Defensive Design for the Web: How to improve error messages, help, forms, and other crisis points (V
By 37signals
You can view this book's Amazon detail page here.
Tags: software, web design
- Started reading:
- 29th May 2008
- Finished reading:
- 7th June 2008
Review
Rating: 7
How do websites manage themselves when things go wrong? What is the best way to guide the user out of a crisis point, ensuring that they will not just get frustrated and leave your site for good. These issues are what Defensive Design for the Web seeks to address.
It provides 40 of guidelines on how to gracefully handle a crisis point on your website when it comes to forms, searches, inline error messages, error pages, and many more. To illustrate the guidelines, the good folks at 37 Signals offers up hundreds of examples of the good and the bad. Scattered throughout the chapters are also some pretty simple things you can do on your site to help your sites along.
While a lot of the principles covered in this book can be seen almost as trivial, [ What do you mean I have to put error messages next to the field that failed validation ? ] I believe it gives the reader a reassuring nudge as if to say, “You were doing that right all along”. Personally, the section I found the most helpful was how to improve the search experience in a web site.
I recommend this book to web developers who have finished their initial design of a site and would like to focus on improving the user experience.