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There wasn't much in the way of high
level design advice for web site design until recently. Some
articles on the web itself but not many books. There has, of
course, been a lot about HTML and a little about style guides and
lots of talk about standards but precious little about designing
navigation for web sites until, Jennifer Fleming addressed it with
this month's review choice.
Web Navigation
Designing the User Experience
by Jennifer Fleming, O'Reilly, 1999
This is a book which lay on my shelf for a few
months, which is a pity as I wished I had reviewed it sooner. Its
a good book and here is why I like it.
No inmates in here
The book opens with a quote from Clement Mok
founder of Studio Archetype - an encouraging sign. It quickly goes
on to state that Navigation is all about "goals". There
is also a transcript of an interview with Clement Mok. Several
chapters of the book are scattered with comments by Mok. This is a
good thing. If you want to learn web site design then you can
start by learning from the best and Studio Archetype have shown
with their work that they are amongst the best.
The first chapter continues to use Cooper-esque
language, as we are introduced to User Profiles which are
identical to Cooper's Personas. We are also reminded that the
client for the web site is seldom the User and the client's goals
are not the User's goals. Good advice. From User Profiles the book
moves on to discuss Scenarios, again these were the same as
Cooper's Usage Scenarios. So here is a book which advocates the
same methodology as Alan Cooper is doing in his "The Inmates
are Running the Asylum" but this advice is specifically
tailored to web site design. What a great start!
10 Qualities
Chapter 2 gives us the principles of navigation
and the qualities that we should look for in good navigation. Much
of this work has appeared before particularly for GUI but its a
good refresher on the principles of what is really important.
Those familiar in the field may find it to repetitive e.g. "navigation
should offer alternatives". This chapter of explanations like
all the others is illustrated with real web site screen shots
showing examples which are doing it well.
Design for Web Users
The book starts to get really web specific as
it moves to looking at practical design considerations. The web
offers special challenges that weren't common for GUI designers.
Problems like delays, lack of trust, dead ends, browser
functionality. Chapter 3 seeks to look at these issues and offer
advice. It looks at user surveys, mentions User Centered Design
and gotchas like "over familiarity". Usability and
Usability Testing gets its rightful place as an important part but
certainly not the whole of web design. Jakob Nielsen's heuristics
for Usability are repeated, these are really GUI Guidelines but I
couldn't argue with them.
In this practical design section, we move on to
look at focusing on tasks and doing participatory design. This has
been called JAD - Joint Application Design. This section of the
book moves more towards slightly more traditional software
development approaches and perhaps overlaps a little with
Constantine's Usage Centered Design . The chapter concludes with a
few pages on running User Tests and lots of references to deeper
material in the field of Usability and Testing.
Architecture
Chapter 4 looks at Site Architecture which
might otherwise be called Data Organisation and Navigation
structure. It looks at issues such as balancing the data
organisation against how the user wants to find it. It concludes
that designing navigation is hard! Well, don't we just know it.
The raison d'etre for this web site! As it gets into detail, wide
versus deep navigation is discussed and navigation aids such as
Table of Contents , Site Maps, indexes etc. are all discussed.
There is a good coverage of techniques which help both right and
left brain people but the link is never made e.g. Site map is a
right brain thing, while a TOC is a left brain thing.
Moving from architecture to a process for
developing, we are presented with a rather lightweight overview of
what is required. Research - well Yes! Conceptual Design which
included Metaphor exploration - well Yeeessss! At this point I was
beginning to wonder if the techniques offered were actually a
smorgasbord of all the available techniques. By this stage we had
Goals, Tasks, User Centered, Usage Centered and now we had
Metaphor. Maybe the author just didn't want to offend anyone.
Moving on... We were introduced to a concept of
an HTML Prototype for the site plus a Navigation Diagram in an
interesting new notation. I liked this. I know it works. The
section on process rather peters out with a final page on
Production and Operation.
Interface
Chapter 5 looks at Interface Design and
Interaction - Hang on! Isn't that what the whole book is about?
Hmmm. Well it seems not. The author draws a distinction and
re-introduces the interface is the layer between the User and the
Machine. This again is a notion that I thought was going out of
vogue. However, the content here starts to look at graphic design
and visual communication and there is a sound discussion of
communicating data hierarchies and navigation hierarchies
visually. More comments from Clement Mok indicate that he believes
that Graphic Designers have perhaps had too much influence on web
site design recently and many of the navigational problems are
routed in this over emphasis on pretty graphics. Metaphor comes up
again. Yuck!
The "Show and Tell" section breaks
into a good if basic discussion of design techniques and this is
followed by material on psychology and the how to design for
action, design for interaction. I liked the seven stages of action
described. More could have been made of the "at one with
nature" aspect of web design in comparison to GUI
environments. With Web Design everything is open, there is so much
more scope to get it wrong.
The last section of this chapter talks about
Polite interfaces. More again from the Alan Cooper school of
thought.
Return to Process
Chapter 5 has a much deeper look at the whole
Lifecycle and the process involved in good Web Design. I thought
the section on requirements was weak but it got better as it went
into Analysis. There was quite a lot of similarity with
Constantine's Usage Centered Design. The Design section developed
further the Storyboarding and Navigation Diagramming material and
the chapter is rounded off with shorter pieces on code
development, roll-out and future maintenance.
Learn by Example
The second half of the book is a series of
examples explained. It goes chapter by chapter through different
kinds of website e.g. shopping sites, identity sites, community
sites etc.. Its full of screen shots and discussion of the design
and implementation and what works and what doesn't work. Sometimes
the discussion shows real depth and includes insight on building
trust and developing user loyalty.
If I had a problem at all with this material is
that it doesn't seek to catalog the techniques at all. From that
perspective, it becomes more difficult for the casual reader to
reproduce the good design style exhibited in the examples.
However, this is a small criticism for a huge piece of work which
must have taken considerable research and is well documented,
illustrated and constructively argued.
Summary
I liked this book. In the grand scheme of
things, it really does add to the body of work on Interaction
Design for the Web. It contains essentially a collection of other
people's work and techniques loosely bound into a methodology for
web site creation. It also extensively reviews existing work and
critiques it. There is still a gap between this book and lower
level material on Web Style guides and HTML coding. It isn't the
whole answer to a great User Experience on the Web but its a long
step forward. If you want to read just one book in this area and
haven't previously read Cooper, Norman and Constantine then this
is a "must read" book for you.
Recommendation
4/5 - Addresses the really important issues,
lot's of good advice, an important book for site designers
everywhere. Perhaps just a little anecdotal to get full marks this
time around. |
