Web Application Design Handbook: Best Practices for Web-Based...

Features

• Cover Type: Paperback with 658 pages
• Published by: Morgan Kaufmann
• Edition: 1st Edition June 23, 2004
• Written in: English
• ISBN 10 Number: 1558607528
• ISBN 13 Number: 978-1558607521
• Book Dimensions: 9.2 x 7.5 x 1.3 inches
• Weighs: 3.4 pounds

Product Review
a how to guide that designers can use to help make important decisions.
Donna Timpone, UserEdge, Inc.

Susan and Victor have written the Junior Woodchucks Guidebook of Web applications: Everything you need to know is in there, including tons of best-practice examples, insights from years of experience, and assorted fascinating arcana. If you're writing a Web application, you'd be foolish not to have a copy.
Steve Krug, author of Don't Make Me Think! A Common Sense Approach to Web Usability



Web sites are so nineties. The cutting edge of Web-design has moved to Web applications. If you are, like many Web designers, struggling to create dynamic, highly-functional Web-based applications, you need this book. It describes how Web applications differ from Web sites, and provides great guidance for common Web-application design problems, such as navigation, data input, search, reports, forms, and interactive graphic output.
Jeff Johnson, Principal Usability Consultant, UI Wizards, Inc., and author of Web Bloopers and GUI Bloopers



User interface designers have been debating among themselves for years about how to design effective Web applications. There were no comprehensive references that covered the myriad topics that emerged in these debates until Fowler and Stanwick took on the challenge and wrote Web Application Design Handbook, the first comprehensive guide to building Web applications. This book tackles design problems faced by every Web development team with uncommon wisdom, clear prose, and detailed examples. Key topics include: modifying the browser interface to meet application security and efficiency requirements, searching, sorting, filtering, building efficient and usable data input mechanisms, generating reports, preventing errors, and using creative visualization techniques to optimize the display of large sets of data. This thorough work should be a primary reference for everyone designing Web applications.
Chauncey E. Wilson, Principal HCI Architect, WilDesign Consulting



Every so often you run into a book and say to yourself: Its so obvious that this book should be read by every developer, so why wasn't it written years ago? This is one of those books.
Scott Ambler, author of The Object Primer: Agile Model Driven Development with UML 2



Web Application Design Handbook is a panoramic book covering a lot of territory from how to design graphical user interfaces for Web applications to a discussion on the types of information visualization that are possible it provides a good overview on the techniques used to create Web applications, especially helpful for the novice Web designer who is tasked with building useful and effective Web applications
Robbie T. Nakatsu, Department of Finance/Computer Information Systems, Loyola Marymount University

Book Description
The first interaction design book that focuses exclusively on web applications.

Reader Reviews
This is a strange book. Despite the giant word "WEB" on the cover, it's difficult to see this as "best practices for web-based software." Instead, it reads like a guide for designers who've only built desktop software and are being forced against their will to deliver a web-based product. It's far too long at 658 pages; there are needless sections on general suggestions for designing for the web that are far better written about elsewhere. I understand the authors' desire for completeness, but there's just too much basic HTML here padding out some sections. And the final *seven* chapters deal with the design of data reports, charts, graphs, and even maps. Now, these are important topics, but they are not such significant parts of most web applications to deserve more than half this book's length. And have these authors never read Edward Tufte? It's hard to imagine a collection of uglier, more garishly colored, visually heavy maps and diagrams than what's presented here. It's a little annoying, too, that most of the diagram images come from *desktop* applications like Excel or Crystal Reports, not web applications. There's a good reason for that: these kinds of data-intense diagrams tend to be for specialist users committed to spending long hours in an application. In most cases, that's a situation that calls for the more powerful capabilities of a desktop application. When's the last time you looked at a scatter plot on a web site? But between the dull basics of the first chapters and the mind-bending statistical overkill of the last seven, there are some good and useful sections. For example, there are good rules of thumb for form layouts, handling input validation gracefully, and search filtering. There's nothing adventerous or innovative here, of course. Advice tends toward the conservative and reliable list view-to-object view model (the way your email program works), with a few breaks for product comparison interfaces. As in so many of these kinds of books, the authors also include examples of utterly pointless novelty interfaces (zooming lenses, radial tree navigation schemes, photo "data mountains") that are notable for their near-total absence outside the HCI lab. The strange thing about this book, and others like it, is the almost willful blindness of what *actually* works in web application design, and what *actual* users vote with their clicks to make successful. Innovative, popular, and usable web applications like Amazon.com, Flickr, Craigslist, eBay, Google's Gmail, or the applications built by 37Signals are nowhere to be found. These applications are successful because they embrace the constraints imposed by the web and HTML (and their strengths), and find ways to support users' tasks that make sense in that environment.