The patterns that are shown in the book are all Model-View-Controller (MVC), the popular design pattern being used in a lot of back-end frameworks such as Ruby on Rails, ASP.NET MVC and CodeIgniter (PHP) to name a few.

The first part of the book introduces the different aspects of the MVC pattern. Then there’s a few chapters dealing with JavaScript templating, dependency management, some of the new HTML5 API’s and JavaScript deployment. In the last part of the book 3 different libraries for applying the MVC pattern to a project are introduced.

Desktop-like applications

Traditional web applications require a lot of requests to the server, but using MVC on the Frontend you can create One-Page-Applications with all the logic in the frontend. This might sound crazy at first, but after reading the book and trying it out for myself, I’m confident that this is a good approach for certain kinds of web applications. It’s actually more like programming Desktop Applications.

This approach gives you applications that responds immediately on user interaction. Because it doesn’t have to perform constant server requests, it is snappy and responsive.

Not for all projects

I want to be dead clear here. Im definitely not saying that this is the right approach for all web applications, because it’s not. For starters, using a JavaScript only approach means that not everybody can use it, for example people using screen readers or have JavaScript disabled. So for content intensive sites this is not the way to go. But for more advanced Web Applications and for mobile web apps aimed at smart phones, it’s certainly a viable option.

JavaScript libraries

As I mentioned before Alex presents a few libraries that will make it easier to create a MVC architecture in the last part of the book. He has actually created one of the libraries himself, Spine.js. The other libraries are Backbone.js and JavaScriptMVC.

Although I’m sure that all theses libraries are good I myself was most compelled by Backbone.js which I’m currently using to build a mobile web app. I think it’s great in the way it makes the code so much more structured and easier to maintain. It essentially brings backend programming structure to the world of JavaScript.

Conclusion

If you have a few JavaScript projects under your belt and you feel that there must be better ways to organize and structure the code, this book is definitely for you. It will teach you how the MVC pattern works on the frontEnd and gives you the tools and knowledge to leverage your own applications.

Bookinformation

Title:

JavaScript Web Applications

By:

Alex MacCaw

Publisher:

O’Reilly Media (August 30, 2011)

Pages:

280

ISBN:

144930351X

ISBN-13

978-1449303518

Buy JavaScript Web Applications from Amazon.com

Note: I wrote this review for O’Reilly’s Blogger Review Program. Their deal is pretty good: You get a free e-book to read and once you post a review you get another. Try it yourself if you’re interested in reviewing books.

This video was recorded during a Master Class with Luke Wroblewski and six participants. Luke talks about the topic, shows slides, and the participants asks questions and comment.

The masterclass is structured into three areas which are:

• Statistics
• Setting Context
• Design Conciderations

In the Statistics part, Luke shows a lot of data on mobile web use. The trend is clear: mobile browsing will soon outperform desktop browsing. This part will give you all the facts you need to realize it’s time to start considering the mobile web. It will also provide you with plenty of ammunition for convincing your boss or client that it’s time to get moving.

In the Setting Context part of the class, the capabilities and constraint of the mobile web experience is discussed. It’s all about screen sizes, limited input opportunities and the different contexts that mobile devices are used. For example, we often use smart phones with one hand while on the move which makes it hard to perform precise manipulations of objects on the screen.

In the Design Conciderations part, Luke presents good advice on how to design for mobile applications. He talks about how to organize content and how to design different actions on a touch device. He also talks about things to consider when designing for input and how to design for different devices and different viewports. Lots of practical advice and current best practices.

All in all the class introduces the mobile web area and gives a pretty broad picture of what it is, where it’s heading and what to think about when designing for it.

About Luke Wroblewski

Luke is a very knowledgeable speaker. He’s written two popular web design books, Web Form Design (which I’ve reviewed back in 2008) and Site-Seeing: A Visual Approach to Web Usability. He’s the co-founder of Bagcheck and former Chief Design Architect at Yahoo!.

These last years Luke has been busy talking and writing about the mobile web and he has a new book coming up this fall called Mobile First.

So what is Mobile First?

The approach that Luke is advocating is to think about the mobile web experience first. Because of the inherited restraints of the mobile platform you are forced to focus on the most important stuff and omit the rest. The screen is small, the input limited and the attention of the user is often shorter than on the desktop.

Then, when you move to the desktop experience, you can bring this knowledge and focus with you. It will help you stay focused and not trying to cram content and functionality into every bit of empty space.

The video format

The quality of the video is mostly good. It’s in mp4 format and both the picture and sound are crisp except for sometimes when one of the participants are talking. Then it sometimes sounds like the person is sitting in a jar talking, you can still here what they say though.

Although the quality of the video is pretty good, my biggest concern is with its format. This master class comes in 14 different video files that you can either watch online or download for offline use. Watching them online is pretty straight forward, you have a chronological list of the videos and watch them one after the other. No problems there.

The problem started when I wanted to watch them on my iPad. I downloaded the files, imported them to iTunes and transferred them to the iPad. Now, instead of being ordered chronological they were ordered alphabetically. Because of this I had to manually edit the meta information of the files, something that’s a bit awkward and time consuming. I think this should have been done to the files, before publishing them.

My verdict

My biggest take-aways from this master class is why Mobile First is a sensible approach but also good ideas on how to design navigation for mobile platforms. There were also some very interesting statistics about how huge the mobile web is really becoming.

If you’re designing or developing for the mobile web or thinking about doing it, you really should check this video out. Luke Wroblewski is very knowledgeable and good at explaining his points in a clear an efficient manner. In fact, even if you haven’t considered the mobile web yet, maybe you should watch this video anyway. Chances are it will make you change your mind.

Video information

Title:

Designing for Mobile First

By:

Luke Wroblewski

Publisher:

O’Reilly Media (August 2011)

Duration:

3 hours and 19 minutes

Check out Designing for Mobile First on O’Reilly Media

Note: I wrote this review for O’Reilly’s Blogger Review Program. Their deal is pretty good: You get a free e-book to read and once you post a review you get another. Try it yourself if you’re interested in reviewing books.

About the book

This book is, as of now, the only book on the subject. There are plenty of books about Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and although Site Search Analytics (SSA) share common traits with SEO, the nature of searching on Google and searching on a sites local search is quite different. You’ll see much more general search terms on Google than on a sites local search.

What’s so interesting is that the term that people use on local sites will tell you something about how they think, what language they use and what they’re interested in. This is valuable information that can help you better understand your audience and better cater to their needs.

What’s in the book

The first section of the book describes what SSA is and provides a case study where SSA helped save a project. It will give you the basics of the topic and good advice on how to start applying it.

The second section is about different type of analysis to gain insights about your data. This will give you a toolkit where you can pick the appropriate tool depending on what insights your’e trying to gain.

The third section describes practical ways of using your insights to improve search, site navigation, meta data and content. It contains very good and practical things you can do to improve your site.

The last chapter looks at how SSA fits into the worlds of UX Design and Web Analysis.

Bridging the gap

A very interesting argument Louis Rosenfeld make is that SSA can actually bridge the gap between Web Analytics and UX Design. Because of the both quantitative and qualitative nature of the data, SSA will appeal to both parties. It can therefor act as a common ground for practitioners in the respective fields to collaborate their researching efforts.

About the author

Louis Rosenfeld has previously co-authored Information Architecture for the World Wide Web, by many considered THE book on Information Architecture. He also runs Rosenfeld Media, a book publishing company dedicated to publishing great books on UX.

With Louis experience in the fields and his clear and entertaining writing style, this book is a pleasure to read. It contains lots of real-life examples and practices that makes the techniques described easy to apply in your own projects.

Conclusion

If your’re interested in making good use of your search data, then this is the book to read. It reveals techniques that will give plenty of benefits for a pretty low effort. I highly recommend Search Analytics for Your Site for both Web Analysts and UX Designers, but also for Project Managers and others involved in creating information rich web sites or Intranets.

Book information

Title:

Search Analytics for Your Site

Author:

Louis Rosenfeld

Publisher:

Rosenfeld Media, LLC; 1st edition (July 6, 2011)

Pages:

224

ISBN:

1933820209

ISBN-13:

978-1933820200

Check out Search Analytics for Your Site on Amazon

Note: I wrote this review for O’Reilly’s Blogger Review Program. Their deal is pretty good: You get a free e-book to read and once you post a review you get another. Try it yourself if you’re interested in reviewing books.

It’s a short book, only 130 pages, that’s easily read in one evening. It provides you with a quick introduction that will give you a kickstart using jQuery Mobile in your own projects. It starts with very basic examples and ends with showing how to build a Twitter web app. It’s very hands-on with lots of example code and code references.

To get the most from this book you should already be familiar with the jQuery framework as well as HTML5 and CSS3 since these topics are not thoroughly covered.

New Beta 1 release

You should be aware that it’s the Alpha 4 release of jQuery Mobile that’s described in the book. As of now jQuery Mobile is in Beta 1 and is expected to make version 1.0 by the end of this summer.

I’ve noticed some differences between the current version and what’s being described in the book. But these are minor differences and shouldn’t cause any serious problems (See the Beta 1 Release Notes for more info).

Jon states in the preface of the book that “As jQuery Mobile advances, we hope to update this ebook to cover new features and provide new tips and techniques.”. So hopefully the version you will read will be updated to reflect these recent changes.

Conclusion

For me this book has given me a head start building the mobile version of a web app that I’m currently developing. (Stay tuned for more info as I plan to release it by the end of this summer). I think Jon has done a great job introducing the framework in a concise and hands-on manner. If you’re planning to create a mobile web app and are considering using jQuery Mobile, you should definitely read this book to:

1. see if jQuery Mobile is something you should use
2. to get at head start using it in your project

All in all I recommend this book for anyone wanting to dip their toes in mobile web development.

Book information

Title:

jQuery Mobile

Author:

Jon Reid

Publisher:

O’Reilly Media (July 7, 2011)

Pages:

130

ISBN:

1449306683

ISBN-13:

978-1-449-30668-7

Check out jQuery Mobile on Amazon

Note: I wrote this review for O’Reilly’s Blogger Review Program. Their deal is pretty good: You get a free e-book to read and once you post a review you get another. Try it yourself if you’re interested in reviewing books.

Although they’re all about UX Design, they’re still very different in their approach to the subject. I list them here, from the most practical to the most theoretical.

Undercover User Experience Design

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The first book out is Undercover User Experience Design by Cennydd Bowles and James Box. Both designers at the renowned web agency Clearleft. This book takes a pragmatic approach to the UX process. The authors recognize that it can be hard to do UX-work in an organization that has not yet realized the benefits of UX. This book is all about how you can sneak in this kind of work anyway to slowly get the organization in the know.

Undercover User Experience Design offer very practical and cheap approaches for conducting:

• User research
• Idea generation
• Prototyping
• User testing

Who is this book for

If you want a hands-on book with practical suggestions on how to perform UX work, this is a good book to start with. Also if your dealing with clients that don’t get UX or work within an organization that don’t get it, I highly recommend you buy it.

Book information

Title:

Undercover User Experience Design

Authors:

Cennydd Bowles and James Box

Publisher:

New Riders Press; 1 edition (September 27, 2010)

Pages:

192

ISBN:

0321719905

ISBN-13:

978-032171990

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Sketching User Experiences

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Sketching User Experiences was not at all what I expected it to be. I thought it would be a book on how to use sketches on paper for designing user interfaces. It turned out that the author Bill Buxton means sketching in a much broader sense. In his definition a sketch is:

1. Quick: quick to make
2. Timely: can be provided whenever needed
3. Inexpensive
4. Disposable
5. Plentiful
6. Clear vocabulary: the style makes it clear that it is a sketch and not a finished product
7. Distinct gesture: similar to the vocabulary, sketches are distinctly open and free
8. Minimal detail
9. Appropriate degree of refinement
10. Suggest and explore rather than confirm
11. (Intentional) Ambiguity

With this definition a sketch can be anything from a carved out piece of wood that represents a PDA to an actual sketch on a piece of paper. What he proposes is that you should always do different types of prototyping to test a product out before starting to actually create it. What this process aims for is to not only get the design right but also to create the right design.

That the book wasn’t what I expected wasn’t a bad thing. I think Buxtons thoughts on the design process is very interesting and all viable if you’re in an organization with big budgets for this kind of work. And even if you’re not, there’s still a lot of interesting ideas in it that you can apply to your work.

The book is both very practical and theoretical. While it discusses the design process from both a design, development and business perspective on a fairly theoretical level it also supplies lots of hands on examples and approaches.

Who is this book for

If you’re interested in the design process not only from a designers perspective but also from a development and business perspective this book is definitely for you. Also if you’re interested in prototyping on different levels, this might be an interesting book for you.

Book information

Title:

Sketching User Experiences

Author:

Bill Buxton

Publisher:

Morgan Kaufmann (March 30, 2007)

Pages:

448

ISBN:

9780123740373

ISBN-13:

978-0123740373

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Simple and Usable Web, Mobile, and Interaction Design

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The book Simple and Usable is about creating simple and usable digital products and services without dumbing down. According to Giles Colborne, the author of the book, there are essentially 4 strategies for reducing complexity without losing important features:

• Organizing
• Removing
• Hiding
• Displacing

These 4 strategies is the core of the book and they’re beautifully illustrated by applying them to the design of a complex remote control. There’s also lots of other examples.

The book is organized into 8 parts which each consists of several chapters. Each chapter is just one page long which I think is an interesting approach. It makes the book really easy to digest and also makes it easy to later look up things.

Who is this book for

If you have already have some experience in design and wants a fresh perspectives on interaction design for web and mobile platforms, this book will be good for you. Apart from the four core strategies for reducing complexity it contains a lot of other gems that you can use to improve you designs.

Book information

Title:

Simple and Usable Web, Mobile, and Interaction Design

Author:

Giles Colborne

Publisher:

New Riders Press; 1 edition (September 26, 2010)

Pages:

208

ISBN:

9780321703545

ISBN-13:

978-0321703545

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Living with Complexity

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Living with Complexity is the latest book by Don Norman. If you’re not already familiar with his work he’s written several seminal books on usability and is one of the pioneers in the field. (You should definitely check out The Design of Everyday Things) In Living with Complexity he addresses the fact that we live in a complex world. Norman writes about the dilemma that we crave simplicity but in reality need complexity.

A good metaphor for this is the cockpit of an airplane. For an untrained person it looks very complicated with its vast arrays of dials and instruments. For the trained pilot on the other hand, it looks very well organized and suited for their needs. A cockpit can’t be dumbed down to a single instrument, because all the instruments are needed for the pilot to take the plane safely from one airport to another. Therefore other strategies are required, training for example.

Who is this book for

This book is more academic and theoretical in nature than the others. If you’re looking for a practical book on how to do design, this book is not for you. But if you more interested in the philosophical side of design, I strongly recommend it.

Book information

Title:

Living with Complexity

Author:

Donald A. Norman

Publisher:

The MIT Press (October 31, 2010)

Pages:

280

ISBN:

0262014866

ISBN-13:

978-0262014861

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Conclusion

These were a few of the books that I’ve read recently. I think they all have something to bring to the table in their own unique ways. Personally I believe that reading books is one of the best ways to get better at what you do. It not only expands your horizons but also confirms the knowledge you already have and can spark new ideas that you can use in your work. If you’re interested in more book on usability and UX you might want to read 5 Essential Books on Usability, an article I wrote a couple of years ago.

So what do you think? Have you read any of these books or any others on UX recently?

Designing with the mind in mind is an excellent book that reveals the facts and neurological research behind common design principles. In this review I will tell you why you should read this book.

The structure of the book

The book starts with a brief presentation of a number of common User Interface design rules. It then compares the two best-known ones [1] and concludes that they are very similar. The reason for this is that they are derived from the same source: human psychology.

This book is all about explaining the psychological and neurological facts behind those design principles. The author, Jeff Johnson, does an excellent job of doing so throughout the book. He uses a clear language with lots of examples, without getting to deep into the psychological lingo.

The book consists of 12 chapters, each being about a specific neurological fact and the implications it has on how you should design User Interfaces. All the chapters have lots of both good and bad examples making it easy to understand how the principles are applied in real life.

We Perceive What We Expect

For example, Chapter 1 – We Perceive What We Expect, explains how our expectations bias how we perceive things. If for example, we’re talking about planning buildings, the black blocks in the picture below will likely look like buildings because we expect to see just that.

Image from slide 9 of Jeff Johnson: Psych 101: The Psychological Basis for UI Design Rules on SlideShare (see further resources at the end of the article)

On the other hand if we’re meeting with an advertising manager and discusses a new billboard. We would probably see a billboard with the white letters LIFT.

The fact that we perceive things differently based on our expectations has certain implications on how we design User Interfaces. For example, it implies that we should avoid ambiguity, we should be consistent in our design and we should understand the goals of our users.

Time Requirements

Another chapter I found especially interesting. It’s Chapter 12 – We Have Time Requirements which deals with how we perceive time and what time factors we should take in consideration when designing User Interfaces. This chapter contains a table which shows how long it takes for our brain to perceive different things. For example it states that the maximum duration of silent gap between turns in person-to-person conversation is about 1 second to keep the natural flow. One implication of this in User Interface Design is that it shouldn’t take longer than 1 second for the User Interface to respond (e.g a window to open, finishing an auto-save, e.t.c.).

The book is structured in such a way that it’s easy to use it as a reference to go back to and check when needed. It’s definitely one of these book you should keep near by your working desk.

About the author

Jeff Johnson, the author of this book, is President and Principal Consultant at UI Wizards, Inc. A product usability consulting firm that offers UI design, usability reviews, usability testing, and training. He has previously written GUI Bloopers and GUI Bloopers 2.0. Both books that deal with the same subject, User Interface Design.

Final verdict

If you’re designing or building User Interfaces, this book is a must read. Learning about and understanding the underlying psychological mechanisms behind common design principles will definitely make you a better designer/developer. It will make you better equipped to make the right design decisions for different scenarios. So don’t wait, buy it now! It’s well worth the money!

Book information

Title:

Designing with the mind in mind

Author:

Jeff Johnson

Publisher:

Morgan Kaufmann (June 3, 2010)

Pages:

200

ISBN:

978-0-123-75030-3

ISBN-13:

978-0-123-75030-3

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Buy on CDON.COM (Sweden)

Further resources

Jeff has a great presentation on SlideShare, Psych 101: The Psychological Basis for UI Design Rules, that contains a lot of information from the book.

One thing to notice is that this book is about processes rather than how to actually design things. So if your looking for a design book this is not it. If on the other hand you’re looking for a book about the process of coming up with the design for web sites and web applications this is definitely a great book. It doesn’t go into great detail about each specific part of the process but provides a good overview and includes many great pointers to other resources.

The book is really hands on. It provides lots of descriptions of how to actually do things. Like signing a contract with the customer or choosing the right user research method.

The structure of the book

The first few chapters of the book is about the different roles of a UX designer in a project team. It’s also about how to create proposals and how to plan the project.

1. The Tao of UXD
2. The Project Ecosystem
3. Proposals for Consultants and Freelancers

Then there’s a few chapters about how to gather initial business requirements and how to do initial user research. There’s also a chapter about how Search Engine Optimization fits in the UX process.

4. Project Objectives and Approach
5. Business Requirements
6. User Research
7. Personas
8. User Experience Design and Search Engine Optimization

The last chapters of the book is about how to transition from defining to designing. They describe different techniques and approaches of coming up with the structure and design of the site. Examples of techniques are Site Maps, Task Flows, Wireframes and Prototypes. There’s also a chapter on how to perform usability tests with users and lastely there’s a chapter on how to transition from design to the actual development of the site.

9. Transition: From Defining to Designing
10. Site Maps and Task Flows
11. Wireframes and Annotations
12. Prototyping
13. Design Testing with Users
14. Transition: From Design to Development and Beyond

Bonus material

The book comes with a bonus, online-only chapter called A brief Guide to Meetings (pdf). I suggest that you download that chapter and read it to get a sense of the style of the book. There’s also an online chapter from the book available at the Peachpit website. The chapter is called Project Objectives and Approach.

Apart from those there’s additional documents and templates available at the download area of the book site.

Final thoughts

The book is really well edited. I haven’t been able to find a single typo. I found it very enjoyable to read and even if a lot of the information was familiar to me there were still grains of gold to be found. The best chapter for me was Chapter 9 – Transition: From Defining to Designing. It described different approaches on how to come to consensus about what the primary goals of the projects are that I really haven’t thought of before.

If you want an overview of the UX design process and an introduction to different UX techniques and approaches, read this book! I highly recommend it!

Book information

Title:

A Project Guide to UX Design

Author:

Carolyn Chandler and Russ Unger

Publisher:

New Riders Press; 1 edition (March 23, 2009)

Pages:

288

ISBN:

0-321-60737-6

ISBN-13:

978-0-321-60737-9

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Further resources

The book site

As always Steve’s writing style is relaxed but still to the point. He’s very humorous and there are a lot of things in the book that makes me smile. The book is nicely designed and is rich with illustrations that breaks up the text and make it more enjoyable to read. It’s not a long book. As he states himself, it’s short enough to read on a long flight. I think that’s a good thing.

I really enjoy Steve’s pragmatic approach to the subject. He manages to demystify the subject and make the case that anyone, well almost anyone, can perform usability tests and benefit greatly from it. Throughout the book he delivers maxims which contains the most important points. Two of my favorites are “A morning a month, that’s all we ask” and “Start earlier than you think makes sense”.

The book also contains lots of extra material, such as sample test scripts, a consent form and a video of him actually performing a usability test. You can watch the video yourself from the book’s companion site. I think that these add greatly to the value of the book since they provide you with concrete tools to get started.

Conclusion

If you’re interested in usability testing, already do them or plan to start doing them, this is definitely a book for you. It does not have all the answers but will provide you with all the information you need to get started. If you’ve conducted usability test before I’m sure that you will still find lots of useful information.

All in all this is a great book and I highly recommend it! If you haven’t read his first book, Don’t Make Me Think already, I highly recommend that you read it too.

Book information

Title:

Rocket Surgery Made Easy

Author:

Steve Krug

Publisher:

New Riders Press; 1 edition (December 18, 2009)

Pages:

168

ISBN:

0-321-65729-2

ISBN-13:

978-0-321-65729-9

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Further resources

The book site

I’ve truly enjoyed Dan’s two former books Web Standards Solutions and Bulletproof Web Design. It was in fact from these books that I first learned the concepts of graceful degradation and progressive enhancement. I also learned clever CSS styling techniques that I’ve been using ever since.

In this new book Dan introduces the concept of Progressive Enrichment. It’s an extension of Progressive Enhancement and in a nutshell it’s about being OK with that web designs will look slightly different in different web browsers. Furthermore it’s about not letting the smallest common denominator deciding which techniques to use but rather reward the more forward-thinking browsers with a slightly more polished look than the other ones (read Internet Explorer). What this means is that it’s OK to start using some CSS 3 properties like border-radius and RGBA right now even though they’re not yet widely adopted.

If you’re still unsure about whether web sites have to look exactly the same in all browser or not, pay a visit at www.dowebsitesneedtolookexactlythesameineverybrowser.com.

The book also contains some ideas on how to reuse CSS between projects. Sort of like building you own lightweight CSS framework like Blueprint CSS and YAML. Dan explains the value of a global reset and some basic CSS rules that’s usable in every project.

It’s a true joy to read Dans texts. The writing style is relaxed but still to the point. The examples are thoroughly explained but doesn’t feel verbose. There’s also a laid back humor in the texts that make them even more enjoyable. As you probably noticed that I’m a big fan of Dan’s writing and the truth is that I wish that I could write like that. He’s just awesome.

Guest writer

This book features guest writer Ethan Marcotte who’s been writing a chapter about “The Fluid Grid”. Ethan is a renowned Web designer/developer from Airbag Industries. This chapter describes how to work with fluid grid-based designs. It contains both some history of grid-based design in print as well as techniques to incorporate them in a web design.

Included DVD

Included in the book I bought was a DVD featuring Dan explaining 10 design guidelines. The DVD was pretty OK but didn’t feature anything the book didn’t include. I guess that it’s primarily aimed at people that are not web designers and need to be oriented about some core concepts. Despite that, Dan playing ukulele in the background makes it well worth the time

Conclusion

If you’re interested in starting to use CSS 3 in your designs I highly recommend this book. Not so much for that it’s chock full of exciting CSS 3 properties because it’s not, but rather because it introduces ways to start using them right now without breaking the designs in older browsers. Anyway you’re in for a great read.

Further reading

Read more about the book at it’s acompaning web site handcraftedcss.com. You can also read more from Dan Cederholm at his blog Simplebits.com.

Book information

Title:

Handcrafted CSS: More Bulletproof Web Design

Author:

Dan Cederholm and Ethan Marcotte

Publisher:

New Riders Press; 1 Pap/DVD edition (August 20, 2009)

Pages:

288

ISBN:

0321658531

ISBN-13:

978-0321658531

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The authors

Designing Web Interfaces is written by Bill Scott and Theresa Neil. Bill Scott has a background at Yahoo! and is currently working at Netflix. This shows in the examples of design patterns since a lot of them is taken from these companies websites.

Theresa Neil is a User Experience consultant located in Austin, Texas. She has worked with Bill before at Sabre Airline Solutions to form their User Experience team.

Organization of the book

The book is organized around 6 design principles. For each principle a number of design patterns are explained. The principles are:

• Make it direct
• Keep it Lightweight
• Stay on the Page
• Provide an Invitation
• Use Transitions
• React immediately

At the Explore the book section at the books companion site there’s a short explanation of each principle as well as a presentation of the design patterns presented in each chapter. So if you want to know more about what the book is all about I suggest you look there.

At several places in the book the authors references to About Face 3 by Alan Cooper. I like that since I think that’s an indispensable book that every Interaction Designer should read.

My take

I think that this book serves both as an inspiration in finding the right design patterns for the projects I’m working on as well as a deeper understanding of the underlying core principles when choosing and designing interaction elements. It has certainly provided me with a deeper understanding of the ins and outs of drag and drop interactions which is thoroughly examined in the book.

The book is well written, contains lots of illustrations and generally provides really good examples. If you’re designing/building highly interactive web sites or is interested in learning more about web design patterns, I’m certain that you will benefit from reading this book. I highly recommend it!

Resources

The books companion site is located at www.designingwebinterfaces.com. There you’ll find more information about the book, as well as links to other resources about design patterns.

Book information

Title:

Designing Web Interfaces: Principles and Patterns for Rich Interactions

Author:

Bill Scott and Theresa Neil

Publisher

O’Reilly Media, Inc.; 1 edition (January 30, 2009)

Pages_

332

ISBN

0596516258

ISBN-13

978-0596516253

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