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Web Site Usability: A Designer's Guide (Interactive Technologies)
 
 

Web Site Usability: A Designer's Guide (Interactive Technologies) (Paperback)

by Jared Spool (Author), Tara Scanlon (Author), Carolyn Snyder (Author), Terri DeAngelo (Author) "All these sites, while obviously trying to sell products, also provide information ..." (more)
4.0 out of 5 stars See all reviews (3 customer reviews)

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Product details

  • Paperback: 156 pages
  • Publisher: Morgan Kaufmann (5 Jan 1999)
  • Language English
  • ISBN-10: 155860569X
  • ISBN-13: 978-1558605695
  • Product Dimensions: 22.2 x 17.6 x 1.2 cm
  • Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars See all reviews (3 customer reviews)
  • Amazon.co.uk Sales Rank: 154,361 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)
  • See Complete Table of Contents

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Product Description

Review
Without a doubt, the most important book I've read this year on Web design is Web Site Usability: A Designer's Guide. The book is easy to read and full of relevant information.
--Bill Skeet Chief Designer, Knight-Ridder New Media


Even experienced Web designers should read these usability findings about 11 different site designs. Competitive usability testing is one of the most powerful ways of learning about design and this book will save you hours of lab time.--
--Dr. Jakob Nielsen, Nielsen Norman Group


This report challenges many of my assumptions about Web design, but that's a good thing. We're still babes in the woods, crawling along trying to distinguish the trees from the forest. Any sign posts are helpful, right now.
--Mary Deaton, KNOWware


"Web Site Usability is great reading for anyone involved in Web publishing." - Currents

Product Description

Web Site Usability: A Designer's Guide is a report that every person involved in Web design, commerce, or online marketing will want to have. This book is, undoubtedly, the most comprehensive data demonstrating how Web sites actually work when users need specific answers. Researched and compiled by User Interface Engineering, the results are written in an easy to understand style, illustrating the need to make Web sites useful, not complicated.

* Based on an extensive study of actual users -- not theory, not graphic design principles, and not new tricks to make a "cool" Web sites
* Demonstrates how people actually navigate and extract information on Web sites
* Offers guidance for evaluating and improving the usability of Web sites

See all Product Description


Inside This Book (Learn More)
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"All these sites, while obviously trying to sell products, also provide information." Read the first page
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Customer Reviews

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3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars Good on analysis, but repetitive and not a designer's guide, 7 Feb 1999
By A Customer
A book that appears to be an expanded 30-page usability report. It's good on the analysis approach and results from looking at six sites, but it fails to distill the results into usability guidelines to suit different web site types. The lack of depth beyond the analysis has caused the authors to pad out the book with a numbing amount of repetition of their findings. If you want guidelines you're better off starting with Nielsen's heuristics and adapting them to your web site type.
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5 of 6 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars A great book with some shortcomings, 14 Aug 2000
I found Spool's book REALLY USEFUL in writing my MSc dissertation BUT I have one major gripe with his idea that 'Graphic Design Neither helps nor Hurts'. Firstly, its fallacious to think that graphic design is just about graphics. Graphic designers do a lot with just text to make it more 'readable' (and 'skim-readable'). For example, they use proximity, alignment, repetition and contrast to communicate relationships between chunks of text on a page. Furthermore, there is a huge mass of psychological research on Graphical Representations (GRs) and the way we think with diagrams. I think its fallacious to think that a web-page is not a GR. As soon as a mass of text is laid out (Use of titles, spacing, paragraph breaks, horizontal rules, etc), it develops graphical properties, and if laid out well, users can use it to find the information they want much faster. Think of the front cover of a Broad Sheet newspaper: it has extremely high information density yet clever graphic design promotes extremely easy skim reading.

I think Spool's stance that 'Graphic Design neither helps nor hurts', is a typical Old-School HCI attitude. If you're interested in a more interdisciplinary view, try an Amazon search on Information Design.

Other than this gripe, I recommend the book. It's similar to Nielsen in its conclusions, except it has the benefit of being based on real usability studies.

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1 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars Essential to understanding the importance of navigation, 14 Jul 2000
By A Customer
This is a book which leaves a strong impression about the importance of navigation. Usability studies are essential because they tell us what the customer wants when visiting a web site. I rate it a five star book because it contains information that makes a real difference when planning the layout of a web site. The message is consistent throughout and leaves a clear picture of how you can apply the findings. A particularly good choice for anybody new to web design.
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