| Review: Designing The Obvious |
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Robert Hoekman jr. has produced a compact title that could pay great dividends for those who need help in that area. When we first received this title, the first thought was 'That can't be it?. In a world of hefty doorstop sized books, Designing the Obvious shines out as a model of size reduction and is no bigger than a thin paperback novel. Our next thought was 'How much?' Despite its diminutive size, it has a fairly hefty price tag suggesting it had better be good because in terms of wood pulp for the buck, it could be considered poor value. The one thing you're not going to find here is a single line of HTML or any technical discussions or platform cheerleading. Instead you get a series of thoughtful and insightful chapters on different aspects of web design from the perspective of user experience and expectation.
One of the biggest surprises for many people will be an early chapter entitled 'Understand Users, Then Ignore Them'. This probably seems like a short cut to project failure but after reading through, you'll almost certainly come to agree with the sentiment which is that it is extremely important understanding your users, their way of working and their functional needs. With that knowledge, you can then design the best and most direct solution for them. Where most systems suffer is when the users dictate the method of achieving things, often adding all sorts of additional features that will never be used. This need for simplicity is picked up on later chapters where the author suggests that as early as possible, all the 'nice to have' features should be moved well away from the core functionality so that the system can be up, running and usable as soon as possible. Programmers love to add all the fancy bits but this is counterproductive. More practical advise comes in the form of the 3 R's, Requirements, Reduction and Regularity. Concentrate on the project requirements, fight feature-creep then reduce clutter, redundancy, verbosity and as much as possible, the chance of errors. Finally, regularity - make everything work and look as similar as possible. The less a user has to think about how to do a task rather than the task itself, the more successful your design will be. Other useful techniques covered includes 'use cases' and 'task flow diagrams'. These plus various prototyping techniques allow you to fix work flow problems and design irregularities before getting too bogged down in real code. Much of the latter part of the book consists of examples of how best to present content and function to the user. In each case examples are given of different ways along with a discussion on why a certain approach is superior. We found these sections particularly good and the various anecdotes and tips contain concepts that should make you start to really think about the design of your web sites at a whole different level.
ConclusionIf you see this slender book in a book shop and assume there can't be much in it for the price, you'll be making a mistake. Anyone working in web design will have a lot to gain from the insights and thought processes behind the detail. If your background is in design, then there could well be some useful nuggets here for you but for web developers without the advantage of that discipline, you'll find a whole new philosophy and way of thinking about your craft that will improve the quality of your work and the satisfaction levels of your users. |
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| Last Updated ( Monday, 16 April 2007 ) | |||||||||
Many web developers come from a design background and understand the issues of usability, layout, form and the approaches that support good results. Rather more come from a technical background and whilst capable of creating great web sites, such designers can struggle with issues that would be so much easier to deal with with a little insight.
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