Web Application Design Handbook : Best Practices for Web-Based Software (Morgan Kaufmann Series in Interactive Technologies)

Rating:
Summary: An excellent resource for web application designers
Review: What is a web application? This is not such an easy question to answer, and rather than simply muddy the water further or leave the definition as an undirected exercise for the reader as do some of the other web application books available today, Fowler and Stanwick devote a chapter to it. Not only do they deliver a matrix that helps you to figure out where your project fits, they also get to the meat: based on where it fits, what design differences do you need to keep in mind? They then give you worksheets to fill out for yourself.

After you decide where your project falls on the page-to-application continuum, you're ready to start figuring out its data architecture, layout, navigation, and presentation details. The first half of the book deals with these issues, including how the controls work for web applications, the differences between them and the controls used in more standard applications, and when to use which. Also, special topics such as searching, filtering, browsing, which have been honed and refined-and sometimes broken-by the size and breadth of the Web, are here summarized and presented in a way that makes them approachable and usable design achievable. For those with real-world responsibilities, there are excellent discussions of internationalization and accessibility, as well as techniques for appropriate use of HTML and CSS (cascading style sheets).

Web-based software poses some real challenges, especially if it's going to be coded in straight HTML and HTML/forms (even if you use a little JavaScript on the side). Java Applets and Flash pose a slightly different set of challenges. Fowler and Stanwick wade right in, devoting chapters to all the critical things you'll need to know to design a usable application, from the browser framework through advice on input, data retrieval and output, through how to set it up for reasonable user interaction with output.

And then they get to my favorite part, which is an excellent reference on what kinds of graphics you can use and when to use which. This part of the book covers graphs and charts, diagrams, and geographic maps. This is a better coverage of this subject than I have seen anywhere else, and it's only half of this book!

In addition to being an impressive researcher, Susan Fowler is also an expert on the use of graphics in applications. Anyone who's attended a seminar by Edward Tufte or read one of his books knows how badly people misuse graphics. If only more designers of web applications (any applications, actually) will spend time with this book, we'll finally start to come out of that era into one in which meaning is quickly and easily understood from a graphical presentation. I'll be delighted when that happens. Until then, make yourself one of those who knows: read this book.