Web Navigation: Designing the User Experience (Paperback)

by Jennifer Fleming (Author)

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review
Jennifer Fleming knows that the best way to prove a point is to use a striking example. She loads Web Navigation: Designing the User Experience with quotes and screen shots that deconstruct some of the most fascinating, successful, and innovative sites devised. Fleming also recommends books within Web Navigation's margins that cover the discussed subjects in more depth. Far from distracting, Fleming's style allow the readers to take notes, think about what each site's page is trying to accomplish, and refocus with the author on the topic.

This book makes it clear that there isn't one right pattern to a successful site. In the case of National Geographic online, she sees the way the site guides and educates the user as its main attribute. For CNET, it's the speed at which it presents well-filtered results and reviews. For Garden Escape, it's its commitment to building a community through "simple and easily used forums" while selling supplies. From design basics to concept meetings to Web heuristics, Fleming casts a wide net without diluting her message: focus on the user's experience. --Jennifer Buckendorff

Product Description
Navigation is one of the most important (and least understood) issues in Web site design. Why do so many people get lost on the Web? How can we create more user-centered environments? The answer is by crafting the user experience. This book explores navigation design in depth, covering usability engineering, interface design, lessons from "real life," and more. The first half of the book suggests goals and processes for developing workable navigation schemes. The second half focuses on designing by purpose, with chapters on entertainment, shopping, identity, learning, information, and community sites. Case studies of popular sites help show what works and what doesn't. Throughout the book, interviews with expert such as Clement Mok, Nathan Shedroff, and Jakob Nielsen provide valuable insights. The accompanying CD-ROM includs a tour of selected sites, a "netography," and trial versions of popular software tools.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 264 pages
• Publisher: O'Reilly; 1 edition (September 1, 1998)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1565923510
• ISBN-13: 978-1565923515
• Product Dimensions: 9.5 x 8.5 x 0.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.4 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 3.9 out of 5 stars See all reviews (20 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #313,336 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

33 of 33 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars 1998 book anticipates 21st century themes, September 27, 2000

By	David Walker (Melbourne, Australia) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

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.

71 of 78 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

By	Barry Campbell ([e-mail]) (New York, NY) - See all my reviews

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.

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

By	Edward Kim (New York, NY United States) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

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.