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Site-Seeing: A Visual Approach to Web Usability
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Customer Reviews
Rating:  - Usability - Physician Heal Thyself
To be fair about this, I am not judging the content of the book, but the format of the book is horrific. The author presents concepts for implementing usable web design through a book that seems to ignor hundreds of years of proven usability principles for the printed word. Interesting design, or even attractive design, is not always usable design.
The book looks like an undergraduate graphic design project - and not a successful one at that. While the author may have many good things to say, communication of those points gets lost in the design. His credibility for what he has to say also gets lost, because of the way he presents his information. I purchased this book for about $6 (used), that's a fair price for an example of what not to do. If you want to gain a solid understanding of basic usability principles, start with Steve Krug's "Don't Make Me Think".
Rating:  - Still a 'must have' book four years later.
This is the book to buy after you have two other basic books on web design. As your other books are thrown away or replaced you will still need 'Site-Seeing'. It covers both the history and progress of web design. Read this book in bed or on a plane trip, preferably not in front of a monitor. I also found it helpful not to take the chapters in any formal order. Delve in! You will be helped. To me, this book is so solid that an upgrade is still a couple of years away.
Rating:  - Visual & "wordy" is what makes this book great!
As a fan of Site-Seeing, I must respond to a few of the reviews asserting that the author should have condensed certain material in the book. For me, the many visual examples and the great, detailed explanations (one reviewer suggested "wordy") are exactly what makes this book so useful. Rather than just skimming over important design concepts, the author actually takes the time to properly explain these important principles and illustrate them with examples. In my opinion, many other web design books use only words, whereas in this book, you can actually see and understand what the author is talking about. This is very important to me, as a visual learner. That is just one reason why this book is still on my desk.
Rating:  - Not very usable.
For a web usability book, this one is suprisingly unusable. The book is overdesigned, making it sometimes hard to read because of all the visual clutter on the page. It's also over-wordy. If only the author had taken Steve Krug's advice (which he mis-quotes in the first chapter) to cut out half the words, and then cut out half of what's left, this might have been a great book. As it is, its only contributions are from the design standpoint, such as not breaking the model of the web, and not making the navigation so contrast-y as to visually distract from the content. Otherwise, just about everything he says is said more succinctly in Krug's book, "Don't Make Me Think."
Rating:  - Good info, could be condensed
This book lays a good foundation for web design by emphasizing planning, meeting clients' goals, and understanding the target audience. Wroblewski emphasizes usability when describing the core of the site- structure, navigation, content- and how it will affect the experience of the audience. He uses numerous examples to illustrate layout, visual heirarchy, color schemes, and how they work together (or don't!) to communicate quickly and effectively to the site visitor.
I got frustrated about the amount of fluff surrounding actual information. He makes plenty of good points and then buries them beneath a barrage of condescending, long-winded metaphors, like the way we can read a map and know that blue represents water. The analogy itself could be helpful, but three paragraphs to explain the analogy is just distracting.
I'm glad I read it... it opened my eyes to many challenges that web designers face, and inspired me to infuse life and personality into my own site. I'm also glad I highlighted the meaningful parts so I (or friends who borrow it) can skip past the fluff in the future.
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