Writing this book has given me great pleasure. The most rewarding
satisfaction comes from thinking how its readers can use the book,
and how it will help them in their work. I have tried throughout to
place myself in the reader's place, considering possible questions
and seeking their answers--not unlike the very approach I recommend
for the web design process.
My experience has lead me to develop this book, in an attempt to
instill in web interface developers the need for a constant focus
on users. I provide arguments showing the need for a user-centered
approach to web design and present a methodology for the systematic
consideration of users during design and development.
In this book I focus on design rather than implementation. Design
principles and methods are long-range, while implementation is tied
to technology, which is often short-lived. This book is about designing
usable web sites, web sites that are easy to use and that provide
a pleasant, enjoyable, and successful user experience. It is also
a book about the proposition that designing usable web sites requires
employing the web-specialized methodology of designing for context.
In my daily life as a human interface researcher and practitioner,
I am often asked by web developers and web site owners for solutions
to their problems, for guidance about design, and for sound ideas
to make a difference in approaching the users. End users have also
come to me with numerous questions about utilizing web sites and
software systems. Many of these user queries can be avoided simply
by designers' employing a more careful process in their work of
developing web sites and web application interfaces. This book explains
such a process. It answers the questions of web developers, provides
solutions to a wide range of development problems, and offers specific
guidelines to support design excellence at every step in the process.
Accordingly, this book draws heavily not only on research findings
in the design and behavioral sciences, but also on my extensive
experience as a web usability consultant and practitioner. I target
primarily web developers who need to know about designing usable
web sites, but I also write for the general "web-interested audience,"
that is, for those who want to design their own web sites.
This book is not written exclusively for web designers and developers,
however. I also aim to reach people who wish to learn about human
computer interaction as we specialize it to web environments. Additionally,
web researchers will benefit from this book because I cover web
usability issues that need to be considered for emerging technologies
and environments where we currently have limited research and experience.
These environments include mobile web environments and wireless
technologies. In general, this book is for anyone with a serious
interest in how to make the human-web interactive experience gratifying
and productive.
The central theme of the book is the focus on "web context." My
contextual approach to web design includes treatments of the web
environment, the user, the web genre, the web site, and the web
page. I devote a separate chapter to each of these "web contexts."In
other chapters, I delineate a user-centered approach to web design.
tackle the usability issues of retrofitting web pages for small-screen
real estate as well as designing for mobile devices. take up the
challenge of the encounter between web art and web usability. discuss
how to evaluate the usability of web sites. address the cultural
context of web design.
Throughout the book, I present web examples to illustrate concepts,
techniques, and guidelines. This provides for a close relationship
between theory and practice, and thus narrows the potential gap
between the researcher's interests and the practitioner's needs.
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