semicolonSoftware, the Internet and you.

To mark World Usability Day 2009, here’s a review of a classic book on usability for web sites and applications. A lot of the information and advice seems obvious once you’ve read it, but judging by the websites that litter the web, it’s not always obvious when you’re building sites. If all web designers and developers read this book, the web would be a better place. And hey, it’s fun to read. Here are some of the book’s highlights. Continue reading “Don’t Make Me Think! — Steve Krug” →

Forms That Work is a practical book dedicated to making web forms usable and useful. It gathers a heap of information together, with helpful summaries and guidelines to make it easy to create web forms that people will actually use.

Here is a summary of some points that I found particularly helpful. This gives the flavour of the book and serves as a reminder for me at least. For all the background information, you’ll need to read the book itself.
Continue reading “Forms that Work — Jarrett & Gaffney” →

I read this good short guide to writing for the web a year or two ago. Even though the book is a few years old now, its advice is still relevant: Web technologies change quickly, but the rules for good web writing are the same now as they were when the web was new.

I learned a lot from the sections on writing for international users, specifically for users who aren’t proficient at reading English. Short, active sentences without complicated words. It has helped me respond usefully to comments on this website, which has readers from all over the world.

“Writing web content that works” is the subtitle of this book, and it delivers a thorough treatment of the topic. I don’t think it contains any radical new ideas, but it is a nicely organised compilation of what some people call “best practices” about writing and layout for the web.

Of course, you can’t possibly summarise an entire book with a list of bullet points, but here are the ideas in the book that struck me as being especially useful. Continue reading “Letting Go of the Words — Ginny Redish” →

This book is nice and short, but it could be a lot shorter. It’s supposed to help you “make any website better”. It invites you to imagine that your website visitors are monkeys looking for a banana. If you don’t make the “banana” easy to see and easy to get, they will go to another website instead.

I don’t think that viewing your visitors as monkeys is a good idea. Continue reading “The Big Red Fez — Seth Godin” →