Want to learn how to create great user experiences on today's Web? In this book, UI experts Bill Scott and Theresa Neil present more than 75 design patterns for building web interfaces that provide rich interaction. Distilled from the authors' years of experience at Sabre, Yahoo!, and Netflix, these best practices are grouped into six key principles to help you take advantage of the web technologies available today. With an entire section devoted to each design principle, Designing Web Interfaces helps you: - Make It Direct-Edit content in context with design patterns for In Page Editing, Drag & Drop, and Direct Selection
- Keep It Lightweight-Reduce the effort required to interact with a site by using In Context Tools to leave a "light footprint"
- Stay on the Page-Keep visitors on a page with overlays, inlays, dynamic content, and in-page flow patterns
- Provide an Invitation-Help visitors discover site features with invitations that cue them to the next level of interaction
- Use Transitions-Learn when, why, and how to use animations, cinematic effects, and other transitions
- React Immediately-Provide a rich experience by using lively responses such as Live Search, Live Suggest, Live Previews, and more
Designing Web Interfaces illustrates many patterns with examples from working websites. If you need to build or renovate a website to be truly interactive, this book gives you the principles for success. |
 Great book for a wide range of users; easy to follow; well-written. |
| Review Date: February 15, 2009 |
| Reviewer: B. T. Denyer, Midwest, United States |
If you are brand spanking new to web design, and have never coded a single site, you may want to hold off on this book for a minute. I'm not saying it is not for beginners, because it is. Those new to HTML and CSS may want to get the hang of that before jumping into incorporating Ajax and JavaScript along with advanced CSS techniques.
Who is it for? I would recommend this book for art directors, project managers, web designers (all levels), interactive designers, DVD menu designers (though not directly related, you can still take away some important aspects or "patterns"), and especially those that design online training modules (we all know how dull they can be.) Like the DVD menu designers I mentioned above, I think Flash designers can benefit greatly, as well. Though the book is not directly geared toward Flash design, the patterns and "anti-patterns" talked about can easily be used when designing for a Flash experience.
The layout of the book is broken up into the 6 "principles" described in the product description of this book. The sections "Make It Direct" and "Stay on the Page" are by far the two largest sections, for they are the most important of the 6. "Keep it Lightweight" is the shortest section/principle, but by no means is rushed or glossed over. It poses some great design ideas to keep it intuitive, discoverable and keep you from designing 'mouse traps.'
In order to get the most out of this book, you would have to have designed a web site before reading this book. If you are a project manager or art director in charge of a team designing a web site (but not a web designer yourself), it would benefit you greatly to have a general understanding of web design, HTML, what Ajax is, CSS, cross-browser compatibilities, and Javascript. If you are just managing a team, you do NOT have to know how to code these languages/techniques, but in order to really benefit form this book, it would be better if you generally know what each does.
This book could also help bridge the gap for some managers by equipping them with the correct terminology of web design. Just speaking the language of user interface design can help speed up the time it takes to turn your directions into an interface that works the way you intended.
The book is detailed and to the point of the benefits of discoverability and weighing your options in the case of just how intuitive you need to make the interface. This book does not read like a my-way-or-the-highway kind of book. Scott mentions the potential pitfalls, disadvantages and possible alternate scenarios that depend on your interactive goals as set by the audience visiting your site.
A good number of the examples are from Yahoo! and Netflix sites (because Scott used to work for Yahoo! and now works for Netflix), but I never once felt like it was an advertisement for either one. He manages to spread the love around and uses examples from the Gap, iPhone, blogs, Google, Amazon, and others.
In short, the book is an easy read, something that one could go through in a long weekend. There are screenshots and visual examples on virtually every page, so in no way are we left to imagine the event happening. Multiple screenshots are taken when the event happens over the period of several steps. There is even a couple free companion web sites that will show the screenshots in a larger format than the book would allow. While reading the book, you will undoubtedly have many 'ah ha!' moments, or times when you rush to check your previously-designed web sites to see if you need to make a correction to your interface (admit it, we all do.)
I highly recommend this book for anyone that designs interfaces, even if they are for mp3 players, touch screens for electronics, or those interactive lobby displays. We all need some help in the area of user interface design.
***NOTE: there is NO code in this book. This the theory of designing user interfaces for the web, NOT the code. |
Best organization of principles for designing Rich Internet Applications I have read so far
|
| Review Date: March 2, 2009 |
| Reviewer: Stefan Leuthold, Zurich, Switzerland |
This book absorbed me for the last weekend, and I have to say, it is the best book in the field of HCI I have come across since reading Tidwell's Designing Interfaces: Patterns for Effective Interaction Design. Of course, I like everything that happens to quote Cooper's About Face 3: The Essentials of Interaction Design and Raskin's The Humane Interface: New Directions for Designing Interactive Systems (ACM Press) - but this one gave me lots of new, practical ideas for the web, and a consistent terminology I can use to think and talk about Rich Internet Applications.
Nicely organized and layouted, well-written, and, in my opinion, thought-through easy-to-grasp structure. I was studying many patterns in the Yahoo! pattern library online and I am glad that Bill Scott finally published a book with the same clarity and logic that I came to like online.
Will become a standard in the company I work for and I am sure our clients will already start to "fear" discussions around the six principles when arguing with our consultants for what should be done and how :-)
Great book. |
Best Practical Interaction Design Guide I've Read
|
| Review Date: April 14, 2009 |
| Reviewer: E. Wood, Menlo Park, CA USA |
I've read a lot of books about designing functional user interfaces. This one is the best I've read. Even as a 12 year veteran of interaction design it had plenty for me to mine. It has up-to-the minute web 2.0 style AJAX interactions with directly actionable, pattern based examples. I bought one for everyone in the design group and made them read it!
The authors' approach to defining interactions using patterns isn't new, but the all-in-one catalog of rich interactions is. Using this book I was able to quickly review interaction options for a particular use case and pick the right pattern. After a couple of weeks I finished standardizing interactions styles for our entire site, which helped designers and developers alike. Another hit from O'Reilly Press.
If you are looking for a more philosophical definition of Interaction Design try Designing for Interaction: Creating Smart Applications and Clever Devices (VOICES) |
Excellent book of rich interaction web patterns
|
| Review Date: February 3, 2009 |
| Reviewer: Brandon Granger, Charleston, SC |
With tons of examples and many meaty details, Designing Web Interfaces is just brain candy for designers to read. My team is working on building out a pattern library right now and this book is a great resource of best practices, decision rationales, and "gotchas" for using specific patterns. This book also builds on the O'Reilly Designing Interfaces book (Jenifer Tidwell) but the two never step on each other. Great resource and highly readable.
|
Web Interfaces
|
| Review Date: August 28, 2009 |
| Reviewer: Frank Mitch, Akron, Ohio USA |
Reviewer: Dave Roman, GCPCUG member
This book has 14 chapters, but they are only sub divisions of a different type of classification. The book is about interaction design on the web. They have divided this book up into six principles and since they took this approach I am going to review the principles.
Principle One - Make It Direct
What does that mean? This is covered in three chapters. They discuss direct in-page editing of content, moving objects around directly with the mouse (drag and drop), and applying actions to directly selected objects.
Principle Two - Keep It Lightweight
This area discusses Contextual Tools
Principle Three - Stay on the Page
Here they discuss ways to keep the user on the page including overlays, Inlays, Virtual Pages and Process Flow
Principal Four - Provide an Invitation
This area talks about providing an invitation to the user in a number of forms. Static invitations are offered on the page using visual techniques to invite interaction. Dynamic invitations come into play in response to what and where the user is interacting.
Principal Five - Use Transitions
This area could be entitled "Pay Attention" because it IS about getting your attention using movement and transition. They discuss transition patterns like "brighten and dim", "expand and collapse", "Self-Healing Fade", "Animation" and "spotlight".
Then they go to the purpose of transition. What is the reason for using these powerful effects and where they are most effective.
Principle Six - React Immediately
This is all about what happens immediately after each interaction with the system. There should be an immediate reaction paired with the user's action. The system should always keep users informed about what is going on, through appropriate feedback within a reasonable time and is called Latency Reduction.
They first talk about lookup patterns and then feedback patterns.
The web is constantly changing, so the authors provide sites to keep you up to date, one of which is http://designingwebinterfaces.com
It's a long book, but does a good job explaining what takes place in an interactive website. This is not a coding book, but more like a combination of the psychology of a web site and how to use this knowledge to make it easier for the user and also make it easier to buy a product or find the information they are looking for.
|
|
No details are available for this product
No video reviews found for this product.
