Usability: The Site Speaks for Itself

That's about as accurate as any other sweeping generalisation made by any other web usability guru.

This book features case-studies in usability and information architecture from the makers of eBay, the BBC news on-line site, The Economist web site, SynFonts (a flash-driven font foundry e-commerce site), evolt (fully cross-browser compatible) and metafilter.

Know your audience, design for your audience, test for usability, and solicit feedback from your audience.

There are no hard-and-fast rules for usability on the Web, which is why this book steers away from the rigid rules of gurus. Instead, this book looks at six very different, but highly usable sites. The web professionals behind these sites discuss the design of each site from inception to today, how they solicited and responded to feedback, how they identified and dealt with problems, and how they meet the audience's needs and expectations.

This book is edited by Molly E. Holzschlag, a member of Web Standards Project and author of a dozen books on web technologies, and Bruce Lawson, the brand manager of glasshaus.

- Max Gadney of the BBC talks about the trials of moving from the TV medium to the Web, and the differences in usability requirements between the main news site, and the sports and children's sites

- David Wertheimer talks of how The Economist's web site involved careful design work to ensure the branding mirrored the print magazine, and looks at implementing easily distinguished free content and subscription only sections

- eBay: Kelly Braun and Tom Walter look at the work involved in designing an e-commerce site that makes a profit each quarter, while meeting the needs of 42 million users

- Don Synstelein of SynFonts shows how he assembled a usable Flash-driven e-commerce site, which enhances his users' experience and protects his copyright. He shows that that, when used properly, Flash can be 100% ok

- Adrian Roselli, an IA guy from evolt, writes on how they needed to be on the vanguard of usability and accessibility, compatible with every browser known to man - and yet maintain branding look and feel

- Matt Haughey writes of his adventures in constructing Metafilter, a great community site, on no budget. This includes usability testing, usable advertising, and community management

Coming to the book itself. I have copies of Jakob Nielsen's books, "Home Page Usability" and "Designing Web Usability". I also have Steve Krug's "Don't make me think" among other books on usability in my personal collection. This Glasshaus title is as different as can be from all those books. For the first time, one gets to hear first person accounts of the how and why of usability decisions made on major, major web sites. I mean, when you are talking about Economist.com, BBC, eBay, evolt, MetaFilter etc, you are talking about some of the most powerful and influential web sites today. The personal narrative form of exposition is another refreshing change; you feel each author is talking directly to you and sharing his/her experiences in making the kind of usability decisions they did for their websites. Each account, when read carefully, can help a web professional connect the excellent groundwork of experts like Nielsen to the practical compulsions behind real-life usability decisions.

Another excellent aspect of the book is the range of web sites that are represented, right from the publishing might of the Economist to the media powerhouse that is the BBC to the ecommerce success of eBay to powerful online communities such as MetaFilter and Evolt. To round all this off, there is a personal ecommerce venture (SynFonts) that is an excellent showpiece for how the Web allows one man to compete with many. In other words, a terrrific amount of thought has gone into developing this book and Glasshaus cannot be commended enough for putting together such a fine team to share its views. I felt that non-profit and church/spiritual (beliefnet would have been a great example) sites were perhaps the only major categories to have been left out. Perhaps a second edition of this book will address that lacuna.

And, refreshingly for a book on Usability, there is almost no Nielsen-bashing in its pages, except a few words from Molly Holzschlag in the editorial, I think. But, then, Molly is always known to be a little irreverent:-)

The only other book of this genre that I can think of is "Web Site Usability: A Designer's Guide" by Jared M. Spool's User Interface Engineering (uie.com). But, I don't have a copy so can't really comment. If you are looking for practical examples of usability decision making, this book is a great title to have. Perhaps this review will serve as quid pro quo for Glasshaus' excellent gesture in sending me a complimentary copy that has given me so much learning.


Better than Guru books   November 4, 2002
 5 out of 5 found this review helpful

Usability: The Site Speaks For Itself has been bedside reading for a couple months. This book has been a great downtime inspiration. This book, unlike the Guru usability books, teaches you how to approach Web interface design and development with the user in mind. The hard fast rules some experts espouse do not always work well with our own users. This book does a wonderful job teaching us how to think through the process. The book provides examples of six varied sites and their developer's approaches to creating usable sites for their audiences. This books is a joy to look at as well as read. There are many nuggets tucked in the pages that make it worth the price. When building Web sites it is best to remember the one constnt is it all depends and we need to know how to think through these situations.


Waste of time   October 23, 2002
 7 out of 36 found this review helpful

I found this to be a waste of my time and money. I had to choose a book on usability in order to make a presentation on for a usability course I am taking at Ohio University. For the course we are reading Jakob Neileon's "Designing Web Usability." This book is a good book on usability.

I found "Usability: The Site Speaks for Itself" to be very uniteresting. The author's are constantly comparing themselves to Neilsen and tearing his books down. While I agree with the authors that there is no "one size fits all" approach to designing on the web and that different things work for different sites, Nielsen does as well. It seems to me that the authors should have worked on providing more useful content and a better layout (the book is laid out very poorly) than trying to bring Nielsen's views down.

I highly suggest that you don't purchase this book, but if you have money to throw away, send me an email, I have some real estate in Flordia I want to sell you too.


Usability for humans   July 19, 2002
 22 out of 23 found this review helpful

I for one, am tired of being presented with a prescriptive list of 101 'guidelines' and being told that they will solve all my usability problems, if only I would just implement them. The authors of this book will explain why they bent the rules, and sometimes discarded them completely.

The book consists of a pragmatic introduction "beyond the buzz: the true meaning of usability" by Molly Holzschlag followed by the six 'tales from the design face'. Each chapter starts with a slightly cheesy, yet endearing question and answer session where the author(s) are asked to comment on items ranging from their favourite pizza, to their rating on a 'geek index'. I found this one page intro helped me to view the authors as human beings, rather than as 'subjects'. At the end of each chapter the authors are given the opportunity to give photographic examples of items that they personally rate as being 'usable'..

The sites covered range from large companies like the BBC and Economist through to community sites like Metafilter and Evolt.org. Also included are chapters on 'e-bay' with tens of millions of users, and the one man SynFonts site.

Each of the tales are compelling and you want to keep reading to see what happens next. The authors concentrate on why they did things, rather than how they did them, so you won't be getting tips on implementing navigation schemes in PHP or ASP. But you will find out why eBay merged their design and usability groups into one, why Flash was the right solution for SynFonts and why both evolt and MetaFilter decided that un-threaded comments were the way to go.

The publishers have put a lot of effort into every detail of this book. The layout enhances the readability of the book, and the screenshots have been carefully chosen to reinforce the text rather than act as page candy. If I had to pick one element that illustrates this attention to detail, it would be the index. Bill Johncocks has done an excellent job in producing an index that adds real value to the book. I wish more publishers would follow this example and employ professional indexers.


Guru-free book: sites who walk the talk   June 7, 2002
 10 out of 12 found this review helpful

The book features case studies from the designers behind six different sites who demonstrate how they created their usable sites. It accurately declares itself a guru-free zone.

Glasshaus moves away from the traditional guru lecture of "do this, don't do that" and show-offy reading. Instead, the book offers an easy read with a friendly tone based on the designer's style. Meet the the designers of BBC News, Synfonts, eBay, Economist, evolt.org, and MetaFilter. The designers talk about their own Web site and how they worked to make the site what it is today.

The book reinforces the basic Web design rule: "Know your audience." I can only hope that the book I write will be half as useful and applicable as this one. It wouldn't surprise me if Glasshaus becomes a familiar name in the Web design world.