Usability: The Site Speaks for Itself [Paperback]

The book consists of a pragmatic introduction "beyond the buzz: the true meaning of usability" by Molly Holzschlag followed by the six 'tales from the design face'. Each chapter starts with a slightly cheesy, yet endearing question and answer session where the author(s) are asked to comment on items ranging from their favourite pizza, to their rating on a 'geek index'. I found this one page intro helped me to view the authors as human beings, rather than as 'subjects'. At the end of each chapter the authors are given the opportunity to give photographic examples of items that they personally rate as being 'usable'..

The sites covered range from large companies like the BBC and Economist through to community sites like Metafilter and Evolt.org. Also included are chapters on 'e-bay' with tens of millions of users, and the one man SynFonts site.

Each of the tales are compelling and you want to keep reading to see what happens next. The authors concentrate on why they did things, rather than how they did them, so you won't be getting tips on implementing navigation schemes in PHP or ASP. But you will find out why eBay merged their design and usability groups into one, why Flash was the right solution for SynFonts and why both evolt and MetaFilter decided that un-threaded comments were the way to go.

The publishers have put a lot of effort into every detail of this book. The layout enhances the readability of the book, and the screenshots have been carefully chosen to reinforce the text rather than act as page candy. If I had to pick one element that illustrates this attention to detail, it would be the index. Bill Johncocks has done an excellent job in producing an index that adds real value to the book. I wish more publishers would follow this example and employ professional indexers.

One of best things about this book, though, is the design and the tone. Its an easy read, like Steve Krug's book, and has very different styles of writing depending on which designer is talking. There's a team of people from the BBC talking about their sites and you get a real sense of a design team at work; the Economist is a serious site and the tone of the designer/ author is formal and serious; SynFonts is a flash site and the designer is not afraid to criticise his own site in far more lacerating terms than outsiders would, but evangelises the use of Flash in his circumstances while giving some excellent generic tips on Flash Usability: Don't restrict the viewing sizes of your movie; avoid hidden/rollover navigation; don't use Flash for navigation; test! test! test!

From the specific experiences, generic hints are drawn out, but they are never rules or guidelines. The book's central premise is that the web designer should know the audience, get feedback from them, use the server logs and design according to the user's needs and expectations.

There's also a gallery of real-world objects that each designer has chosen as examples of great design and usability. I liked this as it showed that web Usability is not an esoteric science and is applicable to more and more non-technical people who use the web just as they use a coffee-pot, can opener or iMac. It also gave an insight into the personalities of the sites' designers - althought I would argue that an etch-a-sketch is usable, but would certainly agree that disposable diapers are "worth their weight in gold" as the eBay designer stated!

This is a well-researched, well-presented and non-didactic book. Thoroughly recommended.

Coming to the book itself. I have copies of Jakob Nielsen's books, "Home Page Usability" and "Designing Web Usability". I also have Steve Krug's "Don't make me think" among other books on usability in my personal collection. This Glasshaus title is as different as can be from all those books. For the first time, one gets to hear first person accounts of the how and why of usability decisions made on major, major web sites. I mean, when you are talking about Economist.com, BBC, eBay, evolt, MetaFilter etc, you are talking about some of the most powerful and influential web sites today. The personal narrative form of exposition is another refreshing change; you feel each author is talking directly to you and sharing his/her experiences in making the kind of usability decisions they did for their websites. Each account, when read carefully, can help a web professional connect the excellent groundwork of experts like Nielsen to the practical compulsions behind real-life usability decisions.

Another excellent aspect of the book is the range of web sites that are represented, right from the publishing might of the Economist to the media powerhouse that is the BBC to the ecommerce success of eBay to powerful online communities such as MetaFilter and Evolt. To round all this off, there is a personal ecommerce venture (SynFonts) that is an excellent showpiece for how the Web allows one man to compete with many. In other words, a terrrific amount of thought has gone into developing this book and Glasshaus cannot be commended enough for putting together such a fine team to share its views. I felt that non-profit and church/spiritual (beliefnet would have been a great example) sites were perhaps the only major categories to have been left out. Perhaps a second edition of this book will address that lacuna.

And, refreshingly for a book on Usability, there is almost no Nielsen-bashing in its pages, except a few words from Molly Holzschlag in the editorial, I think. But, then, Molly is always known to be a little irreverent:-)

The only other book of this genre that I can think of is "Web Site Usability: A Designer's Guide" by Jared M. Spool's User Interface Engineering (uie.com). But, I don't have a copy so can't really comment. If you are looking for practical examples of usability decision making, this book is a great title to have. Perhaps this review will serve as quid pro quo for Glasshaus' excellent gesture in sending me a complimentary copy that has given me so much learning.