Books and book reviews

Reviews

  • Activity-Centered Design - An Ecological Approach to Designing Smart Tools and Usable Symbols
    The book provides an excellent incentive for system designers to pursue activity-centered design, and a good initial set of tools to start them on their way.
    (Carl Bedingfield)

  • Book review: Designing for Interaction
    "Dan Saffer’s Designing for Interaction: Creating Smart Applications and Clever Devices was an ambitious undertaking. In fewer than 300 pages, he has attempted to cover the history, current practice, and notions about the future of the rapidly evolving discipline of interaction design (IxD). Whether you are simply curious about interaction design, are entering the profession yourself, or are collaborating with an interaction designer, Designing for Interaction is a good place to start your journey down the road of interaction design."
    (Leo Frishberg - UXmatters)

  • Book review: Paper Prototyping
    "Carolyn Snyder’s Paper Prototyping: The Fast and Easy Way to Design and Refine User Interfaces provides the only complete guide to paper prototyping. It teaches you everything you need to know to successfully do paper prototyping and offers many practical tips. However, only about a third of the book is actually about doing paper prototyping. The majority of the book’s content comprises a basic reference on usability testing. While some of the information on usability testing describes how to test paper prototypes, most of it is applicable to any type of usability testing. If you’re already an expert in usability testing, you may not find this information as useful, but Snyder has honed her approach to usability testing over her many years of experience as a usability professional and provides a wealth of practical information."
    (Pabini Gabriel-Petit - UX Matters)

  • Book reviews: getting requirements by observing users
    A review and comparison of two recent books on user research--Observing the User Experience: A Practitioner's Guide to User Research, and Designing Collaborative Systems: A Practical Guide to Ethnography.

  • Built for Use: Driving Profitability Through the User Experience by Karen Donoghue
    Have you wondered why so many dot-com enterprises have disappeared from the Internet while others continue to amass a large and loyal audience? The situation is reminiscent of the pun, "dot-com today, dot-gone tomorrow". If you want to understand how satisfying the user experience contributes to profitability of enterprises that use the Internet as a customer relationship channel, you want "Built for Use" by Karen Donoghue.

  • Defensive Design for the Web
    After reading Defensive Design for the Web, I think of potential problems as places to learn more about the user and to make the site better.

  • Designing With Web Standards
    Computing books are not 'cool'. You don't impress anyone by walking around your place of work carrying the latest computer programming book. Hey, that stuff's for nerds, right? However, there is a computing book that you can carry around without looking like a dweeb, a book that just begs to be looked - probably something to do with the bright orange cover - and it is of course Jeffrey Zeldman's second book Designing With Web Standards.

  • Information Architecture: Blueprints for the Web
    Christina Wodtke is an experienced information architect who also happens to possess a unique flair for putting things simply. Her writing is remarkably jargon-free, even conspiratorial, as she walks the beginner through the process of building the scaffolding around a website.

  • Information architecture by locale
    Not exactly a book review, but Lou Rosenfeld shares his thoughts on John Yunker's Beyond Borders: Web Globalization Strategies.

  • Information Design: An Introduction
    The goal of communication-oriented design of messages should always be clarity of communication. In information design the task of the sender is actually not completed until the receivers have received and understood the intended messages. Information Design--An Introduction includes chapters explaining verbo-visual communication, information and message design principles, design processes, and design tools. These chapters can be seen as a general framework for production of information and learning materials. Based on theories for verbo-visual communication this book presents several practial guidelines for the use of text, symbols, visuals, typography, and layout in information and learning materials.

  • Less than perfect: designing real things inevitably creates flaws
    In his latest book, the thoughtful and insightful Small Things Considered, Henry Petroski looks at the Oral-B toothbrush and other everyday objects to see what lessons they can teach us about the nature of design and the constraints that all engineers must face when bringing a new idea to fruition.

  • More Eric Meyer on CSS
    Eric has chosen his project topics well, picking up on current design trends and new CSS techniques and applying them to simple but realistic examples.

  • Observing the User Experience: a practitioner's guide to user research
    How do we go about learning who our users are and what they really need? And how do we do this in a way that helps us make a strong case for our design decisions to the people in charge? Andrew Hinton reviews Mike Kuniavsky's Observing the user experience: a practitioner's guide to user research.

  • Paper Prototyping: getting user data before you code
    Carolyn Snyder has written a wonderful new book called Paper Prototyping: Fast and Simple Techniques for Designing and Refining the User Interface. As the title promises, the book has all the practical information you need to make paper prototypes and gather cost-effective usability data about your user interface designs. By following this book's advice, designers on any mid-sized project will likely see an ROI of several thousand percent.

  • Persuasive Design: new captology book
    Review of B.J. Fogg's new Persuasive Technology book, which provides useful principles on how to think about creating persuasive design, but rarely gives detailed design guidelines. The exception is a section on enhancing website credibility.

  • Return On Design
    Here’s a book that consciously takes aim at the mentality that has taken hold in the wake of the so-called "dot.com bust". Corporations are no longer willing to spend millions of dollars on their web presence. They want to know what they are getting and how it will affect their bottom line. And since so many web firms have gone belly-up in this climate, it is a buyer’s market. web designers need to be savvy marketers when it comes to communicating with potential clients. Terms like "value" and "return on investment" have actually entered the lexicon of the web designer, and Ani Phyo is here to tell you that this is not a bad thing--not by a long shot.

  • Review: A Pattern Language for Web Usability
    The notion of "patterns" and of a "pattern language" comes from the work of Christopher Alexander, a contemporary architect who proposed the use of collections of architectural patterns to address deficiencies in modern building design. The Web usability pattern language described in this book resulted from the collaborative efforts of attendees at a workshop hosted by the author in 1994. It is a collection of recommendations for the design of usable Web sites. While it will be of particular benefit to designers of Web sites designed for commercial or informative purposes, it also provides useful advice for sites intended purely for personal use or as creative outlets.

  • Review of Persuasive Technology
    We could say that Persuasive Technology is a colossal book that will change the way you view computers, but that's a lie.  The brilliance of Persuasive Technology is the way it analyses the way we already view computers.  The only difference is that in the end, you'll be aware of the hidden assumptions that drive people's computer usage, and perhaps have an idea or two on how to harness those assumptions. 

  • Review: Web Usability and Navigation, A Beginner's Guide
    Regardless of this book having the word “beginner” in its title--and even if you have been designing and running websites for years--there is a lot that can be learned from Web Usability and Navigation: A Beginner’s Guide.

  • Speed Up Your Site: Web Site Optimisation
    Many people and businesses have jumped on the high-bandwidth bandwagon, but a majority of users are still topping out at 56.6Kbps. While it is always important to be acquainted with the demographics of your audience, a more important objective is to optimise your site so that no user is left behind. Jennifer Alvin (Digital Web) reviews Andrew King's new book.

  • The Elements of User Experience
    Ready-Fire-Aim! How many times have you been involved in a Web site design effort that seems to fit this approach? Sadly, we all have such experiences in our lives. This delightful little book provides user experience designers a conceptual model for producing Web sites. This allows for a process that is rigorous, logical, and easily communicated.

  • Usability: the site speaks for itself
    Although books like Usability: The Site Speaks for Itself aren't designed to present an overarching manifesto, if I had to distill one piece of wisdom from it, it would be, "Listen to everybody." For every commandment, find an exception. The more examples of successful usability you can examine, the more you'll realize that no one is going to do the hard work for you. One book, no matter how good, isn't going to teach you everything you need to know. Find out who your audience is and ask them for feedback. Find other designers who have faced similar challenges. Read some of the pundits, but, in the end, your site's usability solution (or your firm's, or your client's) will need to be as unique as you are.

  • Web Design On A Shoestring
    I see two types of people reading this book. One would be the solo web designer, creating sites for smaller businesses and usually working with the tiniest of budgets. The other would be someone working in-house at a company, perhaps as a communications specialist or marketing assistant, and maybe being called upon for the first time to create a web presence for her company. Again, the resources allocated are probably minimal. Designers on a "shoestring" are often as strapped for time as they are for money, and this book can easily be digested in an hour or two. And that's definitely an example of spinning straw into gold.

  • Web ReDesign: Workflow That Works
    I've been looking for a good book on the process of web design for a while now. You would hope that a book about project management would be well-organised, and in this case, you would not be disappointed. Helpfully dividing their process into five phases, the authors spend one chapter giving an overview of the entire process, then detailed chapters exploring the minutiae of each phase. Throughout, the book is filled with useful charts, checklists, and, most importantly, real world examples and case studies, though the latter might have been expanded into more than a two-page spread at the end of each chapter.

  • Web Standards Solutions: the Markup and Style Handbook
    In Designing with Web Standards, author Jeffrey Zeldman’s case for web standards was open and shut. Dan Cederholm’s book Web Standards Solutions: the Markup and Style Handbook, is the logical extension for the converted (those of you who believe using web standards to build web sites is a must) who want to learn some tips and techniques to use in your web design work and play. Where Zeldman is like your dad, helping you understand right and wrong in the world of web design, Cederholm is like your big brother. He shares his secrets to success and challenges you to take your new knowledge and experiment.

  • What is Web Design?
    A review of Nico McDonald's What is Web Design? which "fulfills a need for the community as a compilation of issues, process and practice in design for connected interactive experience and sets the stage for the conversation about the effective integration of design with business and technology".

Book websites