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The Almighty Buck Books Media Book Reviews

Built For Use 186

Posted by timothy from the ride-it dept.
Teresa Esser writes "Karen Donoghue's new book, Built for Use: Driving Profitability Through the User Experience was clearly written for marketing professionals and upper level managers. Slashdot readers may find that some of the material in this book is intuitively obvious. But it's great to have a book like this on your shelf when you're trying to have a discussion with a co-worker who doesn't understand why corporate Web sites need to be user-friendly." Read on for the rest of her below.
Built for Use: Driving Profitability Through the User Experience
author Karen Donoghue
pages 262
publisher McGraw Hill
rating 9 -- great for its intended audience
reviewer Teresa Esser
ISBN 0071383042
summary Provides important information about how to make corporate Web sites user-friendly

Built for Use is the kind of book that can be slipped under a door or surreptitiously dropped into a mailbox to make a point without wasting time on yet another useless conversation.

The book is filled with tidbits like:

  1. The best Web sites don't necessarily come from the best designers.

  2. Frustrated artists with nose rings and black turtlenecks should not be allowed to turn a company's Web site into a piece of experimental non-performance art.

  3. Flashing lights are great for Las Vegas, but who wants to work in Las Vegas?

Usability is not, and never has been, sexy. Grayscale sites like Yahoo! deliver value to their users because they load almost instantly and provide access to the things that people want.

This is basic, logical, intuitively obvious stuff. Yet it seems like a lot of this material is completely foreign to many of the people who make the final decisions about what corporate Web sites are going to look like.

As we move forward into a world where EZ-Passes will be used to finance fast-food purchases and where nanotechnologies will be woven into the threads of our jeans, it's important to learn -- and learn quickly -- that sexier is not always better.

Before companies sink millions of dollars into the development of yet another annoying and impossible-to-use Web site, they need to ask themselves:

  1. Can the site be used by its intended audience?

  2. Do the customers understand the language on the site?

  3. Are the customers' computers fast enough to download all of the relevant material?

  4. Are the customers savvy enough to find their way to the cash register?

  5. Will the cash register accept the customers' money?

  6. Is the system completely integrated with the company's back-end software?

  7. If you call the company on the phone, will you get the same experience that you get when you visit the corporate Web site?

Companies need to make sure they are delivering the same messages through their Web sites that they are delivering through their phone banks, through their television ad campaigns, and through their product delivery channels.

If you say that you have sold me something, and you charge my credit card, then you had better deliver that thing to my door, and soon, or you will lose my trust.

Slapping a Good Housekeeping Seal of Approval type "trust" sticker on some Web site does not build customer loyalty. Customer loyalty needs to be earned, one transaction at a time.

Could you imagine how annoying the world would be if retail clothing chains like The Gap put invisible trip-wires in front of their clothing racks, so that whenever you reached for a pair of khakis you crashed to the ground?

Could you imagine how annoying the world would be if retail stores covered all of their cash registers with a layer of Saran Wrap?

That's basically what some Web sites are doing now. If a retail site looks great but you can't use it to buy anything, or to access interesting content, then the site stinks.

If you work with marketers who desperately need to know a thing or two about user-experience strategy -- or maybe all nine -- hand them a copy of Built for Use. It will save time, and they'll praise you for allowing them to discover the truth on their own.

This book has a website, located at http://www.humanlogic.com/. You can purchase Built for Use from bn.com. Slashdot welcomes readers' book reviews -- to submit yours, read the book review guidelines, then visit the submission page.
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Built For Use

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  • Read on for the rest of her below.

    I read on but didn't see either Karen or Teresa. Given the /. reputation I'm not sure if I should have been looking for the rest of her below or the rest of her elbow.
  • I happen to be at odds with the banishment of art from corporate image. In addition, an analogy struck me.

    web sites : moody artists :: operating systems : dirty hippies

    By the principles put forth in this book, Linux would not exist!

    I ask the Slashdot community to consider carefully the contributions made by artists. Without culture, we would still be living in the Middle Ages.

    • Re:interesting (Score:2, Insightful)

      by carlos_benj ( 140796 )
      I think the point was that the site shouldn't be so gagged up with 'art' that it loads slowly or not at all. Just because someone sees themselves as an artist (as I do) doesn't mean that their client's or company's web site should become their personal statement or portfolio.
    • If you are a hired to do some work with a specific aim in point, then it is not good to be so intent on showing off that you make the original purpose impossible. It's like claiming you should be allowed to have 28 disciples, three Jesus Christs and a kangaroo in a painting of the Last Supper.
    • Art is a part of culture. A valuable one too, and I don't think anyone is denying that. But the discussion here is whether cutting edge art is appropriate for interactive service.

      Something can be beautiful to look at, and if all you ever intend to do is look at it, sure, pull out every stop to make it as awesome in appearance as you can. But sometimes you want to build something that will be used for more than just looking at. A corporate web site is optimally a tool for driving profitability. A good way to drive profitability is to faciliate commercial transactions between the corporation and its customers. A good way to facilitate commerical transactions is to make them quick, easy, inexpensive, and non-frustrating for both parties. Driving those transactions through an interface that is designed solely to look good with little thought on how easy it is to use is not necessarily a good way to accomplish the above.

      This is not to say that a functional and easy interface can't look good. Several sites have managed to build easy to use interfaces which are also attractive. But in these cases, designers have carefully planned out the function, and then optimized the form to implement the function in an attractive way.

      In order to accomplish this designers may have to constrain their creativity to work within certain parameters. For instance, Putting all the type on your site in a custom font might look great on your screen, but how does it look for someone who doesn't have that font? Forcing customers to download a font in order for a page to look good is a senseless frustration which does nothing to help them give you some money for your goods or services. On the other hand, there are plenty of ways to use fonts that are widely distributed, that can still look pretty good.

      Nobody is saying don't use any pictures on your site. Even using sparse graphics in place of ugly grey javascript order buttons isn't a capital sin, but if customers have to load a page full of large-size graphic files to choose an item/service to order, another page full of large-size graphic files to adjust the quantity, another page of large-size graphic files to enter a shipping address, another page of large-size graphic files to enter payment information, and another page of large-size graphic files to confirm the info they have entered and finally place the order, they might not be inclined to complete the whole process, and even if they are, you've paid a web designer a lot of money to waste a lot of people's time (not to mention the extra expense of bandwidth for you as a site owner to serve out all those graphics).

      Art doesn't have to be the exclusive realm of museums, but not every store has to be a museum, either. You can design and make things look good, and even a bit artistic, without going completely avant-garde and making your business harder to conduct.
      • In order to accomplish this designers may have to constrain their creativity to work within certain parameters.

        It could be said that the constraints actually give one an opportunity to exercise their creativity. If an individual can only work a certain way then they are stagnant and not creative at all.

    • Re:interesting (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Squeamish Ossifrage ( 3451 ) on Friday June 28, 2002 @11:38AM (#3786872) Homepage Journal

      I haven't read the book, so I can't comment on what priciples it's putting forth, but your comment seems to be missing the point which the reviewer, at least, was making. Nobody's saying that art has no role whatsoever in website design. What they seem to be saying - and I agree wholeheartedly - is that art is a secondary concern. It's not wrong to have art, indeed art is often desirable, but art should facilitate the goals of the website, not be a goal per se.

      I've done web site design [ericanderson.org], and I consider myself an artist [ericanderson.org] of sorts, and they are very different activites. Art, as an end in itself, is about beauty and self expression. A corporate web site, like everything else a company does, is about advancing the company's financial position. Usually this means encouraging people to buy something (advertizing), directly enabling them to buy something (on-line sales), or maximizing the value of things they've already bought (customer service).

      In none of these cases does the web site work by sitting there and expressing the artist's vision. It works by enabling the customer to do something they want to do - and which the company also wants them to do - using the web site. Art, in a commercial setting, is a fine means unto that end, but should not be the end itself. This isn't to say that art for art's sake isn't a wonderful and necessary part of our society, but a corporate web site is probably not the most suitable canvas.

      • Art, as an end in itself, is about
        beauty and self expression.

        Right. And when doing a corporate website (or a website for anyone other than yourself) the goal is for you to express something of them and not of yourself. It's not the artist's vision that's important, but conveying the company's vision. If an artist wants to freely express themselves they can build their own page or submit pages to an art oriented site.

        Nice pics by the way. Have you delved into digital yet?
        • It's not the artist's vision that's important, but conveying the company's vision.

          I'd argue that there is an art to that - putting across the company's vision in an aesthetically pleasing way, without sacrificing functionaliy or straying outside the bounds of good website design (accessibility, download times, cross-browser compatibility, etc...). Our designer has an excellent grasp of these things, and has an ability to capture a companies "feel" that really amazes me. She's a pleasure to work with.

          On the other hand, nothing bothers me so much as so-called designers that insist on gratiutous elemements that impede usability and add nothing to the site. Some of our clients have had very bad experiences with previous companies, and it made it very hard to get them to trust us at first. Of course, now they're loyal clients who say nice things about us, so maybe it all works out ;)

          Anyway, I'm agreeing with you, just expanding on how I'd define "art" in terms of commercial web development.

    • Art, the very concept, is subjective. Simple placement of text can be artful, while the most beautifully rendered animated gif can be the reason users close the browser before receiving the message, because animated, flashing gifs are not merely annoying, but aggrevating (Slashdot, take a hint here!!!)

      There were a few very effective pages on Web Pages That Suck [webpagesthatsuck.com] which brought how how Art can be highly effective, or a barrier to the target (i.e. don't put 2.5Meg of images on your home page, users on modems will lose interest) I personally dispise Flash homepages and have thus uninstalled it Flash, and good riddance.

      Conversely, Linux, if lead by people so dedicated to some technical aspect to the detriment of functionality would make your point, however, I think enough of Open Source and Linux projects have moved beyond that stage, hence Gnome and KDE. Looking back at software of 10 years ago should bring home that interfaces have gotten much better, though some were great to begin with and the bad ones have just been catching up.

    • KISS (keep it simple stupid) has long been a design principle, pre-dating the internet. Art is a huge part of the corporate image but it must be kept simple.

      The point of a corporate web site is not to serve as a museum showcase for their brilliant designers. Their web site is to present their company and products in a favorable light.

      The ability to create a professional-looking and simple web page takes as much talent as the talent needed to create a whiz-bang site.

      I ask the world to consider carefully the contributions made by all types of creators. Programmers these days are having their creations suppressed and their artistic value denied.

      Why should a programmer who crafts a program that can play a DVD be suppressed while a movie that can serve as a recipe for terrorism, murder, con games, etc be considered a cultural contribution? (I do not support movie and music censorship. I also do not approve of source code censorship.)

      Should the programmer sing his program so that it will be considered a creation? ("Elton John Sings Linux Kernel 2.4.9" could be a big hit)

    • Re:interesting (Score:2, Insightful)

      by Eugene O'Neil ( 140081 )
      By the principles put forth in this book, Linux would not exist!

      It would be difficult to articulate the full magnitude of how wrong you are.

      Linux does not depend on the sort of "frustrated artists with nose rings and black turtlenecks" the book is complaining about. Linux owes it's existence to the sort of hard-core geeks who think that hunting down kernel thread synchronization bugs is fun. Without all the tedious, non-sexy details like a stable kernel and a good compiler suite, there would be nothing to linux for the more traditionally "artistic" types to cover with a candy-coated shell. At best, those artistic types only make an operating system that was already exellent accessable to a wider audience: more often, they are useless parasites that take more credit than they deserve for the fruits of real geek's labor. I consider your post to be an excellent example of the latter case.
    • I happen to be at odds with the banishment of art from corporate image.

      There's a difference between banishing art, and being appropriate with it. You don't make a knife blade out of gold on the premise that it's prettier; you make the knife out of good steel, and put ornamentation on in such a way as to not interfere with the function.

      I am, among other things, a poet. But I don't write my software design docs in verse.

  • Hmm.. (Score:2, Interesting)

    by gabec ( 538140 )
    Someone at mozilla.org could make some use of that book, methinks. Their website is not made for the average joe. Granted it has gotten better but it's still chock full of unexplained keywords and high expectations of the customer's tech-savvy. I can just see sending my mom to download Mozilla and telling her 'just look for links that say "downloads for windows", don't get sidetracked by trying to figure out what Mozilla is. Just download it and find out later.' It would be nice if someone went through with a user-friendly stick and beat every page, at least a little bit.
    • I would say mozilla.org is about right for its intended audience - at least according to the project charter. It was (and maybe still is) intended that average joe customers would download a polished distribution from a provider such as Netscape, Opera, etc. Sort of like the difference between reading kernel.org and buying a Redhat package.

      sPh

      • But the point is that if the major difference between Netscape and Mozilla is "polishing" then I would still think that Mozilla's chance to become a standard browser *itself* would be just as much a reality as Netscapes chance to regain even a small fraction of its former market share.

        After all, the major difference I saw between the two was AOL slipping little ad-fliers under every virtual carpet and into every virtual droor of my computer. If that's polishing send me back to Mozilla!

        Another question though is that, since Mozilla's major funding comes from Netscape/AOL/TIME/Warner, I would think they would be rather irate to see Moz take off as a browser (as compared to their own). Maybe not, maybe it would be more like "well, at least we're taking market share away from MS" ... but... I dunno :)

  • At least they follow their own advice. (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Mr Guy ( 547690 ) on Friday June 28, 2002 @11:08AM (#3786672) Journal
    Unlike certain people railing against pop-up ads, THESE guys practice what they preach. Total time starting from www.humanlogic.com to end of purchase at Barnes and Nobles was less than a minute.
    • THESE guys practice what they preach. Total time starting from www.humanlogic.com to end of purchase at Barnes and Nobles was less than a minute.

      Which is an laudable accomplishment. Ebay has just changed their My Ebay page (see reactions here [ebay.com], sprung on users without any warning and it's awful. Perhaps a copy of this book should be sent their way.

      What you would hear 30 minutes before their web development team is fired:

      "The network connection to the conference room is down, but we're setting you up with a 56K modem for your presentation."
    • True, but their site is also not a big design challenge. They only have one or two goals to accomplish and not very much content.
  • One day our previous webmaster, in a fit of god-knows-what, decided to replace our old site with an unholy conglomeration of geometric shapes that constituted the links to other sections of the site. The orange square, for instance, linked to the personnel page, while the yellow circle linked to the upcoming events, et cetera. As if that wasn't bad enough, they actually floated around the page w/ flash! He thought this was very cutting edge and would impress people.

    He resigned shortly thereafter.
    • http://riverwalk.ebaseinteractive.com/

      They're a web design company. I would think that they should realize nothing is quite as annoying as not having any text but in the ALT tags, so you have to hover over every graphic to find out if it's a link, and if so, where to.
    • He resigned shortly thereafter.

      He probably got an offer-he-couldn't refuse from some up-and-coming dot com that had no product and thus no content.

  • It's hard to get her to understand that a class website is first and foremost a way to convey information, and secondly entertaining. She likes to have 1200*1600 resolution pictures of Lord of the Rings characters all over, piocked a color scheme of green-on-black, and uses ALL custom fonts.

    Maybe I should buy her this book, heh.

  • Web as Phone (Score:1, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward
    7. If you call the company on the phone, will you get the same experience that you get when you visit the corporate Web site?

    SO I'm going to get bounced back and forth through 3 web pages, and then their server will disappear?

  • And also ... (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Lumpish Scholar ( 17107 ) on Friday June 28, 2002 @11:11AM (#3786693) Homepage Journal
    Before companies sink millions of dollars into the development of yet another annoying and impossible-to-use Web site, they need to ask themselves: ... Are the customers' computers fast enough to download all of the relevant material?
    And is the typical customer's bandwidth, even on a bad day, fast enough blah blah? (I saw one "interactive online service" which was prototyped by pulling information off a local CD. Surprise; it didn't make it to production. Not long afterwards, around 1996, I went on an interview where I would have been a manager in a very nice office with a window. My prospective boss tried to demo the site over a 10 Mbps LAN. The interview finished before the first page did. I let him know not to call me.-)

    Are the customers savvy enough to find their way to the cash register?
    More to the point, is the cash register findable? And can you use it without doing stupid stuff? (If you're selling me something, all you need is a method of payment, a billing address, and a shipping address. I shouldn't need an account or a password, though you're welcome to offer me one if you show me the benefits -- to *ME* -- of having one.)
  • Will not replace HTML is simply put: The old era of _BLINKING_ text and hideous flash intros (should be) is dead. Many a "net savvy" site has reverted to the early days of the web -- white backgrounds and simple fast loading text. Layers are dead -- tables are back and frames are less overbearing.
    Thank god.
    • Ever managed to bookmark a page on a flash site!!!
    • "Will not replace HTML is simply put: The old era of _BLINKING_ text and hideous flash intros (should be) is dead. Many a "net savvy" site has reverted to the early days of the web -- white backgrounds and simple fast loading text. Layers are dead -- tables are back and frames are less overbearing."

      If you are on win32 and feel like playing god, then go and get The Proxomitron [cjb.net]. It is a thoroughly developed tool that basically uses an advanced text-matching engine in concert with search/replace filters to re-write websites the way you want them to be seen. This is especially useful for killing banners, layers, nosy Javascript, changing colours, deleting unnecessary frames, etc.

    • While HTML is here to stay, Flash does have a market, IMHO. Pizzaz may not be appropriate for corporate sites, but for diversions, its not so bad. You're right though, Flash is disappearing from corporate sites, so I agree with you on that end.

      As for XML, while it may not *replace* HTML, I don't think I shall ever need to hand write HTML (or have a design app write it for me) again. Given the extensibility of XML in defining an object model custom to the needs the business, the advance of schema and transformation technologies, and the push for W3C standard XML support in all web browsers, XML is here to stay, and will maintain a strong presence in corporate sites. Frameworks that take advantage of XML to generate HTML web sites integrate better with other corporate software systems, most prominently databases, if simply for the reason that HTML is clumsy and loosely enforced, whereas XML has a strong definition, can be validated to a schema, can represent a complex DOM, can be parsed efficiently, etc.... A handful of XML initialization files can define an entire site if the framework is shrewdly designed, making the site more extensible and more maintainable than would be if HTML were the only choice. A couple of bioler-plate XSL transformations (+ a few custom) can represent your data in more meaningful and modifiable ways than you can have with rote HTML. Server-side, big players Java and Microsoft both have excellent support for XML, and it is ever-growing.

      HTML has stagnated, because it is too sloppy to fix at this point, and object model standards were clobbered by Microsoft. That is why sites feed you 'Minimal-tag-HTML', and in most cases, I'd suspect it has been transformed from XML ala XSLT.

      XML + XSD + XSLT + CSS = better than HTML alone.

      Completely aside: if anyone who contributes to Mozilla in the XML - XSLT newsgroup, I've noticed that Mozilla doesn't recognize a transformation on an XSD if the extension is .xsd (it does if you rename the file to .xml), though XSD is valid xml syntax. Why would I do this? It makes for a nice documentation resource, and a transform on XSD requires almost no maintenence. I tried to post to the newsgroup, but here at work there is no news server, for security purposes, so alas, I could not.
  • As an ad hoc web designer who is really a network engineer I agree with the comments about websites.

    99% of web designers I know will take a companpies site and turn it into some wonder of Flash, css, java, and while it looks great is unsuable to the regular Joe due to bandwidth issues, plug-ins, are un navigable. Can we say frames anyone? echh.

    I do websites with sidebar menus, no frames, and flash sparingly, and you can choose to see the flash or not.

    Also site with musical intros without volume controls, intros without a skip button...

    I also preview in Opera, Netscape, IE, and Mozilla.

    I am not the most creative or knowledable designer. But I am finding my side web business is growing because of the no frills sites I do.

    Puto

  • But it's great to have a book like this on your shelf when you're trying to have a discussion with a co-worker who doesn't understand why corporate Web sites need to be user-friendly.

    Is that because its particularly heavy and will leave a good imprint in said co-workers skull?

    • Is that because its particularly heavy and will leave a good imprint in said co-workers skull?

      Geez. Didn't you read the first line of the interview?

      Built for Use is the kind of book that can be slipped under a door...

      I figure it's about ten sheets and a staple.

  • A minor point ... (Score:3, Funny)

    by beer_maker ( 263112 ) on Friday June 28, 2002 @11:12AM (#3786706)
    262 pages and you plan to 'slip it under the door' of your co-workers?

    • 262 pages and you plan to 'slip it under the door' of your co-workers?

      She never mentioned which door. She must have meant the kind of door we all do most of our thinking behind, the one with a convenient 8-inch gap at the bottom. Some days we are more productive in a stall than in a cubicle.

  • books on that subject (Score:2, Informative)

    by dirvish ( 574948 )
    Other usefull books on the subject:

    Design of Everyday Things by Donald Norman

    Designing Web Usability by Jakob Nielsen

    Information architecture for the world wide web by Louis Rosenfeld & Peter Morville

    I think I got the titles and authors correct. I had to read them for a class [csuchico.edu] and they were pretty good, especially for text books.

  • And yet... (Score:2, Interesting)

    by Rikardon ( 116190 )
    Not all useful sites need be "grayscale design," though. Just this morning, I was reading a new article by Don Norman [jnd.org] (he of "The Design of Everyday Things" fame), wherein he acknowledges that the emotional impact of a design affects our ability to use it.

    "Yahoo-style" design is great for a directory, where the volume of information is such that speed and "cleanliness" are paramount: nobody expects the White Pages (or the Yellow Pages) to evoke oohs and aahs for their design: we expect them to be efficient, no-nonsense directories. But the design of other types of sites (or other software, or hardware for that matter) can be more complex, especially if one is creating a new interaction model and has precious few (if any) precedents on which to base one's design.

  • remove Flash.
    it destroys sites, reduces the intuitiveness of the web experience, and allows web designers to do "because they can."

    not to say that the program is bad, ive seen some really cool art exhibitions of flash demos, but they are just not cool on the net. they remind me of tags.

  • I have said for a long time. . . (Score:1, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward
    that you should be able to get to any point in a web site with only three clicks from the front page.

    There are a few exceptions to this overall rule but 3 clicks is more than enough to get where you want to go. If it takes longer, people get frustrated and give up.

    So far, everyone I have said this to, web designers and others, all agree and have tried to implement this policy wherever they have control.
  • Does this book cover, in any detail at all, the restrictions that policies (such as Section 508, security policies, etc.) put on the development of a user-friendly government website? I'm working on such a website and have found that user-friendly and compliant are often mutually exclusive.
  • But it's great to have a book like this on your shelf when you're trying to have a discussion with a co- worker who doesn't understand why corporate Web sites need to be user-friendly.

    I assume, then, that this is a very heavy book, suitable for *bonking* co-workers with?

  • Author's Site SUCKS! (Score:4, Funny)

    by zerosignal ( 222614 ) on Friday June 28, 2002 @11:18AM (#3786752) Homepage Journal
    No DTD, no alt text for images, uses depracated FONT tags...

  • Sex (y) sells (Score:3, Funny)

    by oliverthered ( 187439 ) <oliverthered@hotmail. c o m> on Friday June 28, 2002 @11:18AM (#3786757) Journal
    One of the main problems I've come across (in all sorts of jobs) is that the people who make the decisions often aren't fit to. as an example
    A traditional ass kissing contest may go something like.

    Ass kisser:
    "Hey boss look at this "sexy" pie I've made, everyone sure to buy it."

    Boss:
    "That looks great, and the wax coating sure makes it shine, why hasn't anyone else though of this."

    Block who does all the work (not me!):
    "Yea but it's made of dog food, tastes like shit, and falls apart in you hand making a mess everywhere"

    Boss:
    "I'm sure we can sort those minor problems out, and it looks so good. make me 1000"

  • a companion article.. (Score:3, Informative)

    by gabec ( 538140 ) on Friday June 28, 2002 @11:19AM (#3786765)
    http://www-106.ibm.com/developerworks/library/us-t ricks/ [ibm.com]

    This article presents "7 simple things most web-users don't know exist." Everything from editing the URL bar manually to produce desired results to new browser windows.

    "In one study, a site provided links to related books on Amazon.com, which opened in a second browser window. Using Amazon wasn't relevant to our test, so as soon as the page came up the users tried to back out. One pair of users, upon discovering the grayed-out 'Back' button, looked at each other with something akin to horror. "

    Granted these people might be techno-shmucks, but I think we geeks seem to forget that too easily. I found a lady just last year still using win 3.11 as her OS and was *irate* to find out that she was being forced to upgrade to a brand new PC. I had to spend hours with her explaining the new OS and even then she was *not* happy with the situation. These people do exist! ;)

  • usability links (Score:4, Informative)

    by scotfl ( 312954 ) <scotfl@gmail.com> on Friday June 28, 2002 @11:25AM (#3786799) Homepage Journal
    A few more usability sites:
    • For those folks that don't know about WebWord, it is a web site that has been around for nearly 4 years. It is focused on usability and human factors for the internet (web sites, email, browsers, etc.). News is posted to the site almost daily. There are two newsletters available to readers -- a daily update and a periodic update. Check out the subscriptions page for details [webword.com].

      - John
  • ...as an aesthetic movement, rather than as an obsession. And yes, this is on topic.

    Around 1915/1930, an artistic movement arose in France called 'Purism [frenchculture.org]'. The central tenant of Purism is that the 'masses' know better than the experts when it comes to design.

    So...lets take an example. A chair. A chair typically has four legs and and back. Totally unremarkable. You can, if you so desire, buy unusual chairs such as this Egg chair [sixdifferentways.com], but they are the exception rather than the norm.

    According to Purism, the four-legged chair wins. It has been accepted by the masses as functional and fit for purpose, whereas the Egg chair has been banished to the fringes.

    So how to apply to web design? Well, take everybody's favourite search engine - Google [google.com]. Look at the interface. It's obvious where you type, it's obvious what you do with the results. The interface is quick and clean, without being flashy. It is a four-legged chair - functional, useful and ubiquitous.

    Now let's compare with the various graph-based graphical search engines. These have a slightly different purpose, but perform essentially the same job as Google. They are the Egg chair of the search engine world - esoteric, and banished to the fringes. Purism would eschew such designs.

    Now Purism has its faults - stick with, err..., 'pure' Purism and you'll never make any progress. New designs would be thin on the ground. However, there are some very useful lessons to be learned from the movement in my opinion - changing things for change's sake is bad, keep things clean, make things recognisable...you get the idea.

    Cheers,
    Ian

  • Our sites message (Score:4, Insightful)

    by SampleMinded ( 580479 ) on Friday June 28, 2002 @11:34AM (#3786848)
    The software co [thinktools.com] I work for went from an elegent and simple website, to an over-designed monstrosity. Helplessly I sat by and watch the crime occur. Despite being the interface desinger for the software, the marketing guys would not even consider my perspective.

    From simple text based links, we got dropped down dhtml menus. From a simple logo graphic, we got business people high-fiving on the home page.

    Marketing believed that our site was not about giving information to users, and potential users of our software. Rather our site's purpose was to create an image of company(a false one)relating to our size and prior successes. Unfortunatly a book like this will not convince them otherwise.
    • I'll have to take your word for it - I went there and got a completely blank page.
    • If you get nostalgic, you can visit the old versions at the Internet Archive [archive.org]. The more recent links work best.
    • I can totally sympathize. At my last job (i left a while ago thankfully.. bad bad bad place..), they insisted on flashing, animating, pop-up windowing, and blinking EVERYTHING.

      The 'opt-in' (wink wink) emails they sent were the worst. The guy in charge of the text considered himself a 'designer' too, and because he was related to the boss (sigh), he would sit over the designer's shoulder and point to words and say 'Make that one BIGGER', 'Now emphasis this word. i want it BOLD and make it RED'. It ended up being one huge bold, size 5 font email with so much emphasis that NOTHING stood out.

      I'm soooo glad i left. the place i work at now actually concentrates on one nice, useable, well designed site with emphasis on customer interaction, and actually DOES take measures to make sure that their newsletter mailing list only contains people that have specifically signed up for it, and promptly remove those who unsubscribe. it's good working at a place with a consciense.
  • Flashing lights are great for Las Vegas, but who wants to work in Las Vegas?

    Better here than in the People's Republic of California. :-)

  • Slashdot readers may find that some of the material in this book is intuitively obvious.
    An ironic statement, no doubt, especially in the light of the earlier Gnome2 review thread!!!!
  • I'd say Yahoo! is less of a good example nowadays than Google is. Yahoo!, with all its extra stuff now, has become somewhat confusing - yes, you can generally get where you need to go after a few clicks, but there's about a thousand other things you have to read to get there.

    Google on the other hand - log in, type a word, press enter, boom you're done. It's a pretty minimalist site and it works because of that.
  • Has anyone else noticed that this article's page is extremely wide ?
  • Built for Use, Karen Donoghue

    'nough said
  • This site [webpagesthatsuck.com] has been pushing the same "save the flashy stuff for art, make your store usable *first*" message for a long time. I still see mystery meat all the time though...
  • Talk about a story full of typos and statements to mock.

    Frustrated artists with nose rings and black turtlenecks should not be allowed to turn a company's Web site into a piece of experimental non-performance art.

    Damn it. All those unemployed web weenies in freak bars will be mouching beers even longer if this book takes off.

    ...it's important to learn -- and learn quickly -- that sexier is not always better.

    Sounds like pointy haired bosses and geeks share this thought. Suckers.

    Could you imagine how annoying the world would be if retail clothing chains like The Gap put invisible trip-wires in front of their clothing racks, so that whenever you reached for a pair of khakis you crashed to the ground?

    Considering I wouldn't be caught dead in most of the Gap's clothes, it sounds highly amusing.
  • ... many of the least usable websites I've come across were designed by developers/techies.

    It's an unfortunate side-effect of the view of the general public as clueless idiots who keep looking for the "any" key on their keyboard... I've actually heard this argument: "if they can't find it on the site, they must be stupid."

    This is an extremely counter-productive approach to web design, at least if the people you are trying to reach are the general public (sites aimed at technically adept people can adhere to slightly looser guidelines), especially for e-commerce purposes. As much as we like to whine about the clueless masses, they are what provide the traffic to keep many of us employed.

    We like to pick on "marketing types," most of the time for very good reasons (e.g. "they don't understand the products they are trying to sell", etc.), but a good understanding of how people's process information is extremely useful and should not be ignored... sometimes it is these people who can help us. Remember, they are much like the audiences many sites are trying to reach.

    On another point, greyscale sites can be very good, but remember that most people process information visually; this means that clever use of graphics to draw attention to certain parts of a site can be very useful. Many people quickly lose interest if they see no pictures. Again, this depends on who the "target audience" is.

    Essentially, all I'm saying is that have to be careful not to let our arrogance be our achilles heel.

  • That my site loads in under 5 seconds on most dial up connection, and that I soon plan on vastly enlarging it, but keeping the load times the same.

    (Every page is also run though TidyHTML before I upload it, ensuring that every last little byte is cut off of it.)

    I have entire image galleries smaller then single images on some websites. ^_^
  • A self-motivated link to it on Amazon:

    Built for Use: Driving Profitability... [amazon.com]. The price is $19.57, and will qualify for shipping of the order is over $50.

    Winton

  • Another reason for site simplicity - protection (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Animats ( 122034 ) on Friday June 28, 2002 @12:39PM (#3787228) Homepage
    More and more browsers are now protected against obnoxious behavior by web sites. WebWasher for individuals has been around for years, but now there's a "WebWasher corporate firewall". Other companies offer similar products. If you want your site to display in business environments, it had better not do anything viewed as hostile by such firewalls.

    A good test is whether the site remains at least minimally usable with JavaScript turned off. If your site comes up blank with JavaScript off, there are probably users at corporate sites that see it that way.

  • TIme to order this book (Score:4, Interesting)

    by RembrandtX ( 240864 ) on Friday June 28, 2002 @12:49PM (#3787281) Homepage Journal
    Considering that I am the webmaster for a powertool company .. AND I happen to be owned by the marketing department.

    How frustrating do you think THAT is ..

    5-6 years of experience of working on corporate sites (my previous company was Comcast@home)
    (and before you scream 'web-weenie' I have the C.S. Degree to back it up .. just happened that at the time .. it payed very well to be able to do stuff on the web.)

    And WHOM do you think they ask first about pretty much anything ? There are folks in the accounting department that are more in touch with what we are going to be putting on our website.

    Currently two of our braintrusts in marketing are trying to convince each other how we should start using an *alternate* pre-packaged software to run our website .. because the current one keeps dying.

    because every marketer I know is a system anylist.

    Totally ignoring the fact that it was a marketing decision to buy it in the first place .. when IT suggested we just write our own.

    This is being closly followed by the idea that we can use flash .. or generate dynamic images to 'save work'

    because every marketer I know is also a graphic artist/programmer/dba.

    To be fair .. we have TWO guys with MBA's from Kellog's .. and *THEY* know what they are doing .. These are the guys who have cd's full of end consumer data and churn through it to find out what folks want.

    The others are all people who were promoted internally from TOTALLY non marketing positions .. who just come up with ideas of what they think we should do - with very little actual research.

    We spent over $3Mil developing a tool, plus the costs of manufactureing it, packageing it, and sending it to market. A month before it went on sale, someone had the bright idea to do customer focus group things about the tool.
    2 people out of about 110 said that they would buy it .. the rest said it wasn't worth the $$.

    what a thing to find out after its already done.

    but every marketer I know is psychic too.

    Im beginning to agree with Douglass Adams, lets put them on a colony ship with the phone sanatizers.

  • a point (Score:2, Insightful)

    by KunstCleaver ( 248052 )
    Obviously the best sites are easy to use AND pretty.

    Yahoo, I have always found to be a monstrosity myself. It is far too 'busy' and complicated. That's the main reason I have never used yahoo. I think yahoo also represents the worst of the old coporate design standards - cram as much as you can into one page... especially ads.

    Google, on the other hand, won me over immediately with their simple but functional design. When I first saw google, it was a breath of fresh air. Not only is it HIGHLY functional, but it is also generally regarded as EXCELLENT design.

    btw, I have always thought the main slashdot page was too loaded down with crap also (though the ads are handled nicely.) The first thing I did when I finally logged in as a user was turn off everything in the preferences.

  • My favorite usability book is Jakob Neilsen's Designing Web Usability: The Practice of Simplicity [amazon.com]. His basic point is the web should be FAST and easy to navigate. Most people have modems and many have poor monitors. See also his website useit.com [useit.com].
  • ... Considering that nowhere under the user preferences are there links to the Friend/Foe/Fan/Freaks links - you can get to them using http://slashdot.org/~/friend and so on, but there are no links to that.

    (Pantomimes flipping visor down, catching keys) "Are we learning yet?"
  • ...is how well a visually impaired (read: blind or legally blind) person can access the site. All too often, it seems, site designers think that flash intros and all kinds of graphics bloat will get a stronger message across than simple, easy-to-read (and quick-loading!) text and hyperlinks.

    I've lost count of the number of times my wife, who is legally blind, has mentioned this or that site to me that she couldn't make full use of because it was loaded down with non-meta tagged graphics, FLASH intros, etc. Ticketmaster is one example. She can check for events, but she's never had any success ordering tickets online.

    The fancy graphics are useless to her because she literally cannot see them. Worse than useless, in fact, because her screen-reader software (Jaws) won't even try to recognize them.

    E-commerce web site designers: If you must design a big flashy site that any Vegas producer would be proud of, fine. Knock yourselves out. HOWEVER -- Would you please also put in a text-only version of the site so that those with limited vision can at least shop around? At the very least, dump the FLASH intros and use meta tags on your graphics, OK?

    Thanks. From both of us. ;-)

  • While the java-script popups are annoying as hell and they try to lock you into their sites, most porn sites do a good job of actually displaying content on their main page (once you get past the warning section), and they make it very obvious how to buy their services. The consumer spends more time spanking the monkey and less time trying to punch it.
  • it's great to have a book like this on your shelf when you're trying to have a discussion with a co-worker who doesn't understand why corporate Web sites need to be user-friendly.

    ..or having a discussion with a Linux-using co-worker about why an OS needs to be user-friendly.</rant>

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