Defensive Design for the Web : How to improve error messages, help, forms, and other crisis points

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Summary: Excellent book for reading and for reference
Review: "Defensive Design for the Web"  is an incredible book - every bit of it was informative and helpful. I will be keeping this book handy for years to come!

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Summary: You should know...
Review: ...that this book is bad. Sure, you're saying, but almost all books in this field are bad because they're rushed, lame attempts to get on the shelves quick - how is this book relative to the field? And that's precisely the point. It isn't just bad by general standards, it's bad relative to the field. There is nothing, absolutely nothing, in this book that you don't already know. It's kind of like bottled water. These guys have built a business wrapping up common knowledge and making it seem like they've got a new take. They don't. The bottom line: if you purchase this book, you're going to be plenty ticked-off a few minutes later.

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Summary: A Must Read
Review: Admittedly a novice to the subject matter, I found "Defensive Design for the Web" to be very enlightening. The focus is on those irritations/frustrations encountered all too frequently when navigating web sites. Its concise, easy to follow instructional critique facilitates understanding and provides clearly-defined and well-documented solutions. In short, very informative and extremely well-written ---definitely, a must read.


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Summary: This will be a classic
Review: Anytime Zeldman devotes a blog entry to a book, you know it's good. This one is great. I've been designing forms for 20 years starting on mainframes and this book had ideas I hadn't thought of. Designers frequently assume that their graphic design skills can substitute for interaction design skills and remove all need for testing. The testing checklist at the end is ideal to give to new developer or an experienced designer. (Don't get me wrong. I love designers. Nobody wants my graphics. Their color sense is better than mine. I actually like gray screens. Amber and green aren't bad either.) It will be useful regardless of the number of years of experience you have.
One of things we don't have for web applications is the equivalent of the Apple user interface standards. Most books are content and design oriented. This is an important step in filling that void.

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Summary: A near-classic, just wish it were in color
Review: Basecamp, a web-based project management tool, is one of the most elegant, affordable, and easy-to-use pieces of software I've encountered on or off the web. When I browse a site this good, I often think "I wish I could pick that guy's brain."

In this case, I could: Matthew Linderman and Jason Fried of 37signals, the web design and usability specialists, have distilled their knowledge of user interaction into Defensive Design for the Web: How to Improve Error Messages, Help, Forms, and Other Crisis Points (New Riders, 2004). As the authors describe:

"No one's perfect. 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 will still encounter problems. Sites must plan for these inevitable breakdowns with defensive design... By improving defensive design, online businesses can help customers recover from mishaps - increasing conversion rates and customer loyalty in the process."

37signals provides 40 guidelines for helping your users manage crisis points, including:

* Eliminate the need for back-and-forth clicking
* Highlight either required or optional fields
* Accept entries in all common formats
* Don't block content with ads

Each guideline is supported by multiple online examples. Simply listing the guidelines doesn't do the book justice: you might be tempted to respond, "Well, that's just common sense." But many sites violate even the simplest of the guidelines.

Defensive Design gets right what so many other computer books do not: it is brief, free from jargon, and doesn't attempt to browbeat you with a list of inflexible rules. The author's tone of humble, informed guidance brings to mind Steve Krug's Don't Make Me Think, and Defensive Design clearly belongs on the same shelf as Mr. Krug's usability classic. As good as the book is, though, it has two real flaws.

First, the book relies on "As if analogy" sidebars to compare online contingency design to offline situations. Too often, the sidebars are distractors, and simply highlight the differences between online and offline transactions. For example, Guideline 28 is "Don't force registration." In other words, web sites shouldn't force customers to uniquely identify themselves before receiving assistance. Here's the "As if" analogy:

"Why is this bad? It's as if I call the phone company to report a problem with my service. To receive assistance, however, I must first sign up for their customer mailing list."

But that's not a precise comparison - in fact, there already is a real-world analogy: you won't get support service from a phone company without providing your uniquely identifying information. Increasingly, you can't even get pre-sales information from a phone company without providing uniquely identifying information. That may be a nuisance, but it's common offline practice, and the inexact analogy simply muddies the otherwise reasonable online guideline: don't force registration.

Second, and worse, the book is printed in black and white: the screenshots are small, low contrast, and difficult to read. This wouldn't be such a nuisance if the screenshots were on the periphery of the authors' message, but they're not! Instead, the screenshots are central to each of the guidelines.

You might think color doesn't matter to a book like this, but consider the authors' second guideline: "Use color, icons, and text to clearly highlight and explain the problem area."

In defense of Linderman and Fried, the decision to publish a book in black and white is made by the publisher, New Riders, not the authors. Four years ago, the same publisher released Don't Make Me Think (DMMT) - a book of similar length, scope, and goals - in glorious color on thick paper stock. Perhaps times are different, with publishers and purchasers poorer alike, but I would happily pay the price of DMMT for a full color version of Defensive Design. The bottom line: Defensive Design is a bargain at the price. But a book this good deserves to be better.

For the full review with screenshot, see here: http://since1968.com/archives/000087.php

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Summary: Featuring 40 guidelines to prevent errors
Review: Defensive Design For The Web: How To Improve Error Messages, Help, Forms, And Other Crisis Points by the "37 signals" team of Matthew Linderman and Jason Fried is a straightforward guide for web designers to creating sites that are less likely to encounter problems that give the browser errors such as "file not found" or worse. Black-and-white screenshots and highlighted tips add a strong visual and example component to the discussed principles. Featuring 40 guidelines to prevent errors, hundreds of real-world examples from companies like Amazon and Google, a simple test to evaluate one's own site, and much more, Defensive Design For The Web is a "must-have" resource for anyone charged with building or maintaining a website bigger than a digital breadbox.


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Summary: Great book for solving problems related to online apps.
Review: I have just finished reading Defensive Design for the Web, written by the fine folks at 37signals. The book is divided into 10 chapters, the first 9 broken down into 40 "guidelines". The guidelines cover all areas of defensive design, or "contingency design", as mentioned throughout the book. These guidelines are used to drive home the overall purpose of the chapter.

The writers keep the technical talk to a minimum, and really focus on what contingency design is, how it helps users, and how it is implemented in various sites around the web, if it is implemented at all. It also gives pointers on how to avoid these pitfalls in your own development. Also, it gives alternative examples to prove a point, relating it to something physical rather than electronic.

One example is comparing the annoying flash ads that appear on top of sites, disabling the functionality of certain elements, to trying to leave a travel agent office, and instead, the agent has blocked the door and keeps handing you brochures.

The sites chosen by the author as examples are very popular sites that a majority of readers have at least heard of if not visited. They range in variance from search engines, to e-commerce sites, to general sites with little application implementation. Many sites are mentioned in multiple chapters, sometimes having great contingency design for what the chapter is about, sometimes not. It is interesting to see that some sites succeed in certain areas while at the same time failing in others.

The "Head to Head" features are also great. This takes to sites that would be seen as competitors (Barnes and Noble vs. Amazon, K-mart vs. Wal-Mart, Foot Locker vs. Finish Line, etc.) and shows how they each handle the same contingency design element in different ways.

After reviewing the areas of contingency design, there is a "Contingency Design Test" that you can use not only to test your site yourself, but also give to others to test your site. The test gives certain tasks and uses a point system to score how well a site did with certain guidelines.

The book closes with a chapter on developing a plan for testing, correcting, and implementing contingency design in your site. It gives examples of ways to catalog various design guidelines such as using a knowledgebase for staff members to reference when a problem occurs, testing a site thoroughly at all points of development, and other techniques.

Anyone involved in building or managing websites with any degree of web application integration would do well to read this book. Many items seem like common sense, but you would be surprised at how easy it is to overlook them in the development process. In the end, your users will thank you for it.

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Summary: A must if you are starting out
Review: I have read a few books on this topic and found this book to be good for those that are begining to do professional development and it also serves as a good review for those that have been developing for a while.

The book is simple in its layout and each section is easy to read by itself or you could read it from cover to cover if you wanted to. I found myself skipping around some and just skimming some areas of the book.

Its not a must have, but it is a good to have.

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Summary: interesting but over hyped
Review: I have really enjoyed reading DNF and other 37signals related material. I like their philosophy about web design etc... However, from what I understand these are simply their informed yet casual observations on how to improve design. The findings are not backed up by usability testing or any other studies. So while what they say may be thought provoking it is by no means right.

Take for example DNF's suggestion to separate out a long text box for entering your credit card into 4 separate boxes. I've tried this and it doesn't help reduce entry error. Top internet retailers that do extensive research and testing, such as this site and land's end, also keep with a single box. Why? I'm not sure but here are a few ideas: Credit card #s aren't all 16 digits long. Maybe tabbing from box to box is confusing and a pain to do if you are looking down at your card and realize that you have tried to enter 16 digits in the first box. The point is though that real answers to questions aren't found by casual observation and inference.

So I say interesting but over hyped. I'm disappointed that Zeldman so blithely endorsed it.

Rating:
Summary: Awful
Review: I have to say that this book was absolutely no help to me whatsoever. On the strength of the reviews here, I purchased this book for help on a corporate redesign project two weeks ago, read it cover to cover, and set it aside in disgust. There was literally nothing in it of value. Unfortunately, as it now shows wear I cannot in good conscience return it to the store. Anyway, I don't know what the deal is with the glowing reviews - I only wish the one from "porterhouse" had been posted before I drove down to the store. That review, honestly, is the only one that's got it right.