Site-Seeing: A Visual Approach to Web Usability

Rating:
Summary: Visual & "wordy" is what makes this book great!
Review: As a fan of Site-Seeing, I must respond to a few of the reviews asserting that the author should have condensed certain material in the book. For me, the many visual examples and the great, detailed explanations (one reviewer suggested "wordy") are exactly what makes this book so useful. Rather than just skimming over important design concepts, the author actually takes the time to properly explain these important principles and illustrate them with examples. In my opinion, many other web design books use only words, whereas in this book, you can actually see and understand what the author is talking about. This is very important to me, as a visual learner. That is just one reason why this book is still on my desk.

Rating:
Summary: Fantastic Read!
Review: Finally a book on Web usability that recognizes the importance of visual communication! Too often what I do, as a web designer trained in graphic design, is categorized as simply making things pretty. Site-seeing runs over that dogma by showing just how important visual design really is for a successful website. No Web designer can ignore the impact a well thought out layout has on usability and user satisfaction. This book is a manual on how to harness the power of visual thinking to your benefit that is both detailed and elegant. You won't put it down without an increased awareness of how what you see makes a HUGE difference in how you understand and interact with a website.

Rating:
Summary: Not very usable.
Review: For a web usability book, this one is suprisingly unusable. The book is overdesigned, making it sometimes hard to read because of all the visual clutter on the page. It's also over-wordy. If only the author had taken Steve Krug's advice (which he mis-quotes in the first chapter) to cut out half the words, and then cut out half of what's left, this might have been a great book. As it is, its only contributions are from the design standpoint, such as not breaking the model of the web, and not making the navigation so contrast-y as to visually distract from the content. Otherwise, just about everything he says is said more succinctly in Krug's book, "Don't Make Me Think."

Rating:
Summary: Very helpful book, well written and outlined
Review: I loved this book. As a programmer without a lot of
experience charged with creating several WWW sites for my
emplyer, the sections on visual design were invaluable to me. The methaphos and examples used throughout the book got me "looking" at Web pages (especially the ones I did and plan to do) with an informed eye. My Web skills have vastly imporved, as evidenced by the praise I have received for my most recent site design! I recommend this book to all WWW designers who "struggle" to get the page "right"! This text will get you there.

Rating:
Summary: Bridging the Gap Between Art and Technology
Review: In Web usability, everybody talks about the importance of response times, accessibility, compatibility, and other technical considerations required to create good websites. But few stress the key role visual communication plays in the Web usability equation.

In the book "Site-seeing: A Visual Approach to Web Usability," interface design expert Luke Wroblewski sets out to show how visual design, combined with technical savvy, results in superior and far more "user-friendly" websites. Wroblewski, head of interface and new media design at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA), explains how the principles behind visual communication apply directly to Web usability. Good visual design, he writes, can make a site's organization crystal clear and convey its message, or "purpose" in an instant.

The book presents both designers and developers with recommendations for taking Web usability to the next level. Topics covered include:

* Applying color, type, images, and more to give a site a distinct and appropriate personality

*Creating sites that are useful, usable, AND enjoyable

*Discovering how visual organization can clarify website elements and simplify interactions by reducing clutter, and making pages understandable

Rating:
Summary: Great Combination of Web and Design Knowledge
Review: Luke Wroblewski, in his book Site-Seeing: A Visual Approach to Web Usability, offers an interesting and, in my view, much needed perspective on the topic of web design. In Section One, he starts at the very beginning, explaining what is basically the design process every designer learns in school. This includes such things as researching your client, documenting your process, generating a mission statement or goal for the website, organizing content and developing an effective navigation system---things that should be thought through before ever firing up the html editor. This information is invaluable for anyone approaching a web design project because it reduces the chance for major revisions further into a project and makes it easier for a designer to do his or her best creative work.

Section Two gets more focused, describing the peculiarities of communicating via the web. I found particularly gratifying the suggestion to not "break the web model"---the established idiom of the web including the back button, bookmarks, history, etc. This is not a follow your bliss kind of web design book. It is a carefully thought through guide for what works and what does not work for effective communication on the web. The author also focuses here on the importance of getting and maintaining quality content for your website and how to make content dominant through visual organization and establishing a hierarchy of information. The next chapter in this section provides a primer on the Principles of Visual Organization---an invaluable resource for anyone approaching this kind of project and something that is largely missing from other books in this genre.

The last section of this book gives more specific information about how to put all these pieces together, where to experiment and where to maintain the established web idiom and web conventions. Lastly the author addresses the issues of dynamic websites and dynamic content delivery---a potential solution to the problem of keeping content current. Throughout the book, the author develops an effective interplay between the general guiding principles of design and the more specific requirements of the web medium. For this reason I think it is an excellent and unique resource for web designers and developers that I would highly recommend.

Rating:
Summary: Making Sense out of Clutter
Review: The publication of this book is quite timely as websites today are in my opinion too cluttered and it is mind boggling to go through most web pages. Most people (myself included) simply scan such web pages quickly. Visual cues and relationships are the key making sense of these pages. Therefore, I think it is a great idea to teach website developers usability issues from the visual perspective. Which is exactly what Site Seeing does with lots of examples and many many great tips on how to design navigation, home pages, web applications, and more. Wonderful book.

Rating:
Summary: Good info, could be condensed
Review: This book lays a good foundation for web design by emphasizing planning, meeting clients' goals, and understanding the target audience. Wroblewski emphasizes usability when describing the core of the site- structure, navigation, content- and how it will affect the experience of the audience. He uses numerous examples to illustrate layout, visual heirarchy, color schemes, and how they work together (or don't!) to communicate quickly and effectively to the site visitor.

I got frustrated about the amount of fluff surrounding actual information. He makes plenty of good points and then buries them beneath a barrage of condescending, long-winded metaphors, like the way we can read a map and know that blue represents water. The analogy itself could be helpful, but three paragraphs to explain the analogy is just distracting.

I'm glad I read it... it opened my eyes to many challenges that web designers face, and inspired me to infuse life and personality into my own site. I'm also glad I highlighted the meaningful parts so I (or friends who borrow it) can skip past the fluff in the future.

Rating:
Summary: Good info, could be condensed
Review: This book lays a good foundation for web design by emphasizing planning, meeting clients' goals, and understanding the target audience. Wroblewski emphasizes usability when describing the core of the site- structure, navigation, content- and how it will affect the experience of the audience. He uses numerous examples to illustrate layout, visual heirarchy, color schemes, and how they work together (or don't!) to communicate quickly and effectively to the site visitor.

I got frustrated about the amount of fluff surrounding actual information. He makes plenty of good points and then buries them beneath a barrage of condescending, long-winded metaphors, like the way we can read a map and know that blue represents water. The analogy itself could be helpful, but three paragraphs to explain the analogy is just distracting.

I'm glad I read it... it opened my eyes to many challenges that web designers face, and inspired me to infuse life and personality into my own site. I'm also glad I highlighted the meaningful parts so I (or friends who borrow it) can skip past the fluff in the future.