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 | | Defensive Design for the Web: How to improve error messages, help, forms, and other crisis points (VOICES) by 37signals ISBN-10: 9780735714106 ISBN-10: 0-7357-1410-X ISBN-13: 9780735714106 ISBN-13: 978-0-7357-1410-6 Paperback 2004-03-12 New Riders Press Find Lowest Price |
Editorials | ||
Product Description Let's admit it: Things will go wrong online. No matter how carefully you design a site, no matter how much testing you do, customers still encounter problems. So how do you handle these inevitable breakdowns? With defensive design. In this book, the experts at 37signals (whose clients include Microsoft, Qwest, Monster.com, and Clear Channel) will show you how. Defensive design is like defensive driving brought to the Web. The same way drivers must always be on the lookout for slick roads, reckless drivers, and other dangerous scenarios, site builders must constantly search for trouble spots that cause visitors confusion and frustration. Good site defense can make or break the customer experience. In these pages, you'll see hundreds of real-world examples from companies like Amazon, Google, and Yahoo that show the right (and wrong) ways to get defensive. You'll learn 40 guidelines to prevent errors and rescue customers if a breakdown occurs. You'll also explore how to evaluate your own site's defensive design and improve it over the long term. This book is a must read for designers, programmers, copywriters, and any other site decision-makers who want to increase usability and customer satisfaction. | ||
Reviews | ||
It is what it is This book is basically a comparison of good & bad designs as related to the topics in the subtitle. There is not much depth to any of the examples so it feels like this is the outline of a book that never got finished. I was looking for something comprehensive enough to allow me to make better informed decisions, even if the book didn't offer an example that is specific to my problem. This book is NOT that. | ||
only for beginers If you already have some design experience, or use the web a lot in your daily life, or just have common sense you will most likely find this book utterly useless. But even for people who are just starting out in the field, at 236 pages this book can easily be compressed into 37 with one page per "signal." Here's what specifically bothers me about the content: 1. Wordy. The authors take a simple problem and run with it for pages. How many examples do I really need to understand that limiting text fields to, let say, 200 characters and not letting users know that there is a limit is a bad idea? One? Two? There are 5 examples beating the same dead horse. And this is going on pretty much for every example they have. 2. Clueless. One of the complaints in the book is about an error message that TicketMaster displays when they can't find tickets for you (page 75). Specifically, the message is "We are unable to fulfill your specific request. We may not have the type of tickets you requested or the number of seats together that you are looking for." The authors' beef with this message is "[...] the error message still leaves me scratching my head. If TicketMaster knows the event is sold out, then why not just say so?" Perhaps, they don't say that the event is sold out because it isn't? First, just because TicketMaster is out of tickets doesn't mean there are no more tickets left. TicketMaster usually only gets a percentage of tickets. Second, if I'm looking for cheapest seats and they don't have any left, doesn't mean there aren't more expensive available. Thirdly, if I'm looking for 7 seats in a row and can't find that many available doesn't mean I can't buy them on other combinations. 3. Superficial. When talking about handling 404 "Page not found" errors, the author completely neglects to mention the intricacies of handling these conditions which can have profound effect on your site's SEO. All-in-all, I'm taking my book back to the store. | ||
Common sense distilled This book is a nice collection of what should be common sense rules (obviously common sense is not so common, as the examples of actual web sites in the book prove). I would assume that it would be most beneficial to a beginning designer, although it's a book everyone involved with web design or programming should browse through every now and then. | ||
A complete waste of time for anyone in the industry. I received zero (0) value from this book, and I can't figure out why anyone would recommend it. I kept waiting for something to learn, but alas, there is nothing but common sense included in this book. To say nothing for the fact that each page contained about 2 paragraphs of text (an image caption) with an image showing Good or Bad examples. What a waste of money, time, and energy. Unfortunately the individuals behind 37 signals had just enough clout to get a book published and have caused me to look elsewhere for authors/teachers. NOTE: their software at 37signals.com is great, but even their own blog is hard to read. Overall a major disappointment. NOTE: absolute beginners may find a 1 star value out of this book. However, 30 days on the job will teach you everything here. | ||
Too much emphasis on error reporting/recovery The sub title of this book should stop at "How to Improve Error Messages". The focus of the book is on recovering from problems, either from user input or from the system. That's all well and good and their ideas are fine. However I was hoping they'd spend some time talking about how to lay out your forms so they are mor effective and less likely to cause problems for the user in the first place. Especially useful would have been web oriented techniques for forms that span multiple pages. Anyway they didn't put it in the book and that's their choice. What they put in is servicable if all you're interested in is recovery. | ||