Product Description

Want to learn how to create great user experiences on today's Web? In this book, UI experts Bill Scott and Theresa Neil present more than 75 design patterns for building web interfaces that provide rich interaction. Distilled from the authors' years of experience at Sabre, Yahoo!, and Netflix, these best practices are grouped into six key principles to help you take advantage of the web technologies available today. With an entire section devoted to each design principle, "Designing Web Interfaces" helps you: Make It Direct - edit content in context with design patterns for In Page Editing, Drag & Drop, and Direct Selection; Keep It Lightweight - reduce the effort required to interact with a site by using In Context Tools to leave a 'light footprint'; Stay on the Page - keep visitors on a page with overlays, inlays, dynamic content, and in-page flow patterns; Provide an Invitation - help visitors discover site features with invitations that cue them to the next level of interaction; Use Transitions - learn when, why, and how to use animations, cinematic effects, and other transitions; React Immediately - provide a rich experience by using lively responses such as Live Search, Live Suggest, Live Previews, and more. "Designing Web Interfaces" illustrates many patterns with examples from working websites. If you need to build or renovate a website to be truly interactive, this book gives you the principles for success.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #32532 in Books
• Published on: 2009-07-01
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 332 pages

About the Author
Bill Scott is director of UI Engineering at Netflix in Los Gatos, CA, where he plies his interface engineering and design skills. Scott is the former Yahoo! Ajax evangelist and pattern curator for the Yahoo! Design Pattern Library.

He has a long and glamorous history in the IT world, due mostly to his unique understanding of both the technical and creative aspects of designing usable products. His ramblings and musings can be found at http://www.looksgoodworkswell.com.

Theresa Neil is a user experience consultant in Austin, Texas, where she designs rich applications for start-ups and Fortune500 companies. Her work can be seen at http://www.designgenie.org.

Customer Reviews

Great Visual Reference for Web Interfaces
I've ordered this book just after attending a O'Reilly webinar with Mr. Bill Scott. Although the webinar was flawed with technical problems, the content was strong and very appealing. Bill Scott knows what he talks and writes about. He's the director of the UI Engineering department, with over 25 years of work under his belt.

The book is really straight to the point and concise. It exposes you to the techniques (patterns) used in today's websites for enhancing User Experience.

You have plenty of full color pictures to illustrate each technique (in my edition some of the pictures were not well printed, but they all are available in a Flickr account).

You'll have access a series of patterns used in web interfaces and it will explain the advantages and pitfall of each one. You'll will also have access to common "anti-patterns" and quickly understand why those are bad ideas.

The book only covers the XHTML/Javascript/CSS side of web interfaces (but never getting technical about these subjects), but the majority can be directly translated to Flash/Flex applications for example.

There's also a companion website where you can expand the subjects covered in the book and get in touch with the author).

I highly recommend this book to anyone serious about User Interface Design and Usability in both websites and/or web apps.

PS: Don't expect any Javascript code examples or something, the book stays away from the tools you can use for achieving the listed techniques. But if you are familiar with Javascript libraries like jQuery you'll quickly translate those techniques into real examples.

A book of principles that's straight to the visual point
Designing web interfaces is a book that consists of separate chapters that describes a broad UI principle and breaks it down into separate topics/patterns.

The great thing about this book is it explains the principle and applicability, shows the correct use and potential misuse of each UI pattern.

The book is succinct and straight to the point. It doesn't just describe a pattern it shows them in use and also in misuse and we get to see where patterns could have been used to great effect (but often weren't).

Packed with illustrations and screengrabs, the text is descriptive and the illustrations push the point home.

The book is as good at putting it's subject across as the patterns and principles that it describes.

A superb book that will be very well thumbed and benefit end users of my software greatly. This book cannot be recommended highly enough.

Brill!
This book is really good. It tells you many things that you never event thought before. great examples too. top stuff.