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Message from Dean - May 8th 2007
I am currently testing out a new version of the APF Bridge Component - If you notice any errors within this demo store please drop me a line.
Rating:  -
Im a quite advenced web developer, i bought the book for discipline, you know, one have to read different opinions, but this was a bad time spending to buy it, espect it and reading it.
Too much pre-self-appologies and redundant talking at the begining of the book, those 'predictions' about when will be possible to read long texts on line... completely out of place.
Writing is disorganized, plenty of drifting away from the subject. I guess that Jakob Nielsen is a grat web developer, he knows many technical things about it, but he should not write books. Or he might take some lessons about "making some text shorter", -if you can say somthing using two words, don't use three. Usability is just about to make things easy to read and understand with minimum effort, this short-lettered, plenty-of-words-pages and plenty of pages book is exactly to learn things you should not do when trying to reach for usability.
Im sorry Mr. Nielsen, its dissappointing.
Rating:  -
The author offers critiques, but rarely offers a better idea or redesign. It's the same with his other book about home page usability. This is a severe shortcoming.
A related problem is that some of his criticisms are just unfounded or - in my humble opinion - just plain wrong. And I'm coming to the conclusion that that's why he doesn't offer solutions - a web site is a tradeoff between competing goals. It's actually not that difficult to find "problems" with sites; it's much more difficult to fix those problems and find that sweet spot.
Rating: -
It is amazing how a book that was useful when it was published becomes obsolete so quickly. Many of the ideas presented are basically OK, but some are definitively ourdated. The Internet and web browsing experiences have change our perceptions of what works and what does not.
Rating:  -
General ideas are quite good...
Rating: -
After reading this book I came up with a better title for it:
"Web sites for dummies".
But then again, should web dummies really read this book ?
The content of this book is made of a series of advices about
organizing your web space. Most good advices in this book are already available (for free) on the W3 markup validator (validator.w3.org) or on some other W3 Consortium page (w3.org).
Other advices are just worthless, like this little jewel:
"[...] sound effects can be used as an extra dimension in the user interface [...] the progress of a file download could be indicated by the sound of water pouring into a glass".
Surely that will clarify it all! Should a flushing sound be played as well ?
I don't see how such a sound could actually give information about the progress of a download.
People really serious about designing user interfaces should try one of Jef Raskin's books, like "The Humane Interface" (ISBN: 0201379376) which introduces quantification techniques of a user's pain when manipulating an interface.
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