This book has seven categories and reminds me more of a guide book to carry around and peek in when you are at the middle of making a web site. For example what you should think about before even making a sketch, what sorts of problems you may confront and how to reach the final destination – launch day. Reading it for the first time you get perhaps too much information to digest at once and the best way is to re-examine the chapter that implies to your level of process when needed. It also doesn’t matter if you are a manager in some organization, designer, developer or just a web designing fan – everyone can find out some tips and tricks for making a better web site.
As follows I will mention more about every category and what seemed most important to me. The key ideas or tips to follow/reckon with are mentioned in bulleted lists.
Pervasive Usability: This category introduces usability methods, the design process and the stages of it. You also learn about typical project schedules, management and what is important to know about the three critical resources (money, people and time).
· The most important step in the process is requirements analysis because if you identify the goals and parameters incorrectly, then everything you do after this stage is wasted.
· It is good to create intimate teams of people with varied backgrounds rather than discipline specific groups: software developers are more effective if they have some sense of design and know how designers need to work; designers are more effective when they understand technical capabilities and limitations.
Requirements Analysis: The first thing – define your audience. After that you should create scenario that includes three things: a profile, a schedule and interaction episode, a sketch or photo of the user. Next thing to worry about is differences you may encounter witch derive from preference settings, disabilities, international differences etc. This category continues with background research: surveys, interviews, focus groups and how to create them according to your needs.
· The biggest challenges are developing for the wide diversity of users, user preferences settings, hardware and software platforms, browsers and network speeds.
· Use religious and political symbols only after very careful research into their appropriate usage and remember that symbols of any kind are culture specific.
· If you are designing a portal, take a look at Yahoo; if shopping site look at Amazon; if building an auction system, look at eBay.
Conceptual Design: Start with use cases and move on with prioritizing and determining the frequency of tasks. Next chapter teaches the process of developing architecture for your web site and also about the ways to present navigation to the users.
· Designing systems that are tolerant of human error becomes crucial when any task has potentially dangerous and costly consequences, or when the outcome is not easily reversible (for example financial and medical web applications).
· When using a search function keep in mind that you may encounter two reasons it to fail: users may have very poor search strategies or your site may have a very poor search engine.
Mockups and Prototypes: This category is firstly focused on page components, basic page layout, common page structures and their structure problems. Secondly you can learn more about prototyping: sketches, paper and digital mockups and their process witch leads to making storyboards.
· If you have information that user has to receive, make sure it is in the general area.
· The key to developing good solid technique is practice, practice, practice.
· An opening paragraph of the major topics is more useful than a company logo.
Production: The main subject is writing for the web. This tells us what to write about, what the style should be, how it differs from other writings and what the text formatting should be. The category continues with graphic design (colors, icon designs, subnavigation design etc.) and different engineering techniques (programming, HTML etc.).
· For online text, don’t be afraid to be informal, casual, chatty, direct, and hip.
· Certain pairs of colors do not work side by side: red/green, blue/violet, red/blue.
· Icons should be identifiable outside the context of the page, unambiguous, familiar, consistent and attractive.
Launch: This consists of pre-launch (quality assurance testing, fixing the problems), launch stage (final check of functionality, responding to problems, maintenance schedule) and post-launch (overall hits, feedback etc.).
· You can never eliminate all problems – set a target level for declaring that the site is adequately bug-free for launch.
· Different worksheets provide useful documentation and shortcuts for double-checking that you are indeed ready to launch the web site.
Evaluation: Focuses on evaluating your design: types of evaluation, automatic tests, walkthroughs, user testing, analyzing the results etc.
· A usability evaluation must first identify the problem and then suggest practical solution to improve the usability of the site.
· Pilot testing helps you to determine whether tasks are too easy or take too long time.
The Most Important of All: Consistency in everything. If you use British English, then use it always; if you decide to use blue links, then use that color for them throughout all pages etc.
