Designing Web Interfaces: Principles and Patterns for Rich Interactions,   ISBN:9780596516253

Customer Rating: 

My wife and I both tried to read this book and found it very hard to understand. I have a decent knowledge of website design and creation, but found that this book jumps straight into the deep end of the pool with very little introduction and context. Unless you are already an experience developer familiar with all the terms and technology, you may find this resource hard to penetrate.

Customer Rating: 

I was waiting for more from this book. It's nothing more than an reference book on some design patterns.

Customer Rating: 

I really enjoyed Designing Web Interfaces. If you plan on making a move from being just a visual designer to a user interface designer this is definitely a must read, more details than you imagine there could be about web interfaces!

Customer Rating: 

Reviewer: Dave Roman, GCPCUG member


This book has 14 chapters, but they are only sub divisions of a different type of classification. The book is about interaction design on the web. They have divided this book up into six principles and since they took this approach I am going to review the principles.

Principle One - Make It Direct
What does that mean? This is covered in three chapters. They discuss direct in-page editing of content, moving objects around directly with the mouse (drag and drop), and applying actions to directly selected objects.

Principle Two - Keep It Lightweight
This area discusses Contextual Tools

Principle Three - Stay on the Page
Here they discuss ways to keep the user on the page including overlays, Inlays, Virtual Pages and Process Flow

Principal Four - Provide an Invitation
This area talks about providing an invitation to the user in a number of forms. Static invitations are offered on the page using visual techniques to invite interaction. Dynamic invitations come into play in response to what and where the user is interacting.

Principal Five - Use Transitions
This area could be entitled "Pay Attention" because it IS about getting your attention using movement and transition. They discuss transition patterns like "brighten and dim", "expand and collapse", "Self-Healing Fade", "Animation" and "spotlight".

Then they go to the purpose of transition. What is the reason for using these powerful effects and where they are most effective.

Principle Six - React Immediately
This is all about what happens immediately after each interaction with the system. There should be an immediate reaction paired with the user's action. The system should always keep users informed about what is going on, through appropriate feedback within a reasonable time and is called Latency Reduction.

They first talk about lookup patterns and then feedback patterns.

The web is constantly changing, so the authors provide sites to keep you up to date, one of which is http://designingwebinterfaces.com

It's a long book, but does a good job explaining what takes place in an interactive website. This is not a coding book, but more like a combination of the psychology of a web site and how to use this knowledge to make it easier for the user and also make it easier to buy a product or find the information they are looking for.

Customer Rating: 

Provides a good overview of the many interface options in use today. However, accessibility is generally not addressed, so you would have to assess this yourself for each option. Also, the screenshots could have been marked up to show the steps in the interactions more clearly, rather than just successive screenshots.