Review by David Little

Theresa Neil’s and Bill Scott’s Designing Web Interfaces (Amazon: US|CA|UK|DE) catalogues and describes seventy five design patterns – solutions to common problems – for building rich interactions on the Web. Not a book about visual design or particular technologies but rather about the whys and hows of interaction design for the Web; or maybe more simply, standards for Web interaction:

This book is about interaction design: specifically, interaction design on the Web… It is a distillation of practices, patterns and principles for creating a rich experience unique to the Web … The Web comes with its own context. It is not the desktop.

Scott and Neil have built their library of patterns on the back of many years’ experience; both as user experience specialists at Sabre, Scott’s involvement with the Yahoo! Design Pattern Library and Netflix and Neil’s work as a interface design consultant.

In just under three hundred pages the patterns are demonstrated and explained in terms of higher-level design principles. Although many of these principles relate to those long-established in the field of Human-Computer Interaction (HCI), readers need no background in it or interaction design to understand them. Any HCI jargon (e.g. “affordance”) is clearly explained and used only to aid understanding of a principle or pattern.

The book centres on six principles: “Make it direct”, “Keep it lightweight”, “Stay on the page”, “Provide an invitation”, “Use transitions” and “React immediately”. The principles are further broken down into a series of more specific examples which in turn contain a number of patterns. 

Many of these patterns will be familiar to those who use the Web on a regular basis, although one might be sometimes hard-pushed to describe them with snappy titles as in the book, e.g. “detail overlay”, “affordance invitation” or “multi-field inline edit”. Unsurprisingly, all patterns come with their own challenges and possibilities of abuse which can lead to ”anti-patterns”, to use Scott and Neil’s term.

Each pattern is described in some detail, alongside colour screenshots (also available online via the book’s Flickr stream). These are followed by discussions of the considerations of using the technique and tips and summary lists of best practices. Even interaction styles which may seem on the surface reasonably straightforward are surprisingly complex when considered in-depth. For instance, the chapter on “Drag and drop” calculates that there are ninety “interesting moments” or states at which interaction is possible, ranging from what happens on page load, mouse hover to dragging to a valid or invalid target, or accepting or rejecting the drop. 

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Of course, if just one thing has been demonstrated in the Web’s history, it’s that if something terrible can be done, it certainly will be. The book’s anti-patterns demonstrate how to get interaction wrong, from classic examples such as “mystery meat” navigation where icons provide no obvious clues as to their functions, through to “mouse traps” where overlays get accidentally triggered, obscuring content and infuriating users, and my favourites, “needless fanfare” where interface elements are announced with pointless and pretentious animations and “animation gone wild” which speaks for itself (see the Nasa website for a bewildering example of this); as Neil and Scott state,

The primary purpose of transitions is to communicate, and no amount of graphic trickery will make a noisy interface compelling.

Whilst the book is detailed, well laid-out and written in a clear, engaging and often witty style, it suffers a little from its organisation. It is certainly useful to describe design principles; after all these stay more constant than particular interaction styles. But grouping the patterns by principle makes the book a little difficult to navigate. Although in essence a reference work, it is difficult to dip in and out of. Instead the reader will benefit more from reading chapters in their entirety and many principles and patterns cross-reference others. 

I found the index more useful than the table of contents, although even that was not without its problems. For instance, the word “form” is not referenced, although patterns relating to forms are present throughout the book. Designers will also need to learn the vocabulary of interaction styles: knowing that a horizontally scrolling image gallery is called a carousel and the difference between an overlay and an inlay will certainly help in tracking down a particular pattern.

Its own Information architecture aside, the book is well designed: clearly aimed more at designers than a typical O’Reilly tech title, it features colour coding of principles, clear typography and many colour images. Some of the images are a little small and, as they try to demonstrate transitional effects, occasionally confusing. However, the book’s Flickr stream provides access to larger images and videos of transitions. 

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The book is also supported by its own website which allows for more interactive browsing of the patterns, alongside an actively maintained blog with entries by the book’s authors on further patterns and anti-patterns.

Hinted at, but not discussed in any depth in the book is the fact that all of the patterns rely on the use of technologies such as Javascript, Flash or Silverlight, all of which come with an accessibility overhead. Also, whether an interaction style is truly relevant to your website will only be revealed by testing it with your site’s users.

Designing Web Interfaces provides clarification on key Web interaction styles and their context. Pretty much indispensable for anyone involved in designing or developing websites, it is of course not a guarantee of success if used on its own.

Rating: ★★★★☆ 

Designing Web Interfaces is published by O’Reilly Media. You can also find it on Amazon (US|CA|UK|DE) or in The Designer’s Review of Books store.

About the author

David Little is a Web user interface designer and developer, based in London. He blogs about Web UI matters and other more random topics at Littled.net, and occasionally tweets at @djlittle.

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Review by Matthew Sanders

Donna Spencer’s debut Card Sorting: Designing Usable Categories (Amazon US) distills several years experience applying card sorting techniques to web projects into a highly practical guide on card sorting.

Some information architecture books take a general approach and cover a large range of topics in a single book. These books serve an important purpose of explaining what information architecture is, best practice principles, and how to communicate designs. Because they cover a broad range of topics they can only go into so much detail, and in the nuts and bolts of a project can leave you with unanswered questions.

Card sorting is one of a range of techniques (including interviews, surveys, and search term analysis) that can be used to give insights about how people group information, and what language people use to think about these groups. Rather than writing a more general guide that covers the broader topic of categorisation, Donna focuses entirely on the technique of card sorting.

The basic process behind card sorting is straightforward: you create a set of cards that represent content to be organised and have a range of different people (either one-on-one or as a group) sort the cards into logical groups.

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After a few introductory chapters on the theory and benefits of card sorting the remaining chapters are structured by the various steps that are involved in a card sort from the start to finish.

Four chapters cover the details of preparing for a card sort, with chapters like “Choose the Method”, “Choose the Content”, “Choose the People”, and “Make the Cards” it’s clear that this is a very hands on book.

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Chapters are short, but do a good job of describing what you need to know. For instance, the “Choose the Method” chapter is only 9 pages (including a half page summary) but walks you though choosing between open versus closed card sorts, team versus individual sorting, and in-person versus software methods.

One of the most valuable chapters for people will be the chapter that looks at how to choose the content that is covered in a card sort. The first card sort I organised was for the content on an airline website, which in retrospect was a huge failure. Nearly all of the problems that I encountered in my early experience with card sorting would have been avoided if I’d had access to this one chapter alone. It covers topics about how to choose representative content from a site with potentially thousands of pages, how to deal with representing a mix of content and functionality on a website, and tips on labelling your cards that will avoid leading people into forming specific groups.

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The stage that comes to mind when people think of card sorting – where participants actually form the groups – is covered in a single chapter (Managing the Sort). This is the most fascinating part of the process because you find that different people have quite unique ways that they think about content – even in areas that you might assume would form obvious groups. I once worked with a colleague who felt that this is where the true value of card sorting is and you don’t need to go any further.

Donna and my colleague don’t share the same view, and the next four chapters describe further steps that can happen after the act of grouping the cards is over. These chapters cover analysis of data collected from card sorts and briefly how to document the card sort in a report.

For most people, this book covers all the practical knowledge you’ll ever need to know about preparing, coordinating and analysing card sorts.

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But, at less than 200 pages, don’t expect this to be an exhaustive resource.

For example, the theory of card sorting is only briefly covered in an introductory chapter (but references are included for further reading) and when it comes to the analysis of results, statistical methods are only given a cursory review – instead Donna describes how to use a spreadsheet-based technique that she has refined over various projects. (This spreadsheet and instructions for use are also available as a free download.)

Rather than seeing the brevity of these topics as an oversight I see it as a merit since it prevents the book from becoming bloated and overwhelming.

Some of the ideas in Card Sorting can be found in various blog posts Donna has written on both her own blog, and also at Boxes and Arrows. While these posts introduce aspects of card sorting, the book excels in providing a complete picture of the card sorting process from start to finish.

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Donna’s writing style is down to earth, confident, and refreshingly jargon free. As well as being useful for design practitioners, it could also be accessible to project stakeholders or clients.

Like other books published by Rosenfeld Media the page layouts are crisp, there is an accompanying website for the book, most of the book illustrations are available on Flickr for use with a Creative Commons license, and the cover is a beautiful minimalist design from The Heads of State.

Card Sorting is a great book if you are interested in running a card sort on your next project but you’re hesitant either because you’re unfamiliar or have had a bad experience with card sorting in the past. It really is a fail-proof recipe.

If you consider yourself experienced at card sorting, don’t expect to find anything groundbreaking. But that doesn’t mean there won’t be something new to takeaway. For me, Card Sorting convinced me to rethink group card sorts, which I had previously thought of as pretty much pointless. At the very least, it’s great to be able to reference a real book to back you up if you’ve got questions from a doubtful stakeholder.

An important point that Donna raises is that card sorting is only a tool, and while it can help find a solution, it’s by no means a substitute for thinking:

‘Remember that you are the one who is doing the thinking, not the technique. You are smart and experienced and allowed to have good ideas–card sorting (and other techniques) is an aid to provide insights and help you create great solutions. But you are the one who puts it all together into a great solution. Follow your instincts, take some risks, and try new approaches.’

And while card sorting as a technique won’t give you magic answers without some effort, the book will give you a robust method to help understand how your users think and ultimately design better systems.

Rating: ★★★½☆ 

Card Sorting: Designing Usable Interfaces by Donna Spencer is published by Rosenfeld Media. The Designer’s Review of Books readers can use the code DROB for a 15% discount from the Rosenfeld Media store.

About the Reviewer

Mathew Sanders is freelance interaction designer living in beautiful New Zealand, who also happens to be a fan of card sorting.

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Review by David Sherwin

“If you wanna innovate, you gotta design. – Marty Neumeier

From the airy confines of interior design to the tailored minutae of the type designer, the varied disciplines of our profession continue to rush outwards like galaxies fleeing the Big Bang. And the force that drives our profession’s expansion? The universal process we call design.

As designers, we have lived and breathed this process often enough to embody its power, in whatever domain we choose. For a businessperson, however, design is nebulous. A slippery fish. When placed on a slide under the accountant’s microscope, design can perish – even in the most progressive corporate culture. And without design, there is no innovation.

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But do not fear. To the rescue is Marty Neumeier, with The Designful Company (Amazon: US|CA|
UK|DE). Much like Mr. Neumeier’s other bestsellers, The Brand Gap and Zag, his new whiteboard overview is set to completely reinvigorate how our profession engages executives in the boardroom. Finally, we have a shared vocabulary that marries aesthetics to business – and from a book with such simplicity, elegance, and verve, it’s downright humbling.

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The premise of the book is founded upon one of my favorite subjects, wicked problems:

“…problems so persistent, pervasive, or slippery that they seem insoluble. Unlike the relatively tame problems found in math, chess, or cost accounting, wicked problems tend to shift disconcertingly with every attempt to solve them. Moreover, the solutions are never right or wrong, just better or worse… In the world of business, managers face a subset of these problems: breakneck change, omniscient customers, balkanized markets, rapacious shareholders, traitorous employees, regulatory headlocks, and pricing pressure from desperate global competitors with little to lose and everything to gain.”

Wicked problems now completely govern the world of business and commerce. You can’t combat these problems in a traditional, Six Sigma-esque manner. Solving these problems requires replacing “the win-lose nature of the assembly line with the win-win nature of the network.”

This network is powered by considerations of human need. In order to accomplish this, you need to raise an executive’s view and application of design from the world of aesthetics – posters and toasters – ”to include “processes, systems, and organizations.” A powerful byproduct of embedding design within a corporation is increased agility, which helps businesses to create change instead of reacting to change. Or, in Marty’s words:

“A company can’t ‘will’ itself to be agile… To count agility as a core competence, you have to embed it into the culture… It’s one thing to inject a company WITH inventiveness. It’s another thing to build a company ON inventiveness. To organize for agility, your company needs to develop a ‘designful mind.’”

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Demonstrating ways in which design can be factored into corporate governance is the core argument of his book, which he unpacks elegantly across 180 well-designed pages. In simple language, he provides simple descriptions of such complex topics as: the value of using abductive logic as part of a design process versus the use of strictly rational thought; the importance of design making to inform business decision-making; how design thinking can permeate every level of a firm’s corporate ladder; and an intriguing chart that aligns aesthetic principles such as scale, proportion, pattern, and repetition with considerations of business strategy and organizational structure. The latter, with its fusion of art and business considerations, has been long-needed and will immediately enrich any designer’s vocabulary.

The last third of the book is devoted to what Marty calls “levers for change.” Most savvy designers will recognize many of these tactics, which are regularly employed in design and innovation firms with varying degrees of effect. However, for a C-level executive that is behind the innovation curve, these tactics may be downright revolutionary.

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Take, for example, “Lever 2: Weave a Rich Story.” Every action that someone takes within your company is part of the overall story that you’re telling to your customers and to your coworkers. But Marty wants you to think of the meta-story for any organization:

“While revolution must be led from the top, it rarely starts at the top. The spirit of revolution already exists in the hearts and minds of motivated employees and loyal customers. It shows up in the individual stories that employees tell about the work they do. And it shows up in the individual stories that customers tell about the products they love. Often a leader need only act as a kind of managing editor, shaping the stories to align with a shared vision. To make the best use of this lever, all the little stories you tell about your company and its products should add up to one big story.”

To be effective, designers must be storytellers through their work, but our clients must be the stewards and owners of that story. In the end, it’s always their story to tell. And if companies better understand how to apply the power of design, they can better manifest that story and delight their customers across every touch point of the customer experience.

Sounds easy, right? Being that mindful about how your company behaves can be quite difficult to manage… that is, without the power of design. Marty uses JetBlue as a case study that describes in detail how this can be accomplished.

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Another notable lever is “Lever 9, Sanction Spitballing,” in which Marty describes ways to encourage more ideas from more employees from within your company to fuel the engine of innovation. However, my favorite lever is the one that closes the book: “Reward with Wicked Problems.”

“While most employees appreciate public acclaim and the occasional monetary award, the highest achievers want something more. They want bigger problems. They want an opportunity to tackle mean, hairy challenges and make a significant contribution to the company.”

Taking such a corporate stance takes guts, because if you’re tackling a wicked problem, you’re going to spend a lot of time wrestling with change. But as Marty says at the close of the book, “Change is power. Design is change.” Being able to be the maelstrom instead of stand within the maelstrom is going to separate successful enterprises from major corporate failures in the upcoming years.

In the back of the book, Marty includes a comprehensive reading list, a sound-bite summary of the most delicious details from across the book, and a list of the top ten wicked problems facing today’s businesses – as well as wicked solutions that could begin to untangle the mess that we call today’s marketplace.

If you’re looking for one book to hand to your design client that will move their consideration of design to a higher level, this is it. And it’s almost a shame that this book is filed away in the management section at your local bookstore – because every strategy-minded designer should own it as well.

Rating: ★★★★½ 

You can find The Designful Company on Amazon (US|CA|UK|DE) or The Designer’s Review of Books store.

About the Reviewer

David Sherwin is Sr. Art Director, UX Strategy at Worktank in Seattle, Washington. He maintains the blog ChangeOrder: Business + Process of Design and is writing a book about concepting for HOW Design Press due to be released in November 2010.

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(Guest Review by Shannon Smith)

Mark Boulton just saved me a ton of money on design school.

His new book, A Practical Guide to Designing for the Web, is meant to help Web designers who haven’t been to design school ‘learn the basics of graphic design and apply them to their Web designs – producing more effective, polished, detailed and professional sites.’ I definitely fall into that category.

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Of course his book isn’t actually a replacement a full design degree. Unless it is. As a freelance designer, the chance of having the time, and of course as I’ve already mentioned, the money, to go back to school for a design degree are slim. And, like many designers, I already have a degree or two under my belt that bring other skills to my work, not to mention clients knocking at the door.

Nor is this book Web Design 101.

‘I wanted more of a conversation. More informal, more of me. The content is still practical, but it’s not a lesson plan.’

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The result is an easy-to-read 264-page book of 25 chapters divided into five sections. The first two sections, Getting Started and Research and Ideas, mainly cover getting started as a Web designer: where to work, how to get ideas, what the design process looks like and a section on setting yourself up as a freelancer.

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Design school comes next: Typography, Colour and Layout. Those last three sections contain the best, most clearly written, easy-to-use explanation of basic design principals I have ever read.

Some of the material will be review – hopefully everyone has at least heard of the Golden Section/Golden Ratio. However much was new and interesting to me. The use of triangles in design is not often covered in other design books. The hierarchy of fonts, though not a new concept, is so well presented in an easy-to-use chart, that I was able to use it to examine my own designs right away.

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Boulton goes further, using his 15 years of experience in Web design to apply those design school concepts to the real world, or at least virtual world of Web design.

Learning how to classify fonts into families is interesting, but Boulton takes typography into the world of pixels and fluid layouts. As a Web designer I’m not sure I’ll ever quite master the proper use of hyphens, n-dashes, and m-dashes that Boulton recommends. Ligatures-use will only come into play in rare circumstances and are still not fully supported on the Web. Still, the information is good to know.

The section on colour is similar with some basics at first, followed by more in-depth treatment with the whole being applied to the Web. Some of the colour combination examples, and the information about how to use them on the Web were immediately, intuitively useful. I can’t wait to test out those patterns on my next designs.

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Then there are grids. It’s a subject Boulton has written and spoken (PDF) about extensively. Boulton covers how to build a basic grid system, how to prototype with a CSS framework (in this case Blueprint) and then how to break the grid for effect. He also touches on the challenges of using grids on the Web, including browser incompatibilities, and the usefulness of new Web technologies, including HTML 5 tags. Each step is illustrated with examples from his own work.

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This book is exceptionally useful, and the timing couldn’t be better.

‘Simple, sophisticated graphic design is making a shift from the online world to the Web as more designers are finding that the tools which were formerly so constrictive – the browsers – now allow them to create the layouts that once were difficult or impossible. The Web is looking good, and will only get better.’

There is a sample pdf online and you can also read the original blog posts that inspired the book. But with a PDF version at £12 and a printed one at £29, buying the book with its additional content is well worth it.

Rating: ★★★★½ 

A Practical Guide to Designing for the Web by Mark Boulton is published by 5 Simple Steps. 264 pages. Boulton’s third book, Designing Grid Systems for the Web, is due out this fall.

About the Reviewer

Shannon Smith is freelance Web designer and developer and founder of Café Noir Design. She lives and works in Montreal.

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What makes a good ad? What makes an award-winning creative idea? These days its easy to get distracted by fancy art direction and technological novelties, but when you strip all that away, does the idea still stand up?

This is the essence of Pete Barry’s The Advertising Concept Book (Amazon: US|CA|UK|DE) in which you won’t see a single glossy image. No 3D, no photography, no screenshots, just pencil sketches and thumbnails. Sketches are still a staple of the process of developing concepts and pitches in everything from interaction and product design through to classic above-the-line advertising, which is what the book focuses on.

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“This way, the work is judged by its content, not by its cover. And in terms of my own work, I’d rather have a portfolio of brilliant-thinking roughs than brilliant-looking duffs. Showing fifty years’ worth of rough comps not only helps teachers to explain why an “old” ad is still a great ad, but it also forces students to think now and design later, hence reversing their initial temptation to grab a computer instead of a pencil.”

As someone who teaches interactive media and has run a digital media programme, this gets the biggest of big cheers from me. Learning how to use the tools is important, but not at the expense of the idea. Coming up with ideas and putting your creativity up for criticism isn’t easy. Sometimes it can be soul destroying. But it is part of the process in whatever creative field you are working in.

Over my own years of teaching I have observed two reasons why students cling to the software. The first is that they often mistakenly think it is what will make them money when they leave. That’s true to a certain extent, but there are thousands of other people out there who know how to use Photoshop just as there are millions who can use a pencil. In fact, many people can use Photoshop spectacularly badly.

The second reason is because software skills are something solid and graspable whilst personal, creative development is mushy and scary. It need not be software – there are plenty of people obsessing over the perfect lens or sketchbook. When it feels like you have no ideas and are creatively all at sea, that filter menu in Photoshop looks like an attractive lifebelt, but it can just as easily be a lead weight.

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The Advertising Concept Book is designed primarily for students (and teachers) and provides a well-structured and complete course on advertising, including several exercises that students can try. The book works through the entire process from basic tools, to strategy and campaign executions across all media – print, TV, ambient, interactive, radio and integrated campaigns.

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Saying the book is for students is selling it short. Given some of the terrible advertising that bombards my poor eyeballs every day, there are plenty of advertising and marketing professionals that would get a great deal out of this book. Every new recruit should be given a copy as part of their induction process, perhaps then we’d see some improvement.

“Over time you will become critical of many ads, even awards winners [...] Once you start to look at ads properly, it won’t be long before you’ll be wincing with embarrassment as you look back at the ads that you thought were good.”

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Although Barry describes the various roles in advertising, he avoids prioritising art direction or copywriting and points out that this partnership is a blend of skills that overlap and complement each other to create the best ideas. The “think now, design now” mantra remains a consistent focus throughout the book.

The Advertising Concept Book takes all the best parts of fifty years’ worth of awards annuals and, along with the rough comps, adds Barry’s accompanying wisdom, which is both engaging and enlightening. His years of experience – first as an art director at Ogilvy in London and since 2000 as a copywriter in New York and a teacher at Syracuse University – have not gone to waste.

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My father had an advertising agency for many years, which left me pretty cynical about the industry. Yet, I found the book much more engaging than I expected and read it in detail from cover to cover. Some of the approaches to generating ideas have helped me with some recent small projects and certainly sharpened my own creative thinking.

If there is a criticism it is that is that the less classical advertising areas (such as interactive) don’t go into as much detail as I would have liked. This is probably a little unfair because Barry makes it clear from the start that the book is really about straight advertising and I’m being picky because interactive is my own area. (Actually a piece of work for Levi’s by Antirom appears in the book, so I can’t complain).

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If you’re a student you should definitely steal buy this book and if you are involved in teaching design and media, you should buy three copies, one for you and two for your institution’s library. If you are a professional in advertising and are wondering why you haven’t yet won any awards, buy The Advertising Concept Book and you might find out why.

Rating: ★★★★½ 

You can support The Designer’s Review of Books by buying The Advertising Concept Book from Amazon (US|CA|UK|DE) or The Designer’s Review of Books store.

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(Guest review by Steve ‘Doc’ Baty)

For people who approached information architecture via Rosenfeld & Morville’s “Polar Bear” book Information Architecture for the World Wide Web, there was a gap left between an understanding of what was meant by information architecture versus how to actually do information architecture. The knowledge about IA failed to provide a starting point on the practical implementation of those ideas.

Information Architecture: Blueprints for the Web (Amazon: US|CA|UK|DE) is the book that bridges the gap between theory and practice. In fact, the book is insanely practical and full of common sense. This is the IA book your grandmother might write; wisdom of the ages stuff.

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‘Blueprints’ 2nd edition is the result of a collaboration between Christina Wodtke (author of the first edition) and Austin Govella, and has a wonderful sense of humour in evidence throughout: “Are you thinking what I’m thinking?…”, “I think so, but what would we do with that many Frenchmen in scarves?”

The book opens with the authors’ 8 principles of Web site design:

1. Design for wayfinding
2. Set expectations and provide feedback
3. Design ergonomically
4. Be consistent; consider standards
5. Provide error support – prevent, protect & inform
6. Rely on recognition rather than recall
7. Provide for people of varying skill levels
8. Provide contextual help & documentation

The remainder of the book steps through an IA-centric view of a Web project –heavy on content, light on interaction and completely digital.

In the second chapter the authors look at the balance between user, business and technology requirements. If I was to make on criticism of this book it would be that the way in which these three are balanced is barely discussed. However, at least the need is highlighted and some solid examples given.

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In the third chapter – Sock drawers and CD Racks – Everything must be organized – we are taken through the thing that lives at the heart of every hot-blooded IA: organizing stuff. We are introduced to IA concepts such as faceted classification, navigation; and the role of good information organization in satisfying the needs of visitors. The authors use a very simple and approachable card-sorting example as the back-bone of the chapter.

“If you want people to be able to find what they are looking for, you must organize the contents of your Web site based on how people think about those contents. The organization of a clothing store should reflect how people think clothing is organized…”

A bricklayer’s view of Information Architecture – Chapter Four – drills into more detailed IA concepts such as metadata, controlled vocabularies, equivalence, social classifications and tagging. Despite the heavy-duty concepts, the authors adopt a light touch that helps maintain the approachability of the subject material.

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In Search and Ye shall find – Chapter Five – we apply the concepts introduced in the previous chapter to the task of designing a search interface and engine that helps people answer their questions (not just find stuff). Some pragmatic advice is, again, dispensed liberally, such as: all the optimization of the search engine won’t help if your interface loads slowly.

“I think we all know what search is. It’s the magic box. You put in a word or two, search reads your mind and tells you what you were wondering about. Like the iPod shuffle, which seems to instinctively know what song you want to hear next, it understands you better than your mother and father, and its hard to believe it’s made by humans.”

The authors make it clear – here and throughout the entire book – that whilst not simple, this stuff isn’t rocket science either.

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Chapter Six takes a look at user scenarios, pathways and prioritization through the use of personas. This chapter is probably the most obviously user-centred design of the book, but doesn’t get overly preachy. Personas and scenarios are presented as a way to reach a destination – in this case, the site path diagram
– rather than gates along the road.

Chapters Seven and Eight were perhaps my favourite chapters of the entire book. In these chapters we move from the conceptual to the concrete. Rather than describing wireframes and what goes in them, the authors look at what goes into making up a Web page (or application screen) and then talks about how to communicate those through wireframes.

In these two chapters we take our conceptual work – scenarios, site paths, etc. – and translate these into tangible page layouts. We also encounter some theory – information seeking behaviour for example – as a way of better understanding how users will navigate through the site or application.

The use of theory as a means of providing structure and context to the practical ideas, rather than as an end in itself, is perhaps one of the greatest strengths of Blueprints. By the end of the book the reader has been exposed to a great deal of IA theory: metadata, faceted classifications, equivalence and hierarchical relationships, controlled vocabularies, personas, user scenarios – the list goes on. But the theory is almost incidental to the practical aspects of the book.

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For many UX practitioners – especially those who arrived to the practice from fields other than information architecture or library science – the theory of classification is obscure. And, quite rightly, deemed irrelevant to the work many UX practitioners undertake on a day-to-day basis. But it is for exactly that reason that practitioners need a book like this: for those times when the deeper theory of information architecture and classification is needed.

To help cement the ideas explored throughout the book the penultimate chapter is dedicated to a semi-fictional case study – a new article page layout for the Boxes and Arrows site. This example provides a very solid close to the book, leaving just a brief “Looking Ahead” chapter to close things off. Without really trying to, the authors also manage to introduce the reader to a wide range of deliverables, providing examples that will help any new practitioner get started.

“Web site creators are on a cusp right now, poised between being part of the problem or part of the solution. Should we continue to throw every bit of data we’ve got onto the Web and ‘let Google sort it out’? Or do we want to start thinking about why we are putting things onto the Internet, what we want to accomplish by doing so, and how we can best accomplish those goals?”

This may just be the one book on information architecture for the Web you need to read.

Rating: ★★★★½ 

Information Architecture: Blueprints for the Web (2nd Edition) is available from Amazon (US|CA|UK|DE) or The Designer’s Review of Books store.

A sample chapter is also available on the Peachpit press web site and another as a PDF from Wodtke’s own site for the book.

About the Reviewer

Steve Baty is a User Experience strategist and Principal at Meld Consulting with over a decade of commercial experience. He usually solves problems for businesses, but often for Government and not-for-profits. He is an organizer of the UX Australia conference and UX Book Club and an editor of interaction design
magazine, Johnny Holland.

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(Guest Review by David Sherwin

Underwhelmed.

We’ve all had this reaction when encountering a product or service that just didn’t cut it.

Take, for example, the alarm clock next to my bed. There are two alarm switches side by side: one for me, and one for my wife. Invariably, every morning I hit the wrong switch and the alarm keeps sounding. By the time I’ve shut the thing down, my wife is wide awake. And she goes to work two hours after me…

I kept thinking about my alarm clock while I was reading the all-too-brief Subject to Change: Creating Great Products and Services for an Uncertain World (Amazon: US|CA|UK|DE). This book was penned by three current Adaptive Path employees, including their president Peter Merholz, and their emeritus director of technology, David Verba.

Adaptive Path (AP) is well known as one of the global leaders in providing product experience strategy and design services. As part of their overall business strategy, AP provides training and events to help educate designers, managers of design, and business executives on many of the topics of discussion in Subject to Change.

I have read and loved most of the other books written by AP staffers, such as The Elements of User Experience and Designing for Interaction. They have been formative, in every sense of the word.

So why am I comparing this book to my alarm clock?

Reason #1: This book is a wake-up call for any business executive that has no idea how to address product or service experience issues.

Or, as Jesse James Garrett puts it in the foreword,

“The key to creating successful products and services in a rapidly changing world is not resistance to unexpected change, but the flexibility to adapt to it. That flexibility must take a number of forms: flexible design processes to adapt to new insights into user behavior, flexible development processes to adapt to new technological opportunities, and flexible decision-making processes to adapt to new and competitive market realities.”

From reading this book, readers will gain a holistic approach towards how they can handle experience considerations across the delivery of their company’s products and services. What I found especially bold was the authors’ foray into cultivating empathy as a core attribute of fostering business success. The following paragraph precedes a discussion about moving beyond tasks and goals to fostering considerations of behaviors and motivations in the course of planning a product or service experience:

“Taking a more holistic, experience-focused approach to design means taking a more holistic view of people. What we need are frameworks and terminology that are closer to the ways people talk about and live their lives. To understand people as people, our understanding of our customers and users must better match our understandings of ourselves. After all, our customers aren’t so different from us when it comes down to their basic motivations and behaviors. Recognizing them is an important step toward empathy with our customers.”

Who can disagree with that? Who doesn’t want more empathy with their customers?

(Click to enlarge)

Reason #2: You hear the signal of the alarm loud and clear… and that’s all that you hear.

Subject to Change contains many descriptions of how to empathize with customers, conduct qualitative research over purely quantitative research, make research actionable, foster best-in-class design principles within your enterprise, and practice agile design and development methods as a foundational component of crafting your products/services.

As an example, here’s one that I admired about the power of tangible, designed ideas in the process of driving innovation:

“Strategy is about choosing in which small set of activities and capabilities your organization should invest so that the resulting offerings create a sustainable advantage. Prototyping at the intersection between your organization’s capabilities and customers’ lives lets you model an experience that customers will love, the plan backward through organizational processes and operations to figure out how that experience can be delivered…

Fabricating ideas makes them plainly visible and accessible to evaluation, implementation, improvement, and delivery. But planning a system for finding and deploying ideas can take an organization to the next level.”

This section is followed by a longer discussion of how to create what the authors call The Long “Wow!” As designers, this idea of the repeated “Wow” for our client’s customers — and in how we serve our clients as well — is a valuable way to think about approaching the results of our design thinking over time. You can sell the author’s high-level thinking here to your boss without much struggle.

But then the tires need to hit the road. This book is all description and narrative. It is intentionally devoid of any actionable tools to dive into implementation. At the end of the book, there are references for all the quotes and material referenced in the text, but no next steps for how you can dive into, say, implementing agile methods as part of your business practice.

(Click to enlarge)

For AP’s focus on paid education and training as part of their service offering, I found this omission to be quite telling. This book is not quiet in its evangelization of AP’s methodologies, products, and services. It is peppered with brief case studies drawn from their overall practice. Yes, these guys are definitely the pros when it comes to thinking about this stuff. But you won’t find much content here that will let you dive right into doing it.

Reason #3: To improve the alarm clock, the manufacturer should have prototyped the alarm clock with users. Then I wouldn’t wake up my wife so often…

I really wish that Adaptive Path had prototyped the final book content and design to match how they present the material in the real world.

When Subject to Change was coming out, a friend forwarded me a video that had been filmed at Google. Two of the authors, Brandon Shauer and David Verba, gave a 45-minute presentation that I found quite persuasive. It stuck with me for some time.

Upon reading the book, with its dry tone, flat business book-style layout, and poorly reproduced black and white illustrations, I kept thinking about how I had extracted more value from the video. In person, they had much stronger visualizations of concepts like the Long “Wow!” The authors also went into a level of detail about third-party case studies, such as descriptions of the processes involved in creating Target’s ClearRX and Nike+, that were sorely lacking in the book.

(Click to enlarge)

Don’t get me wrong. I’m glad that I read Subject to Change. This book added a level of nuance to my thinking as a manager of user experience. In client meetings, I found myself bringing up points from this book that helped me to steer and guide conversations away from features and poorly thought out goals (a.k.a. “We need a blog because our competitors have one”) to much broader considerations of their overall service experience. It also helped me start a dialogue within my own company about being more agile in how we practice design.

But I will shave down that kudo with a caveat. This book is only a starting point, and in order to advance your business practices as described in this book, you’ll need to scavenge your own toolkit of working methods.

And I know a great company that can help you with that…

Rating: ★★¾☆☆ 

If you found this review helpful, you can support The Designer’s Review of Books by buying Subject to Change from Amazon (US|CA|UK|DE) or The Designer’s Review of Books store.

Already read it and have a different opinion? Let us know in the comments.

About the Reviewer

David Sherwin is Sr. Art Director, UX Strategy at Worktank in Seattle, Washington. He maintains the blog ChangeOrder: Business + Process of Design and is writing a book about concepting for HOW Design Press.

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“Remember the small, cheeky, hand-scribbled notes that were reproduced on a photo or poster design? Those with the simple message: “I was here!” Indicating that someone actually worked with the photo and that these are their thoughts.” – from the Preface to Tangible: High Touch Visuals.

In such a digitally dominant world, Gestalten’s new book, Tangible: High Touch Visuals, is a reminder of the pleasure of the physical. Tangible is the third in a series of books starting with Hidden Track: How Visual Culture Is Going Places (2005) and Tactile: High Touch Visuals (2007) and explores the trend towards designers creating dioramas, sculptures and other physical environments. Naturally, object and interior designers and architects have always worked with three dimensions, but many of us spend an extraordinary amount of time awash in a world of pure pixels.

It is no accident that this movement (re)started in the early 2000s. After the dotcom crash many of my friends and colleagues saw their work simply disappear. Quite apart from turning up to work only to be met by bailiffs padlocking the doors and changing server passwords, many of their clients vanished overnight. The websites they had toiled over vanished with them, sometimes without so much as a screenshot to remember them by.

Whilst kicking their heels in a flooded freelance market, many of them turned to making physical objects, such as vinyl toys or interactive devices. Somewhere in the midst of what we can create in the digital world lurks an innate desire to make things that can be touched, smelled and turned in the hand. Russell Davies summed it up well a year ago:

I suspect it’s my unconscious telling me that I’m not equipped for the world we’re going to be living in. My core skill is probably using PowerPoint to persuade people and businesses to do their advertising slightly differently. That’s an increasingly abstract and useless thing. Because, however the future turns out it seems like a knowledge of the thinginess of things is going to be important.

Tangible is a book about those things. It divided into sections covering areas such as hand-built graphic design, extending the human body and public intervention. Not all of the examples fit neatly into these categories and they are fairly loosely applied.

Some of my favourites are in the Out of the Box chapter, which covers hand-built graphic design. Some of them are installations that are either standalone pieces or photographed for use in print. Others are physical interactive works such as Jessica Nebel’s Pixel It – a poster with individual flaps that can be pulled down to customize its ‘pixels’.

(Jessica Nebel’s Pixel It – click to enlarge)

Slinkachu’s wonderful Little People works feature in the Imitation and Mimicry section, but could happily sit in the Public Interventions:

(Slinkachu’s Snail Graff – click to enlarge)

On the Altered Identities front, there are some excellent camouflage works by Desiree Palmen and Emma Hack, but I loved the stylishness of Christian Tagliavini’s Dame di Cartone series:

(Dame di Cartone – click to enlarge)

The Spatial Compositions chapter covers works that blur the art/design divide. Many are installations in gallery environments, intended to be interacted with, touched, walk around and upon. Others are also installations to be photographed, easily the best of which are Katrin Schacke’s editorial shoots for Stanley magazine.

(Katrin Schacke’s photography for Stanley – click to enlarge)

Featured in the Public Interventions chapter are works that make you stop, look, stare and sometimes interact. These include the now infamous coin installation Obsessions Make My Life Worse and My Life Better from Stefan Sagmeister and the clever plastic bag animals of Joshua Allen Harris.

The book is typically well-researched, designed and produced by the Gestalten team and it is a great collection of this growing trend. A sense of playfulness is what comes across strongest of all. It is a reminder of how good it is to get your hands dirty once in a while, so stop reading this, get off your computer and go and make something.

Gestalten.tv also has a video interview with Julien Vallée who created the cover and chapter plates for the book.

Rating: ★★★★½ 

You can support The Designer’s Review of Books by buying Tangible: High Touch Visuals from Amazon.com, Amazon.co.uk, Amazon.de or The Designer’s Review of Books store.

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Dan Saffer has a knack for writing the right book at the right time. His first book, Designing for Interaction: Creating Smart Applications and Clever Devices pulled together various disparate approaches and aspects to interaction design into one volume.

“In general, the response has been positive and it is being used by universities and others to teach new interaction designers. But now, four years after I started writing it, I’m mostly unhappy with it. It’s too theoretical and not useful enough to practicing designers,” Saffer told me.

I also use Designing for Interaction for teaching having found its format one of the clearest explanations of interaction design and it’s practical enough, I think. So I have been looking forward to reading Saffer’s new book, Designing Gestural Interfaces, and I am happy to say that it is not a disappointment, though it has quite a different tone.

Published by O’Reilly, the Designing Gestural Interfaces is a much more practical book, filled with design patterns for gestural interface design as well as an appendix for possible future gestures. Starting with a potted history of gestural interfaces (one that goes back a surprisingly long way), Saffer moves onto what is good and bad about them as well as their ergonomics. This includes a whole section on the body, its main joint types, how they move and how the body and technology are so entwined:

“It’s no exaggeration to state that the type of sensor you employ entirely determines the types of gestural interactions that are possible. If the system can’t detect what a user is doing, those gestures might as well not be happening. I can wave at my laptop as much as I want, but if it doesn’t have any way to detect my motion, I simply look like an idiot.”

The exciting, but tricky, aspect of gestural interfaces for interaction designers is that the interface feels like it disappears. When you are pinching a picture taken with your iPhone camera in order to zoom or shrink it, it feels like there is no interface because you are directly manipulating the object, one that has never had a physical counterpart.

Of course that’s not entirely true – the metaphor of it being a photograph on paper is still there, as is the pinching. “As our devices get more sophisticated, metaphor will become even more important. I mean, look at your example. The user isn’t ‘pinching’ anything, just bringing their fingers together but we think of it as pinching to understand what is going on,” says Saffer.

(Click to enlarge)

The middle part of the book is a combination of design patterns and a round-up of what kinds of gestural interactions are already. There is also a chapter on approaches to working on projects, including the sometimes difficult nature of wireframing and documenting gestures – everything from dance step notation to musical scores are possible approaches.

Despite the inevitable media focus on the technologies involved, Saffer does a good job of constantly bringing the focus back to designing for people:

The first question that anyone designing a gestural interface should ask is: should this even be a gestural interface? Simply because we can now do interactive gestures doesn’t mean they are appropriate for every situation. As Bill Buxton notes, when it comes to technology, everything is best for something and worse for something else, and interactive gestures are no exception.

In my interview with Saffer on Core77, Saffer told me he worries that manufacturers will go multi-touch crazy and what this might mean for the end user experience:

“There’s a lot of experimentation going on and it’s an exciting time, much like the web circa 1995-97, which, in one sense, is great. I can also see that experimental period becoming annoying for users who just expect their devices to work as they expect. We’re still figuring out what this stuff is good for and it’s going to take a while, perhaps a long while, before we figure out the things it’s really best at. We’ve only just begun.”

The last quarter of Designing Gestural Interfaces is where Saffer takes a plunge into predicting some future trends and has put together an appendix of existing and potential gestural interactions.

(Click to enlarge)

He is relatively cautious about the future predictions and there is nothing there that is likely to come back and haunt him (apart from the robots, maybe). Smart objects, near-field communication between devices as well as the ethics of gestural interaction all feature. Of course gestural interaction standards are also an issue he covers and one that is fraught with danger if companies too aggressively use or abuse the patent system.

In some ways Designing Gestural Interfaces is a book that is long overdue, given the long history of gestural interaction. In others it is a first and valiant stab and pinning down a currently emerging and rapidly changing area. My guess is that within three or four years, he will already need to update it, but for designers working both in interaction and product or industrial design right now, this is a must-read. If you have anything to do with designing any kind of consumer electronics device, you should get a copy of Designing Gestural Interfaces and get a second copy to give to the marketing department who will, no doubt, be trying to stuff multitouch interfaces on everything.

Rating: ★★★★☆ 

Buy Designing Gestural Interfaces from Amazon.com, Amazon.co.uk, Amazon.de or The Designer’s Review of Books store.

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I hate forms. Germany is full of bureaucrats that love them, but their forms are amongst some of the most poorly designed I have ever encountered. The ones lying under the book in the picture above have been sitting on my desk for a year waiting to find someone who can understand them. A year! What a sad indictment – whoever designed those should be weeping right now.

By rights a whole book devoted to Web Form Design: Filling in the Blanks should be as interesting as watching paint dry, but instead Luke Wroblewski has written on of the best books on user experience and web usability that I have read for some time. It deserves a place on every user experience or web designer’s bookshelf right next to Steve Krug’s classic Don’t Make Me Think: A Common Sense Approach to Web Usability.

Web Form Design is written from a position of sympathy with everyone who has had to struggle through a bad form, and that is pretty much all of us. Wroblewski lays out his stall right from the outset:

Forms suck. If you don’t believe me, try to find people who like filling them in. You may turn up an accountant who gets a rush when wrapping up a client’s tax return or perhaps a desk clerk who loves to tidy up office payroll. But for most of us, forms are just an annoyance. What we want to do is to vote, apply for a job, buy a book online, join a group, or get a rebate back from a recent purchase. Forms just stand in our way.

What makes this book so engaging is Wroblewski’s insight that forms are the social interaction part of any web experience. Forms are conversations between us and the company whose web site we are on. When we go to a real-life shop, we are usually greeted by an assistent or have some kind of social interaction whilst paying for our shopping, even if it is just “have a nice day” or “thank you”. Or we might have a pleasant interaction when unpacking a product:

“Unpacking a new Apple MacBook Pro is a tactile, engaging experience that reflects the quality of the product inside.”

Forms are everywhere online. Whether it is a simple log-in, a purchasing or sign-up process or an online application, you can’t escape them. Wroblewski argues that many web forms are like a stranger coming up to and demanding to know your all your personal and bank details without so much as a “Hello”. When something goes wrong, the worst of them just leave you in the lurch and even the some of the best of them stare at you with an accusing error message without any hint of what to do about it. Even taking a few hints from Web Form Design could save us all from that unpleasantness and frustration.

To tackle the subject, the book is divided into three sections:

Form Structure describes how to go about designing and organising forms that help people complete them and their goals, which is actually what they want to complete, not the form itself. This also includes the practical tasks of trying to manage vying needs of marketing, business and usability requirements as well as deciding if you even need a form at all.

“In the eBay registration redesign, customer support, usability findings, and site tracking data were used to illustrate major issues. The entire flow was mapped out page by page with site click-through data that illustrated user drop-off and best practice analysis.”

Form Elements covers the nitty gritty of labels, alignments, input fields, actions, and messaging, such as help, errors and success. Throughout this and the other sections there are plenty of clear examples and best-practice approaches on hand.

Some of the pros and cons of right-aligned labels.

Form Interaction focusses on the process of filling in forms and covers issues such as auto-validation, input types and how to engage people in the process from a human point of view, not an “inside-out” point of view of the company or the developers.

The above descriptions of the sections makes it sound rather dull, because forms are dull. But don’t be misled by that because Wroblewski really brings the user experience to life as he works through the examples as well as case-studies and perspectives from other designers. It all is this attention to detail that makes all the difference.

One case study from Jared Spool describes how a simple change made an enormous difference to an online store that had previously forced shoppers to register before checkout:

“The designers fixed the problem simply. They took away the Register button. In its place, they put a Continue button with a simple message: “You do not need to create an account to make purchases on our site. Simply click Continue to proceed to checkout. To make your future purchases even faster, you can create an account during checkout.”

The results: The number of customers purchasing went up by 45%. The extra purchases resulted in an extra $15 million the first month. For the first year, the site saw an additional $300,000,000.”

Web Form Design is not about Wroblewski making a dull subject interesting, instead he shows that forms are, in fact, central to the user experience and can be painless at the very least and sometimes even engaging and entertaining when done well. His clear and readable writing style is displayed in an equal clarity by Susan Honeywell’s crisp design of the book.

Rosenfeld Media’s founder and publisher is Louis Rosenfeld, who wrote Information Architecture for the World Wide Web. As a user experience guy himself, he has made sure to make his books as accessible as possible, which is an additional treat. Along with the book’s web site, almost all of the images and diagrams are available on Flickr under a Creative Commons licence.

So, who is this book for? Interaction, user-experience designers and usability folks for sure, but it’s the kind of book that everyone from CEOs and marketing departments through to developers and project managers and German government departments should read.

Eric Meyer sums it up best on the back cover:

‘If I could only send a copy of Web Form Design to the designer of every web form that’s frustrated me, I’d go bankrupt from the shipping charges alone. Please. Stop the pain. Read this book now.’

Rating: ★★★★½ 

You can support The Designer’s Review of Books by buying Web Form Design from Amazon.com or our store, but you can also buy a physical copy or a DRM-free digital edition (thoughtfully tweaked for ease of on-screen reading and printing) direct from Rosenfeld Media. You don’t need to feel guilty and if you use the code DROB, you’ll also get a 15% discount.

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