Making the Web Work


Book Description

There are no other books that examine the effectiveness and benefits of having well designed and created web applications. This guide includes case studies that are well-known, global, and emphasize the points and theories discussed. It covers all aspects involved of creating the effective application in concise and easy to understand ways.




Designing Web Sites that Work


Book Description

Every stage in the design of a new web site is an opportunity to meet or miss deadlines and budgetary goals. Every stage is an opportunity to boost or undercut the site's usability. This book tells you how to design usable web sites in a systematic process applicable to almost any business need. You get practical advice on managing the project and incorporating usability principles from the project's inception. This systematic usability process for web design has been developed by the authors and proven again and again in their own successful businesses. A beacon in a sea of web design titles, this book treats web site usability as a preeminent, practical, and realizable business goal, not a buzzword or abstraction. The book is written for web designers and web project managers seeking a balance between usability goals and business concerns. * Examines the entire spectrum of usability issues, including architecture, navigation, graphical presentation, and page structure. * Explains clearly the steps relevant to incorporating usability into every stage of the web development process, from requirements to tasks analysis, prototyping and mockups, to user testing, revision, and even postlaunch evaluations. * Includes forms, checklists, and practical techniques that you can easily incorporate into your own projects at http://www.mkp.com/uew/.




A Web for Everyone


Book Description

If you are in charge of the user experience, development, or strategy for a web site, A Web for Everyone will help you make your site accessible without sacrificing design or innovation. Rooted in universal design principles, this book provides solutions: practical advice and examples of how to create sites that everyone can use.




Learning Responsive Web Design


Book Description

Deliver an optimal user experience to all devices—including tablets, smartphones, feature phones, laptops, and large screens—by learning the basics of responsive web design. In this hands-on guide, UX designer Clarissa Peterson explains how responsive web design works, and takes you through a responsive workflow from project kickoff to site launch. Ideal for anyone involved in the process of creating websites—not just developers—this book teaches you fundamental strategies and techniques for using HTML and CSS to design websites that not only adapt to any screen size, but also use progressive enhancement to provide a better user experience based on device capabilities such as touchscreens and retina displays. Start with content strategy before creating a visual design Learn why your default design should be for the narrowest screens Explore the HTML elements and CSS properties essential for responsive web design Use media queries to display different CSS styles based on a device’s viewport width Handle elements such as images, typography, and navigation Use performance optimization techniques to make your site lighter and faster




Forms that Work


Book Description

Forms that Work: Designing Web Forms for Usability clearly explains exactly how to design great forms for the web. The book provides proven and practical advice that will help you avoid pitfalls, and produce forms that are aesthetically pleasing, efficient and cost-effective. It features invaluable design methods, tips, and tricks to help ensure accurate data and satisfied customers. It includes dozens of examples - from nitty-gritty details (label alignment, mandatory fields) to visual designs (creating good grids, use of color). This book isn't just about colons and choosing the right widgets. It's about the whole process of making good forms, which has a lot more to do with making sure you're asking the right questions in a way that your users can answer than it does with whether you use a drop-down list or radio buttons. In an easy-to-read format with lots of examples, the authors present their three-layer model - relationship, conversation, appearance. You need all three for a successful form - a form that looks good, flows well, asks the right questions in the right way, and, most important of all, gets people to fill it out. Liberally illustrated with full-color examples, this book guides readers on how to define requirements, how to write questions that users will understand and want to answer, and how to deal with instructions, progress indicators and errors. This book is essential reading for HCI professionals, web designers, software developers, user interface designers, HCI academics and students, market research professionals, and financial professionals. *Provides proven and practical advice that will help you avoid pitfalls, and produce forms that are aesthetically pleasing, efficient and cost-effective. *Features invaluable design methods, tips, and tricks to help ensure accurate data and satisfied customers. *Includes dozens of examples -- from nitty-gritty details (label alignment, mandatory fields) to visual designs (creating good grids, use of color).*Foreword by Steve Krug, author of the best selling Don't Make Me Think!




Don't Make Me Think


Book Description

Five years and more than 100,000 copies after it was first published, it's hard to imagine anyone working in Web design who hasn't read Steve Krug's "instant classic" on Web usability, but people are still discovering it every day. In this second edition, Steve adds three new chapters in the same style as the original: wry and entertaining, yet loaded with insights and practical advice for novice and veteran alike. Don't be surprised if it completely changes the way you think about Web design. Three New Chapters! Usability as common courtesy -- Why people really leave Web sites Web Accessibility, CSS, and you -- Making sites usable and accessible Help! My boss wants me to ______. -- Surviving executive design whims "I thought usability was the enemy of design until I read the first edition of this book. Don't Make Me Think! showed me how to put myself in the position of the person who uses my site. After reading it over a couple of hours and putting its ideas to work for the past five years, I can say it has done more to improve my abilities as a Web designer than any other book. In this second edition, Steve Krug adds essential ammunition for those whose bosses, clients, stakeholders, and marketing managers insist on doing the wrong thing. If you design, write, program, own, or manage Web sites, you must read this book." -- Jeffrey Zeldman, author of Designing with Web Standards




Adaptive Web Design


Book Description

Building an elegant, functional website requires more than just knowing how to code. In Adaptive Web Design, Second Edition, you’ll learn how to use progressive enhancement to build websites that work anywhere, won’t break, are accessible by anyone—on any device—and are designed to work well into the future. This new edition of Adaptive Web Design frames even more of the web design process in the lens of progressive enhancement. You will learn how content strategy, UX, HTML, CSS, responsive web design, JavaScript, server-side programming, and performance optimization all come together in the service of users on whatever device they happen to use to access the web. Understanding progressive enhancement will make you a better web professional, whether you’re a content strategist, information architect, UX designer, visual designer, front-end developer, back-end developer, or project manager. It will enable you to visualize experience as a continuum and craft interfaces that are capable of reaching more users while simultaneously costing less money to develop. When you’ve mastered the tenets and concepts of this book, you will see the web in a whole new way and gain web design superpowers that will make you invaluable to your employer, clients, and the web as a whole. Visit http://adaptivewebdesign.info to learn more.




Web Work


Book Description

This book brings together three great motifs of the network society: the seeking and using of information by individuals and groups; the creation and application of knowledge in organizations; and the fundamental transformation of these activities as they are enacted on the Internet and the World Wide Web. Of the three, the study of how individuals and groups seek information probably has the longest history, beginning with the early "information needs and uses" studies soon after the Second World War. The study of organizations as knowledge-based social systems is much more recent, and really gained momentum only within the last decade or so. The study of the World Wide Web as information and communication media is younger still, but has generated tremendous excitement, partly because it has the potential to reconfigure the ways in which people seek information and use knowledge, and partly because it offers new methods of analyzing and measuring how in fact such information and knowledge work gets done. As research endeavors, these streams overlap and share conceptual constructs, perspectives, and methods of analysis. Although these overlaps and shared concerns are sometimes apparent in the published research, there have been few attempts to connect these ideas explicitly and identify cross-disciplinary themes. This book is an attempt to fill this void. The three authors of this book possess contrasting backgrounds and thus adopt complementary vantage points to observe information seeking and knowledge work.




Learning Web Design


Book Description

Do you want to build web pages but have no prior experience? This friendly guide is the perfect place to start. You’ll begin at square one, learning how the web and web pages work, and then steadily build from there. By the end of the book, you’ll have the skills to create a simple site with multicolumn pages that adapt for mobile devices. Each chapter provides exercises to help you learn various techniques and short quizzes to make sure you understand key concepts. This thoroughly revised edition is ideal for students and professionals of all backgrounds and skill levels. It is simple and clear enough for beginners, yet thorough enough to be a useful reference for experienced developers keeping their skills up to date. Build HTML pages with text, links, images, tables, and forms Use style sheets (CSS) for colors, backgrounds, formatting text, page layout, and even simple animation effects Learn how JavaScript works and why the language is so important in web design Create and optimize web images so they’ll download as quickly as possible NEW! Use CSS Flexbox and Grid for sophisticated and flexible page layout NEW! Learn the ins and outs of Responsive Web Design to make web pages look great on all devices NEW! Become familiar with the command line, Git, and other tools in the modern web developer’s toolkit NEW! Get to know the super-powers of SVG graphics




Web Works


Book Description