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Summary: Review: "The Design Of Sites," Van Duyne, Landay, Hong, 2002
Review: "The Design of Sites" is Pattern Language for Graphic User Interface Architectures, GUIAs - please make more! Soon!Like most good references, it is not necessary to read front to back right away. One does out of interest anyhow and finds a manual of common functional web styles. This is the kind of book that empowers the first timer and the 100th timer. Thorough reference organized by Patterns and Pattern Groups is the structure of most of "The Design of Sites." Professionals are wise to scan it all now. Having it close makes me feel a little more prepared as it may come in handy as both an info source and a model for future manuals like it. E-Commerce through better online customer service is a message that surfaces when reading about the granular breakdown of e-commerce concepts in relevant paradigm that everyone can appreciate. Search, navigation, site performance, and usability, all are factors when designing on the web. Developers and managers at all levels can benefit from specific parts of this book of collected, common web experience. By demystifying common and complex web processes, plus all the standard material and easy organization one comes to expect from thorough reference, "The Design of Sites" is a valuable text for students of web design. That is, in business as in art, learn the rules of the road or keep off the highway. The arrangement of each pattern heavily borrows from the design philosophies of Alexander, for those that appreciate his work, and are arranged as web design scenarios divided into 6 Factors of: Name, Background, Problems, Forces, Solutions, and Other Patterns to Consider. TDOS is an advanced reference and choose your own adventure of sorts. By studying patterns these authors have struck on the great lesson of design which is not always reinventing the wheel.
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Summary: A reference book about web design to keep close to you
Review: Full of practical design guidelines, this book will help me and my customers to focus on the right site features and to build them right. As stated by the authors, this book is "opened". So I decided to contribute by suggesting a new online text editor pattern and an improvement to the grid pattern by displaying contextual content over the HTML page using an invisible-visible DIV tag. I hope a second version of this book will be published soon with all the comments and new patterns sent to the authors.
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Summary: Might be OK for some beginners, but wordy, and lacks depth
Review: I bought this book so it would provide me with domain-specific pieces of usability knowledge, but it failed at that. Althought there are concrete examples, there's nothing learn from them, as the explanations are so general they almost seem canned. It just takes basic usability concepts and applies them to popular domains, without going into any depth. And you don't need another book for that. The writing style often feels like a desperate attempt to beef up the volume. This isn't a useless book for an absolute beginner, but Steve Krug's "Don't Make Think" is several times thinner, and will teach you just as much, if not more.
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Summary: Some good points, but it's better for design agencies
Review: I manage a large corporate website, and was looking for good book which provides examples of common dilemmas faced in managing a corporate website...this book failed to answer them with any true substance. This book is geared more towards the design agencies only, not people who design and develop in-house. Also, I felt that it was very basic and covered many things I learned in my early days of web development.
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Summary: Good idea but hopelessly out of date
Review: I think this book was probably very helpful a couple years ago. And there's still some good information here. But the web is changing so fast that a lot of their guidelines and "patterns" just don't apply (i.e. they encourage you to use popup windows).
Wait until they revise the book before you spend the dough. Oh, and the website they refer you to for updates is an embarrasment!
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Summary: Two words: Exceptionally useful
Review: If I could keep only one of the dozen or so User Interface-related books I purchased in 2003, this would be the one. I haul it along to most of my clients (I'm a user interface designer). The design patterns in the book actually do help us to design more effectively. The patterns describe recurring issues and trade-offs in relation to specific design problems. Each pattern also describes a solution to its specific problem. Instead of starting from square one, we can start with something known to work and modify or refine it as needed for our specific site.
Yes, I knew a lot of this already, but it's still a big help to have it all written down, illustrated and organised at my fingertips. And it really helps my clients who are working on a first, second or third system and who don't have a personal database of tens or hundreds of projects. Or the ones who are caught in an endless discussion loop.
The book itself is easier to use than any other reference book in my collection. The patterns are organised and cross-referenced so that I can easily pick out just what I need for a given project. The book has a clear and pleasant visual organisation with color-coded sections. It is heavily illustrated with examples and sketches. And the resources section at the back is truly thorough, not just an afterthought. This is one of the books I especially recommend to software developers, since many of them are already familiar with the use of patterns in designing code. And I've found that developers on the whole are a pragmatic bunch, always looking for a way to get better results with less effort. That's exactly what the Design of Sites is good for.
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Summary: A Rare Book
Review: It is a rare privilege to spend time with masters of their profession. It is rarer still to read a book written by them. The Design of Sites: Patterns, Principles and Processes for Crafting a Customer-Centered Web Experience. Creating a website is easy. Creating a website that connects with your audience is not so easy. It takes planning, experience, an intuitive understanding of your audience and skill. The authors have done much of the work. They have taken the time to reduce their knowledge to writing. Their book distills the practices that result in sites that draw repeat visitors to simple patterns, principles and processes. The book is comprehensive and easy to use. It can be read front-to-back. It can be read in snippets. It provides design solutions to common web design problems. Follow the patterns and you will shorten your development cycles and reduce your maintenance costs. If you are in the Web Development or Design business, buy the book. I promise it will be dog-eared from use in a short period of time.
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Summary: Excellent Resource
Review: This book is my primary source of designing many websites. As web content management consultant, it is my job to design and also build a web site. The patterns and principles described here are well suited to many cases, big or small scale. Althought the primary concern of this book is about patterns and principles, several parts at the beginning chapters are devoting to understand "customer-centered" web design and how to perform such processes. The customer-centered design principle, at the first time I read this book, opened my whole new outlook about designing a 'good' website. I am waiting for the 2th edition, since, you know several websites referenced in this book are now going out of business (for example [website]), and several look and feel described by figures reference is now beginning out of date. Ignoring those, this book is a must-have arsenal for a web content management consultant, web designer, web developer, even a manager.
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Summary: I n c r e d i b l e !
Review: This is absolutely the best book I've ever read in regards to web development. I very rarely read a book word for word but this one I'm actually highlighting as I read. If you design or develop websites then this is a must read. I think it creates a nice bridge between designers and developers and puts them on the same page, creating a site for CUSTOMERS to use.
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Summary: Invaluable resource
Review: This is the first computer related book that I have bought and thought - "Perfect, just what I needed." What I like most about this book is that it spends so little time explaining why building user centered web sites is a good idea, and tells you exactly what techniques are used to create them. You can open the book up to almost any page, read a paragraph and get something out of it. It is clear that the authors spend alot of time laying out the book to make information retrieval easy. Dont let "look inside" pictures that amazon has posted fool you - they are probably the only boring sections of the book. In part 2 (about page 100), the book gets really really good. For the next 500 pages they cover almost every area of of web design imaginable and present the areas in a problem - solution format. Many books dont offer concrete techniques, just tell you - "design for the user", "users hate poorly designed pages" etc etc. Each problem/solution is about 2 pages long, and they are web techniques that can be applied to almost every web site. They literally say to solve X problem do Y solution. Very specific, very useful. The book also is good from cover to cover. I have found that alot of books are good for the first chapter and then loose quality. They present each "nugget of information" with the perfect amount of description - enough to explain why its useful, but not too much to drag on. They also use these hand drawn pictures that I liked to show how a generic web page would function, instead of only pictures of pre-existing web pages ( which they also have ample examples) So you can actually apply it to your project instead of saying, I understand why hotmail looks the way it does. I would recommend this book to anyone, hands down.
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