User-centered Web Development [Paperback]

The book sets out to guide the reader through the process of building a website, looking at the user-centred view. To be honest, that was pretty much all I remembered from this book, as Lazar bangs it into you right through each page with all the subtlety of a ten ton hammer. Its chapters are riddled with precisely the kind of wooly marketingese language you expect to find in Business Studies, but Lazar attempts to disguise it as academic.

I for one don't consider it an academic read- its tone was patronising at best, incomprehensible at worst, thanks to a proofreader who clearly went on vacation, flouting grammatical rules, and clunky sentence structure. Did you know, for instance, that "Mr. Owl found that it took three licks to get to the center of a Tootsie Roll Pop"? And that this is allegedly a useful example of navigation around a site? His tone is informal, which might work if the content of the book was even worth explaining. What are some good things about it? Well, there are lots of pictures of websites, and case studies of organisations that are not too bad (but only because they weren’t written by Lazar). But on the whole I came away knowing not much more than common sense would have told me. And the points is does convey are repeated over and over, with slight changes in the words used, until you want to throw the damn book out a window.

I did search for some good things about this book. The end came to mind. I honestly considered it an insult that my I sat for a few hours and let my bottom grow carbuncles while reading this pile of excrement that passes for a book. And the latest updated version is being sold for £30. This is clearly daylight robbery. Please, save your cash for something better than this- perhaps a nice O’Reilly book, if you want something geeky. But not this. If you’re reading this, Mr. Lazar, please, for the love of all that is academic, buy yourself a Chambers dictionary, throw away your marketing language and write something that doesn’t make me want to commit seppuku with the pointed corners. That is all.

This book takes the reader through the process of developing a website, focusing very much (as you would expect from the title) on the user. Who are the users? What are their characteristics? What do they want from the website? How can you find all this out? What do you do with all this information when you've got it? How do you judge your site when you've finished it? It also covers the differences between browsers, and includes a brief chapter on actually coding the site - presumably intended as background info for a pure designer as it's no use to anyone who's actually going to have to do the coding.

The book is not too long, at just under 300 pages, and the text is quite easy to read - this is no dry, academic tome. There are lots of snippets of useful information, eg "With paper surveys, there are a number of time-tested techniques for increasing the response rate..." (which are then listed).

Three case studies are followed, with a few pages at the end of most chapters outlining how the issues discussed were dealt with in each case. These do a good job of illustrating the points made in the text.

Now for the annoying: Although the book is easy to read, it would benefit from a good deal of editing. Much of the information is repeated several times in the course of a few pages, and occasionally sentences seem unnatural, if not necessarily ungrammatical. Also appearing annoyingly often - three times in three consecutive sentences at one point - is the tautological phrase "currently existing". Why not just say existing? This might seem like a petty criticism, but after the 50th time it becomes very distracting.

On the whole, I found this book well worth reading, but some people may find it a bit brief.