysis of sites like Amazon.com (yawn) and IBM (yawn) is deeply unenlightening, and pedestrian. The sites chosen are very 'missionary position', and there's not much more to be learnt than by just browsing them yourself.

Overall, I'd recommend this book for all Web architects, particularly experienced ones who will appreciate the lucidity of the first half. But purchase it knowing that it's a quick read that really only starts the project of illuminating the rules of navigation structures.

This book has some very useful info in it, but I've seen it all before. I read this one right after reading O'Reilly's Information Architecture and felt, at times, that I was reading the same book. The case studies of different sites (news, e-commerce, etc.) were very nice though. Most design/navigation books out there only focus on the kind of site that the author works on. That's not very helpful if the author works for a University and you work for a news organization. This book covered that. I would still recommened "Information Architecture" over this one, but it is still worth reading through.

Truly a great overview, and to cover the multi-faceted topic of web navigation is daunting indeed. By all means this is not a hand-holding expedition to find the holy grail of web navigation which is what some people might expect. I think the people who already have a fair knowledge of what works and what doesn't work in web navigation should just go with what they already know, or maybe write a book themselves and enlighten us! Yes, some of us already know the principles outlined in this book, but often we need reminding of what's truly important when we design sites and I think this book does that job very well.

As an independent consultant I was pretty set in my thoughts about how a web site ought to navigate, and was pretty much turning them out like flapjacks. Then, a client hit me with a navigational approach -- in fact, mandated a navigational approach -- that I implemented only with many concerns. I ordered this book, assuming I knew everything there was to know <grin> about navigation, as much as ammunition in case I had to have a showdown with the client as for personal betterment. Well, sometimes really good things happen for the wrong reasons. I am really impressed with this book, and it has already been hugely valuable to me. Interestingly, it convinced me that the client was actually correct -- that their navigation idea was spot on for their market position. Actually, the effect of the book went beyond that. It started me re-thinking some of the sites I had built in the past that I still had some control over. It made me think of things I could have done differently, and it resulted in three small projects to improve navigation on existing sites. My copy is now quite dog-eared. Pages are turned down, and sticky notes inserted throughout. There are marginal notes all over the book. I have been back to it repeatedly to use one of its greatest assets: its references. Unlike some books, this one recommends a quality source no matter who publishes it. This is a pet peeve of mine with some other publishers, who can't bear to admit that any book worth referring to could come from another imprint. Yes, many references here are to other O'Reilly books, but far more are to other publishers. A ten page "Netography". A three page bibliography. References throughout the text. The nice thing is that you can take the text and run with it, and when you hit a wall there are references that can take you the rest of the way. I was also pleased to see the demo of Dreamweaver and of Imagevise on the CD-ROM. Coincidentally I had been thinking about trying both these products, and now I will get to try before I buy. Conclusion: this is the kind of technical book you can have a relationship with.

If you're an old hand at web design, this book is mostly valuable for it's pointers to examples. It can connect you with people and ideas, and is therefore worth your scanning time. But the book is at it's best as a guide for people just getting started, just learning how to think about design for networked media. It's a better starting point than some other books because it recognizes that you can't think about web navigation in isolation -- navigation is a topic that sticks out into almost every aspect of the user experience. So, starting with navigation, Jennifer Fleming steps back and addresses everything from understanding user needs to usability testing. It's a broad (and therefore sometimes shallow by necessity) foundation from which to build a design approach. Lots of research, lots of examples, lots of pointers. A shotgun, not a rifle.

This book, along with Morville and Rosenfeld's Information Architecture for the World Wide Web, was one of the first things I read when I started getting into designing navigation for a living. It's very simply laid out, clearly and concisely written, and you'll have no trouble trying to figure out what Fleming is trying to tell you. Some boooks on the subject try to be very complicated, while Fleming points out the basic common sense infherent in good navigation systems. The CD includes a Dreamweaver trial, among other things, if you want to try out this WYSIWYG. Anyone designing a large-scale or commercial web site will be helped by reading this book, as will aspiring information architects.